Breaking News: Pacquiao-Khan Fight A No Go
By: Sean Crose
It ain’t happening, folks. Manny Pacquiao and Amir Khan are not going to be meeting in the boxing ring, at least not anytime soon. Talk was that the phantom superfight would go down in the Middle East this spring. What’s more, both Pacquiao and Khan announced over Twitter that they would, in fact, be facing one another. As Boxing Insider reported earlier this week, however, there was a potential air of unreality about the entire affair.
And now word arrives that the fight simply won’t be happening. ESPNs Dan Rafael writes that Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum informed ESPN “that the UAE deal for Pacquiao-Khan was dead.” UAE, which stands for United Arab Emirates, was said to be the proposed location of the hoped for megabout. What Pacquiao will do now is anyone’s guess, never mind Khan.
Pacquiao was originally supposed to face the widely unknown Jeff Horn, possibly in Horn’s homeland of Australia. That idea was clearly not in keeping with what Pacquiao wanted, however. Now that the potential of a big money dream match with Khan has morphed into a dream deferred, it will be interesting to see where things go from here.