Fans, Tim Bradley hates it as much as you do.
The idea that even though he and Floyd Mayweather Jr. are unbeaten fighters with high-end pound-for-pound status and tangible claims to world welterweight supremacy, they'll probably never fight as long as existing promotional allegiances remain as they are.
Bradley signed a contract extension with Bob Arum's Top Rank Boxing organization while securing a lucrative April rematch with Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas, while Mayweather is a promotional free agent and former Top Rank client whose enmity for Arum these days is hardly a secret.
“It sucks. Honestly, it sucks. It really does,” Bradley said. “The business is changing. It used to be everybody working together. Everybody would work together and say ‘Let's make these fights. Let's make this money. Let's do this and let's do that.' Now you've got promoters trying to monopolize the whole game. Now everybody wants to be Dana White.
“I want to fight the best, and right now the best guy in the business is Mayweather.”
Bradley defeated Pacquiao amid controversy to win his title in 2012 and defended it twice in 2013 while seeing his stock rise from “respected among the sport's hardcore fans” to “universally considered one of the best in the world.” He outlasted Ruslan Provodnikov to win one of the year's top fights last March in suburban Los Angeles, then headed to Las Vegas to outpoint Juan Manuel Marquez -- who'd knocked Pacquiao cold 10 months earlier -- in October.
Still, though he's proven himself a commodity fans will pay to see, he's not quite ready to parlay that status into a make-this-fight-or-else ultimatum to the executives in the corner office. It could still get done, though, he says, if Mayweather -- whom he dubbed “the Michael Jordan of boxing” -- wanted it.
“I can probably never go and stick the gun up to Bob and say ‘I want that fight,'” Bradley said. “I'm not going to mess up my business doing a foolish move like that. But Floyd says over and over and over and over, ‘I'm my own boss. I do what I want to do.' If he's his own boss and if he wants the fight, he can make the fight happen. If he wanted to fight me, he could fight me, no problem.
“But if he's not willing to work with my people, then it's not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, as the boxing world's ears are collectively perked for Mayweather's disclosure of whom he actually will fight in Las Vegas on May 3, mum remains the official word for the moment.
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