If Manny Pacquiao returns to the ring, it won’t be on April 14th.
Top Rank Boxing’s master plan for its April 14th event will need some tweaking.
The original idea was to have Manny Pacquiao (59-7-2, 38 KOs) fight Mike Alvarado (38-4, 26 KOs) on the undercard of an ESPN pay-per-view headlined by Terence Crawford (32-0, 23 KOs) moving up in weight to challenge WBO welterweight champion Jeff Horn (18-0-1, 12 KOs). It’s been eons since Pacquiao was on an undercard, and his team made it clear that Pacquiao won’t be taking this fight.
“No he’s not fighting [Mike] Alvarado,” Aquiles Zonio, Pacquiao’s media relations officer, said in a message to ESPN5’s Lyn Olavario. “He rejected Bob Arum’s offer to fight [in the] undercard of the Crawford-Horn fight.”
“It’s an insult to him,” Zonio said. “The world knew who won that dirty fight in Brisbane. It was the biggest broad-daylight boxing heist.”
The “dirty fight” would refer to the controversial Pacquiao decision loss to Jeff Horn last year, with many observers believing the eight-division world champion was robbed of victory in enemy territory.
With Pacquiao’s career winding down, promoter Bob Arum recently said that the Filipino legend would have the choice between fighting Terence Crawford (assuming a win over Horn) or Vasyl Lomachenko in the fall. That was before the news about Pacquiao-Alvarado being nixed, so it’s uncertain whether that stays true under these new circumstances.
For what it’s worth, Alvarado may have been a fun action fighter in his prime, but he’s not beaten anyone of note since the second of his trilogy bouts with Brandon Rios in 2013. He’s taken massive punishment in virtually all of his losses, and his current four-fight winning streak doesn’t include anyone of note. Pacquiao vs. Alvarado was derided from the start, and presumably the purpose of booking such a fight would be for Pacquiao to get his first knockout win since 2009.
It’s most likely that Crawford vs. Horn would be on regular ESPN, seeing as having that as a PPV main event and no other draw on the undercard would flop spectacularly. What we could see in place of Pacquiao vs. Alvarado is IBF super-flyweight champion Jerwin Ancajas (29-1-1, 20 KOs) taking on his mandatory challenger Jonas Sultan (14-3, 9 KOs), also from the Philippines. If that’s the case, then consider it a major plus that Pacquiao’s team isn’t interested in fighting on the undercard next month.