Arum Says Cotto Meeting Went Well For Pacquiao Clash

Top Rank promoter Bobby Arum says he is confident a welterweight title fight between Filipino ring icon and “Hero of Asia” Manny Pacquiao will be worked out by the end of the week and the fight will take place on November 14 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Arum told BoxingScene.com, insidesports.ph, Standard Today and Viva Sports that they had a good telephonic meeting on Wednesday with the Cotto people and he was “sure that by the weekend I will have something concrete to share with Manny (Pacquiao)” who was returning to his hometown of General Santos City after an enjoyable family vacation in the picturesque island of Bohol.

Arum said “it looks very, very good . I will have a very good proposal that will make Manny happy” and the fight with Cotto will happen.

At the same time the astute Top Rank promoter said he thought it was “rather silly” for Golden Boy Promotions people to go to the press to push a Pacquiao fight against WBA welterweight champion Shane Mosley, posing the question, “what has the press have to do with it?. They know Pacquiao vs Cotto is a very, very good fight” although he conceded that controversy makes things interesting and better.

Arum said the campaign in media to try and get Pacquiao to fight Mosley with Oscar De La Hoya himself trying to challenge Pacquiao’s pride by claiming Mosley will beat him up has “absolutely no impact on me, on anybody else or even on the press.”

He said that the press itself feels that Pacquiao vs Cotto is “a tremendous fight.”

In his regular column in the Pilipino tabloid Abante, Pacquiao said that before he resumes training hard for his next fight which would mean being away for some two months, he wanted to give his wife and children even a brief vacation which he said was very enjoyable after a tough fight against Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton.

He pointed out that while the fight lasted two rounds he had given everything in a rigorous training program in the buildup to the fight. Pacquiao also indicated he needed to give his body some rest because a number of boxers were lining up to fight him.

Pacquiao is expected to report at Freddie Roach's Wild Card Gym around the second or third week of September to begin training for the Cotto fight although he normally stays in shape physically by playing basketball on a regular basis in General Santos City.

Source: boxingscene.com