LAS VEGAS – After years of frustration and disappointment, following many starts and stops, perhaps the most talked about boxing match in history is finally a reality.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. announced Friday that he's agreed to fight Manny Pacquiao in a welterweight bout May 2 at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas. It's a bout the public has been calling for since late 2009 and pits the two finest boxers of their generation in a historic event.

View photos Floyd Mayweather is the pound-for-pound king. (AP) More

"I am glad my decision to meet with Manny and discuss making this fight happen helped get the deal done," said Mayweather. "Giving the fans what they want to see is always my main focus. This will be the biggest event in the history of the sport. Boxing fans and sports fans around the world will witness greatness on May 2. I am the best ever, TBE, and this fight will be another opportunity to showcase my skills and do what I do best, which is win. Manny is going to try to do what 47 before him failed to do, but he won't be successful. He will be number 48."

The bout is expected to set numerous records, including purse size, live paid gate and pay-per-view sales. The cost of the pay-per-view has yet to be determined and won't be until there are deals with the distributors.

Formal details on the agreement have yet to be announced, but it's expected that Mayweather will have a 60-40 split advantage on revenues, with Mayweather making at least $120 million and Pacquiao, who signed the contract for the bout Thursday, earning $80 million.

"Floyd should enjoy being the A-side while he can," Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer, said. "Because on May 2, Manny is going to put him on his backside."

The two nearly came to terms around the Christmas holidays in 2009, a month after Pacquiao stopped Miguel Cotto at the MGM Grand. It fell apart, though, when Pacquiao and promoter Bob Arum balked at Mayweather's demand for drug testing run by the United States Anti-Doping Agency during training camp.

There were numerous attempts over the last five years to reignite the talks. In 2011, then-HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg tried to act as a mediator between Mayweather adviser Al Haymon and Arum, but that didn't come to fruition.

In 2012, Mayweather, who was in Las Vegas, called Pacquiao, who was at his home in the Philippines, and offered him a guaranteed $40 million but with no pay-per-view upside. Pacquiao declined that offer.

Mayweather jumped from HBO, which had him under an exclusive television contract for much of his career, to Showtime in 2013, which seemed to be the death knell for the fight.

Mayweather has fought four of the six fights on his record-breaking Showtime contract and didn't have an opponent out there who would have made the kind of show that would resonate with the public the way a Pacquiao fight would.

Pacquiao remains under an exclusive television deal with HBO, so that further complicated the attempts to match the fighters. Only once previously, in 2002 when Lennox Lewis (HBO) and Mike Tyson (Showtime) fought, have the two premium cable giants gotten together to do a pay-per-view.

This most recent talks began in November and were started by CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves, a longtime acquaintance of Arum's. Roach actually got them together by speaking to a friend of his who owns a Southern California pizza restaurant that Moonves frequents.

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