BOXING 4





The MGM Grand was bursting at the seams this weekend and it was not because of the abundance of slot machines at the Las Vegas casino. Manny Pacquiao is in town to fight Juan Manuel Márquez and wherever the Filipino goes the masses follow. More than 5,000 fight fans turned up for the televised weigh-in on Friday, while tickets for the welterweight fight were selling for more than $1,000 on the black market, signifying a rarity in the these hardened times. A true sell-out. So much for the great American recession.

Yet if the buzz for the third meeting of Pacquiao and Márquez was loud it still could not drown out talk of the fight that everyone with an interest in boxing obsesses about, Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather.

Spend a few days in this city devoted to money and it becomes ever harder to believe that the money fight to beat them all cannot be made. Everybody wants it. Yet those best placed to make it happen betray little optimism.

"If I can make that fight happen, then they might send me over to bring about peace in the [Middle East] because I got a guy in Mayweather who won't fight Manny Pacquiao,'' Pacquiao's promoter, Bob Arum, said this week on CNN.

"He [Mayweather] has two ways to go in the fight. He can fight Manny the way a couple of opponents have fought him, get hit, quit and go into his shell. Or fight him like Cotto and Margarito did, keep coming and get the hell beaten out of him. He has those two choices and those two choices only. And no money that anybody could come up with can make him step into the ring with Manny."