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April 22, 2015

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Abrupt early end to Pacquiao conference call

Manny Pacquiao鈥檚 teleconference call on Monday was abruptly halted just minutes after it began with promoter Bob Arum delivering an obscenity before telling organizers to shut it down.

鈥淥h (expletive),鈥 Arum said after the moderator said the first question would come from Michael Marley of Examiner.com. 鈥淒o this call some other time. Let鈥檚 reorganize and do this call some other time, please.鈥

Pacquiao and trainer Freddie Roach commented briefly before the call was taken over by Arum who had said earlier he wasn鈥檛 happy with the idea of it.

鈥淲e are ready to go. We had a great training camp and good sparring partners,鈥 Roach said of the mega showdown with Floyd Mayweather on May 2 at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Asked how his training was going Pacquiao simply said, 鈥渧ery good.鈥

Reporters were then told Pacquiao had boxed 12 rounds in a sparring session on Saturday.

There was no mention of tickets for the fight which are still not up for sale with the mega fight just two weeks away. The contracts with the MGM also remain unsigned and there is no word on the closed circuit television.

But when the call was opened up to questions that is when Top Rank chief executive Arum shut it down.

Top Rank released a statement saying the call system crashed because of the overwhelming number of media trying to join the session.

鈥淎t the top of the hour there were a massive number of calls from the media,鈥 Top Rank said. 鈥淥ur conference call system which worked for years literally went down and we were unable to communicate with our operators. This was very unfortunate and we apologize.鈥

Arum told Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports that he didn鈥檛 like the format of the call and thought it should be limited to a small group of news reporters.

Mayweather has his own conference call scheduled for today.


 

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