Hold the phone on Macau being penciled in as the site for the fifth fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manual Marquez.
According to the Strait Times, Singapore is making an attempt to bring the mega-fight to its shores, with the possibility of the fight being staged at either of the two country’s integrated resorts and casinos – Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa.
It’s been well documented that Pacquiao isn’t too keen on having the fight in the US for tax reasons. Previous reports have linked Macau as the possible destination of the fight but Singapore is also coming on strong as potential host. As it stands now, Top Rank CEO and Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum is looking at all the possible locations in the Asian region, something that appears to have been decided a long time ago. It’s also important for Arum to host the fight with a casino in place to make it appealing for these establishments to carry equal burden in promoting the fight with potentially lucrative ramifications the fight between the two bitter rivals is expected to carry with it.
Talking to the Strait Times, Arum didn’t reveal which Singapore hotel is a potent candidate to land the mega-fight, opting only to say, “The thing we’re waiting on is which one of their hotels they want to do it at.”
The level of interest for a fifth Pacquiao-Marquez fight is at an all-time high, particularly after how the last fight ended when Marquez scored a stunning knockout of Pacquiao in six rounds. PacMan trainer Freddie Roach thinks a fifth fight between the two will break pay-per-view records and while we’re going to stop short in agreeing to that, we do know that whoever gets to host the fight will have a revenue windfall on its hands.
