By Mark Staniforth, Press Association Sport
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After another week of anti-boxing, in which the two best fighters on the planet hogged the headlines for continuing to manoeuvre away from their proposed mega-fight, the sport has some serious questions to answer.
Pseudo-deadlines and trash-talk marred a week in which Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao ought to have seized the opportunity to at least go some way towards mending their differences.
Among the acres of rain forest devoted to the tiresome subject, perhaps the most telling came from Mayweather's right-hand man Leonard Ellerbe, who was quoted as saying: "The truth is no negotiations have ever taken place."
If we are to take that quote at face value then the question surely has to be why.
Pacquiao's camp maintain Mayweather is too concerned about keeping his unbeaten record intact to be seriously considering fighting the Filipino.
For their part, the Mayweather camp insist Pacquiao's tardiness in accepting drug test demands show a lack of true desire for the fight, with all their talk not backed up by action around the negotiating table.
Those who believed all along that the initial bust-up between Mayweather and Pacquiao may have simply been a cynical ploy to hype up the fight for when it eventually, inevitably happened are beginning to sweat.
For the fact is, in a week in which Mayweather's father Floyd Sr derided Pacquiao as a "midget", and Pacquiao's promoter Bob Arum began actively pursuing alternatives, the fight seems as far away as ever.
That leaves Mayweather and Pacquiao playing a dangerous game with a boxing public which has up to now almost unanimously hailed the pair as the two best fighters on the planet.
They will only buy the back-biting and recriminations for so long before they look elsewhere for their boxing stars; up-and-comers like Juan Manuel Lopez, Yuriorkis Gamboa and even Amir Khan fit the bill nicely.
As far as their respective legacies are concerned, the cold hard fact is that Mayweather will simply never be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson until he has Pacquiao on his ledger.
For all its magnificence, Mayweather's record still lacks its defining fight: a tired and old Oscar De La Hoya? An out-of-his-depth Ricky Hatton? A slowing Shane Mosley? None were fellow superstars in their prime.
Pacquiao too may prefer to spend the remaining days of his career racking up endless titles in endless weight divisions - a largely meaningless feat in an era with so many splintered titles and weight divisions.
We will remember him for his stunning knockout win over Miguel Cotto as well as his brawls with Mexican stars Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales. But he needs one more bona-fide Hall of Famer to make him great.
One senses, at the moment, the boxing public being short-changed by politics. The enlightened era of unification bouts, spearheaded by Lennox Lewis and Oscar De La Hoya, could be coming to an end.
The business has got so big that deals get dragged down interminable avenues to the point where those involved fail to find a way out, and any number of big-name bouts are in danger of falling by the wayside as a result.
The silence over a much-mooted showdown between one of the Klitschkos and David Haye has become almost deafening.
Bernard Hopkins shows zero desire to get in the ring with the world's number one light-heavyweight Chad Dawson.
With exceptions such as the excellent 'Super Six' super-middleweight series, promoters are becoming over-protective about their investments, with the result that low-risk fights are becoming a staple diet for fight fans globally.
Mayweather and Pacquiao need to get their heads together and sort their fight out soon. Otherwise they risk dragging the whole of their sport into an abyss from which it will struggle to ever recover.
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