It wasn’t long after Conor McGregor was lying prone on the canvas in Abu Dhabi that Manny Pacquiao started looking for another way to create a payday for himself.

I believe that McGregor and Pacquiao would have put together a deal to meet in the ring; I really do.

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But it would be very difficult for such a fight to have any credibility after McGregor took a knockout loss to Dustin Poirier. Maybe Conor should have never gone into the Octagon again. But at this point he’d likely have no choice but to try to get Poirier in a rubber match in order to rehabilitate his career.

Or he could just retire.

But now we are talking about something else – a fight between Pacquiao and Ryan Garcia, who just won the WBC’s interim lightweight title over Luke Campbell.

Pacquiao seems to want to go through with the fight. We said “seems.”

We’re not sure about the other side of it.

On Saturday, Kevin Iole, who covers combat sports for Yahoo, reported that the pairing was a virtual fait accompli. But over at ESPN’s site, their reporter, Salvador Rodriguez, was quoting an executive with Golden Boy Promotions – which holds promotional rights to Garcia – as saying, “the fight isn’t going to happen.”

Don’t get us wrong; this doesn’t mean that Garcia doesn’t want to do it. In fact, he does. very much. His manager has insisted that the door was still open for this fight to come off.

But through a post on his Facebook page, Sean Gibbons, a member of Pacquiao’s team, had expressed frustration with Golden Boy representatives for not responding to his messages.

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We’ll have more on that in a minute, but some of this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

There is no reason Garcia wouldn’t want to have a fight with Pacquiao. It’s his biggest money opportunity. It also works out pretty well from a “risk-reward” standpoint.

And for someone who has a keen awareness of the value of building his brand, this can’t be beat. Garcia has already scored the kind of endorsement deal most fighters could never hope to get, as he is now a spokesman for Gatorade. They certainly hope to leverage a social media following he has dedicated himself to building. And a Pacquiao fight would be thrilling to the Gatorade people, since it would enable them to start getting a return on investment right away.

All this makes you wonder why Golden Boy wouldn’t want to do it.

Maybe they don’t want to do business with Pacquiao. maybe it is a sense of control they want to have. But Eric Gomez, who runs the day-to-day operation, is trying to push Teofimo Lopez as the opponent that is “most feasible” to be Garcia’s next opponent.

No disrespect to Lopez, but he doesn’t bring the same kind of opportunity to Garcia as does Pacquiao.

But Golden Boy’s acquiescence is critical, because as part of their promotional agreement, they would have the exclusive right to promote Garcia’s fights. That also means they could prevent any given fight from happening.

The idea of the Pacquiao-Garcia fight being staged as an “exhibition” has been floated. And so I have also wondered whether the reason is that it would take it outside the scope of Garcia’s agreement with Golden Boy. But frankly, I would be very surprised if they didn’t have their bases covered in that respect.

It’s moot anyway, at least for the time being, as Garcia made it clear in an Instagram post that the fight would not be an exhibition, but a 12-rounder where “our records will be on the line.”

The aforementioned Gibbons, who is listed as president of MP Promotions (Pacquiao’s outfit), has said of any prospective bout with McGregor, “I think the demand for the fight is not there presently.”

And then there was a statement issued by a gentleman named Audie Attar, who operates Paradigm Sports, a management company that is involved in the representation of both Pacquiao AND McGregor,. which means they would have a tremendous interest in keeping hope for that fight alive.

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Apparently he wants to carve out his territory very clearly.

In pertinent part, the statement reads…

“Senator Pacquiao engaged Paradigm Sports as his exclusive representatives last year because he wants to close out the final chapters of his historic boxing career in a meaningful way.

“No one outside of Paradigm Sports is involved in any way with the management of Senator Pacquiao’s boxing career at this time. Anyone falsely representing themselves as Senator Pacquiao’s manager or representative as it relates to his remaining fight career may face legal repercussions.”

Stay tuned. We may have a drama in the making.

Check out our Mayweather vs. Paul boxing preview – they’ll be fighting later this month.

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