The fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr is now officially off.
It seems Mayweather will still not budge on his insistence that Manny undergo Olympic style drug testing. Pacquiao was willing to submit blood 24 days before the fight and directly after but Mayweather is unwilling to compromise.
Bob Arum is calling Mayweather and coward and claims he never wanted the fight to begin with.
"Mayweather never wanted it." says Arum, "Manny wanted the fight. He was agreeable to terms. The fight's off."
The fighters' representatives apparently thought they had reached a compromise after the mediation and were expected to announce the bout formally yesterday but subsequent discussions with Mayweather during the day led Top Rank to announce the fight had been cancelled.
Mayweather will now possibly face Paulie Malignaggi while Pacquiao attempts to claim yet another belt in another weight division (yawn) by challenging light middleweight champion Yuri Foreman.
I'm not surprised that this has happened and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the fight does go ahead sometime in the future their just seems to have been too much money on the table for it not to.
They agreed on the size of the ring, the gloves, the venue, the weight limit and more importantly the reported 50/50 split in money.But thesteroid accusations that at first just looked like psychological mind games being played by the Mayweather camp has jeopardized possibly the biggest fight of the decade.
It just all seems totally unnecessary but not surprising in the strange world of boxing.
