The latest round of negotiations between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao have hit another wall. Maybe not a brick wall. Maybe a straw wall that a big bad wolf can blow on through. I don't know. But ESPN.com is reporting that the negotiations may have taken "a step back" in the last couple of days, and Top Rank and Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum is worried that timing to get the fight done for May 2 is now a serious issue.
Mayweather (47-0, 26 KO) is insistent on fighting May 2, with or without Pacquiao, and despite Golden Boy and HBO being ready to go on that date with a Canelo Alvarez vs James Kirkland fight (which would be moved for Mayweather-Pacquiao, surely, but probably not for Mayweather-anyone else).
But if the fight is going to be done on that date, Arum believes it needs to be finalized quickly.
"The thing that really concerns me is that we are running out of time for May 2. If you want to drag this out a little longer then move the fight to later in May -- May 30 is a good date -- or go in June. We agreed to go on May 2 because that is the date Mayweather is hung up on, but if we're going to go on May 2 we need to get this done."
Arum also says "there doesn't seem to be any urgency" on the Mayweather side about getting the fight done. In other words, this is all becoming a lot of he said/he said/he said/and also he said, with talk that the fight has been agreed in principle, that the fighters were on the same page, and then reports that there are still clear issues not just between CBS/Showtime and Time Warner/HBO in getting a deal done, but the fighters and their teams, too.
As for the networks, the big hang-up there is apparently the replay situation for the following Saturday night. According to sources that Dan Rafael spoke to, Showtime wants to do what the two sides did in 2002 for Lewis-Tyson, where the winning fighter's network got the replay the next week, and also paid the other side $3 million. HBO just wants to do replays on both networks at the same time.
So, where are we now? If yesterday it seemed 50-50 we could get the fight on May 2, today it might be 70-30 against it. But everything can change quickly. Maybe we'll get some miracle domino effect where one barrier falls, the next does, and on down the line, and suddenly we get an announcement sometime this week. It doesn't seem likely, but it's not impossible. Or maybe it is.