Floyd Mayweather Jr., left, and Manny Pacquiao AP FILE PHOTO
With less than two weeks before boxing’s most expensive fight, one piece of paper is still left unsigned.
That is contract between the camps of Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and MGM.
In a report from ESPN.com, Top Rank CEO Bob Arum said he would not sign the fight contract because the terms written in the contract are not what he, Mayweather Promotions, and MGM Grand agreed upon in the term sheet that they signed in February.
“We agreed that we would all be signatories on the final contract and then they sent us a draft of the agreement and it excluded us,” Arum told ESPN.com.
Arum is the Hall of Fame promoter of Pacquiao, the current WBO Welterweight Champion and boxing’s only eight-division World Champion.
Mayweather announced in February that he will finally fight Pacquiao after nearly six years of hype to unify the WBO, WBA, and WBC Welterweight titles in a match of their era’s greatest boxers.
Top Rank, which is not a signatory of the contract, does not have control of the decisions during the fight, in-arena production including the music and video clips that will be played at MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 2.
“They don’t want us to have any say,” Arum said. “So whether they came up with the deal between Mayweather and MGM before or after our agreement, they’ve committed fraud either way. That’s what we’re enmeshed in.”
ESPN.com also said in their report that Arum received the fight manifest, which he has requested for three weeks, which designates who gets the seats and where.
“It’s one of the things I was most concerned about,” Arum said who gave a glimmer of hope.
It’s possible that, as Arum said in the report, that the contract gets signed on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning (US time).