Cornering Floyd Mayweather: Manny Pacquiao must OK no limits testing

VIENNA -- Lawyers who handle wills and estates tell us that if there is a good time for a rich guy to expire, George Steinbrenner chose the right calendar year to depart. There is no federal estate tax for 2010 and thus Boss George, ruler of the New York Yankees Evil Empire, won't have an estate carved up by the government to the detriment of his heirs. So I guess it's true that everything in life, and maybe even in death, comes down to timing. So it is with the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao mess as “negotations” have now failed again. Call it Strike Two with the next pitch coming in 2011. My purpose today is not to castigate wily Bob Arum or his Mayweather counterpart, the music and boxing operator who runs silent and deep named Al Haymon. Nor is it to call Mayweather, with 41 bouts and nary a loss, any kind of coward or to allege that Pacquiao is loaded with illegal drugs which have carried him to his awe-inspiring victories. I'll leave that for the juvenile delinquents among you. On a more adult basis, I will say that a prime sticking point between the parties, maybe the ultimate dealbreaker, remains the same in my personal view. Pacman's great concession of agreeing to random blood testing 14 days before a Floyd fight did not go far enough. Not in the Mayweather camp's eyes, it did not. They want complete, total, utter and without date restriction blood testing implemented for the Super Fight. Here's what Papa Floyd said on the subject of drug cheats in the ring on a radio program called "On The Ropes Boxing": "Guys that do stuff like that, they should be banned from boxing, period. Guys that take supplements, enhancement drugs, steroids, whatever that stuff is, look at here—they should be banned, period. All these people want to say oh, how good he is and how good he is. Once again, this is what happened with Shane. Let me tell you what happened with Shane. Shane probably whopped Margarito’s ass with the sh*t in him, with the stuff inside. But I ain’t going to say that he did, it could have been. I’m just saying whatever it is, if he did do it he did no more than Margarito did when he beat up Cotto. So both of them are underhanded kind of fighters so whatever happens to either one of them it’s all good. It’s all good. But I know one thing, little Floyd had Shane take the test and guess what? You seen what happened, nobody got to tell you." Mayweather and his people are not fools. They see the handwriting on the wall at the Nevada boxing commission and in all pro sports in the United States. Random blood testing is coming to boxing in Nevada because what commissioner in her or his right mind wants to be seen as supporting drug cheating? He may be a bull in a China shop, supercilious and bordering on the unbearably arrogant when he appears before the Nevada boxing board, but the USADA's Travis Tygart is making headway in pushing for unfettered blood testing in the state. A source within the commission who did not wish to be quoted told me recently: “It's not about liking or disliking Tygart. The push for random blood testing is like a tidal wave and it has moral force. T's coming, we know it and the message and the movement is more powerful than Tygart's preachy pontificating. I'd say it's a budgeting issue as with everything in government now but we could have it in the next year or so.” Look, we all know the haughty Mayweather actually believes the only possible way Pacman can beat him is by using EPO, HGH or some other cocktail combination of banned substances. So why would L'il Floyd take what he sees as the Big Chance that a 14 day window leaves open for cheating by Team Pacquiao? At the end of the day, until such time as either Pacquiao gives a blanket endorsement to having his blood drawn at any given time before the bout or, in the alternative, Nevada regulations mandate such testing, Mayweather is not going to enter into a bout contract. Another thing Mayweather knows is that HBO will not abandon him or pull its financial transfusions simply because he won't fight Pacman. He remains the American standard bearer for an American prime cable network. Not that this is the only lump of coal in the fight fans' stocking. I suspect the money split is the other prickly issue and I seriously doubt it has even been bandied back and forth. The first round of talks, those were negotiations. This second round, as I said in my essay on Monday, consisted solely of Martin Luther Arum nailing Pacquiao demands to the front door. Those demands obviously were not responded to. It's my deep belief that sore hands, having just fought in May and being on vacation with his family, pushing a huge chunk of income into the next year...blah, blah, blah...all that could have been overcome had Pacquaio agreed to no limits blood testing. The way things stand today, it looks like no limits, no fight. Nevada may be moving at a snail's pace to no limits testing but it will get there someday soon and the Mayweather camp knows this. In the meantime, as was said in the movie “Cool Hand Luke": “We have a failure to communicate.” If Team Pacquiao slams the blood testing door, then I really see no escape for Mayweather. They should have done it in round two. Agreeing to a 14 day outer limit before the bout was a bridge not far enough, really. It was a reasonable concession but it did not serve to corner Mayweather. Who goofed? I've got to know. After all, I'm the only pluperfect one around here. http://www.examiner.com/x-5699-Boxing-Examiner~y2010m7d20-Cornering-Floyd-Mayweather-Manny-Pacquiao-must-OK-no-limits-blod-testing