INQUIRER Sports

New York—Floyd Mayweather is now opening the lines of communication with Top Rank for a mega fight against reigning pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao next year.

And maybe it has something to do with the numbers.

Mayweather adviser Leonard Ellerbe told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday night that they have discussed the possibility of fighting Pacquiao and that they have given Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer the go-signal to open up negotiations with Top Tank chief Bob Arum.

The development came at the heels of an announcement by Arum—who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with Mayweather Jr.—that the fight between Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto Saturday in Las Vegas is nearing the 1.5-million mark in pay-per-view buys based on initial reports only.

It also follows a report by USA Today that the Pacquiao-Cotto fight, where the Filipino ring icon made history by becoming the first boxer to win world crowns in seven different weight classes, outperformed Mayweather’s last fight in the box office.

Pacquiao took Cotto’s WBO belt via a 12th-round technical knockout last Saturday at the MGM Grand. Mayweather also won his comeback fight after a 21-month “retirement” by outpointing Mexican foe Juan Manuel Marquez last December. Both victories set up a mouth-watering potential clash between the winners—who belong to warring camps—next year.

BIGGEST REVENUE-PRODUCING EVENT

In an interview with popular sports site Fanhouse, Arum revealed that the early pay-per-view numbers released on the Pacquiao-Cotto bout have reached “over a million and under 1.5 million buys—and that's without all of the precincts being reported.”

“They're not really accurate yet, but all that we can say with absolute certainty is that Pacquiao-Cotto was the biggest, revenue-producing event on pay-per-view for the entire year,” said Arum in the Fanhouse report.. “And that surpasses all of the UFC. Everything. Any event. It's the biggest event of the year from the standpoint of revenue being generated.”

“That's without Washington, D.C., being reported, Baltimore, California­—a lot of Comcast Systems,” said Arum. “But based on what we have, we can make that statement—that Pacquiao-Cotto was the biggest revenue-generating pay-per-view event of the year.”

That number puts the PPV income of Pacquiao-Cotto at $82,425,000.

Ticket-wise, USA Today reported that Pacquiao-Cotto earned $8.84 million on 15,470 tickets sold, outperforming Mayweather Marquez on tickets sold (about 12,000) and box-office gross (about $6 million).

USA Today also reported that “no tickets were sold beneath face value for Pacquiao-Cotto. For Mayweather's bout, 94 tickets were sold at 50% discount and 895 were complimentaries, or giveaways while just 46 complimentaries were doled out for Pacquiao-Cotto.