Mayweather vs Pacquiao? Bah humbug!

Floyd Mayweather Jr. versus Manny Pacquiao—the most recorded apparition in sports history again manifested itself to boxing diehards last week.

A long-playing ectoplasmic phenomenon, the ghost match between the ring’s prevailing potentates was about to take on a living form.

Interviewed on the Showtime network from San Antonio, Texas, Mayweather appeared to have relented to Pacquiao’s challenge to face him once and for all.

The Money Man called for the fight to finally happen, and even gave a date—May 2.

But just as fans thought it was safe to assume that what would be the world’s richest fight ever, expected to gross at least $250 million, was happening at last, Mayweather messes up everything.

He reprises issues that prevented the fight from happening five years earlier, including prefight drug-testing protocols and revenue sharing in his favor.

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While news of the so-called Fight of the Century spread like wildfire in the boxing world, it failed to excite some of the planet’s best-known boxing writers.

Why the bah-humbug attitude? I asked them.

“It’s simple,” said Steve Carp of the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Too many false starts in the past.”

“I thought Floyd’s talk was a premature repeat of what he’s always said,” Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times told me. “He has to decide to engage with the Pacquiao side. Once he starts that, that’s news. His Showtime appearance was just posturing.”

“Until they sign a contract, I won’t believe it will happen,” said the eminent LA Times columnist Bill Dwyre matter-of-factly.

Dwyre, a former Times sports editor, said he can’t speak for all media, but he advised his sports desk to play that story down.

“Two reasons: 1. When has Mayweather ever earned the kind of credibility that we ought to believe him on this? 2. When something is anticipated this long and doesn’t happen, and when both fighters are constantly quoted on the subject and NOTHING happens—the entire thing loses credibility.”

Greg Beacham of the Associated Press said he was deferring to his colleague, Tim Dahlberg, who writes more about boxing than he does.

I did not seek out Dahlberg, but in a recent commentary, he wrote:

“The wizard of defense has finally been boxed into a corner. The charade is over, whether Mayweather realizes it or not. He must fight Pacquiao next, if his career is to have any legitimacy. And he must do it on terms that reflect he won’t be the only superstar in the ring.”

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HOLD THE EMPANADA—Pan de Vigan, a baked bun stuffed with longganisa and topped with melted cheese, was rolled out recently by Bantay Bread, a popular bakery in the Bantay-Vigan area of Ilocos Sur. The bakery owner, my niece, Estela Robles Villareal, said the new treat is in celebration of Vigan’s selection as a “New 7 Wonders Cities of the World.” One of Bantay Bread’s three outlets is on Bonifacio Street, within the area of preserved Spanish-era houses that earned the capital of Ilocos Sur a heritage site designation by Unesco in 1999. This Christmas is a good time to try Pan de Vigan.