Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: Why Super-Fight Is Nothing More Than a Pipe Dream

How long must we wait?

For how long will the super-fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao be dangled in front of our noses, only to be pulled away at the last moment?

Why must boxing suffer without the only fight any of us want, and frankly, the fight the sport needs?

Maybe it's because the fight will never happen. Maybe we've been led to believe something impossible was in fact possible, that a few dollars here or a few dollars there were all that separated the world's two best fighters.

But those dollars are very important, it turns out. They don't call him Money Mayweather for nothing. His pig-headed refusal to give Pac-Man a 50-50 revenue split, at least for the moment, is the main reason this fight will never happen.

It's utterly absurd—why Mayweather thinks he deserves a bigger split that Pacquiao is beyond me, since the two men are on equal footing as boxers and as a draw at this point—but for the time being, it's the biggest impediment to the fight ever happening.

It's been a number of other things over the years, of course—a failure to agree on venues or Mayweather's insistence that Pacquiao be drug-tested in America have delayed the negotiations.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to pride. Both men want the fight on their terms because they've reached the elite level as boxers that ensures they get every fight on their terms. Neither is accustomed to sacrificing, and neither is likely to sacrifice what they want to make this fight happen.

The thing about pride is that it is often closely related to fear. Fear of failure, fear that a legacy would be lessened by a loss in a fight of this magnitude, fear of the unknown.

Believe me, these two fighter each know, deep down, that if they ever fight one another, one man will leave that ring as the best pound-for-pound fighter of his generation, and the other will leave having lost the most important fight of his career.

And they can each act as confident as they like—they know the stakes. And I think that's the main reason why these two will never fight one another.

Because after a lifetime of building up to the elite status they find themselves at, each is afraid to put their legacy on the line. They aren't negotiating to fight—they're using these negotiations as a way to avoid the fight.

If it isn't clear by now, I'm calling you a chicken, Money Mayweather, and I'm calling you a chicken, Pac-Man.

And unless the two of you can sit down, negotiate terms that are fair for both of you and make this fight happen, that's how I'll choose to remember each of you.

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