Bob Arum uneasy about Cotto-Pacquiao fight

Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports has an excellent feature up on Saturday's Cotto-Pacquiao showdown. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum isn't necessarily looking forward to watching his two biggest fighters rip into one another.

"On Sunday, I called Bob and told him we were getting great [coverage] of the fight and things were looking terrific and he just goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’" said Top Rank president Todd duBoef, Arum’s stepson. "And then he says to me, ‘I don’t want to see the fight.’

"I was astounded and I said, ‘What? You don’t want to see the fight?’ And he said, ‘Todd, I’m sick to my stomach. I like these kids too much to watch them do this to each other. I like to root for my guy against someone else. This is going to be very hard on me.’ I was really amazed.

"I asked him if that had ever happened to him before. And he said, ‘Yeah, I had the same thing before Hagler-Hearns.’ … It’s going to be hard for him to watch and see one of them, or both of them, taking that kind of punishment."

Iole mentions it, and I've heard the rumblings from a lot of other people, plus they mentioned it briefly at the final press conference yesterday, but the chance that this fight hits the magical one million buy mark is very real. In brief:

In 1999, De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad racked up 1.4 million sales, which at the time was the largest non-heavyweight bout ever. The Pacquiao-Cotto fight is tracking so well and there’s such a palpable sense of excitement in the city that surpassing 1.4 million sales doesn’t sound as ridiculous as it might have just a month or so ago.

This fight is big -- very, very big. Boxing has started to pick up some real steam on the major level like this, and the enjoyed financial success of this year's three biggest fights (Mayweather-Marquez, Cotto-Pacquiao and Hatton-Pacquiao) likely will keep the massive fights coming if the promoters can help it. That's good news all around.

Take some Tums, Bob. Enjoy the ride. You built these fighters for fights like this.