By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is licking his chops at a potential November fight between Pacquiao and lightweight 38-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez, feeling that it’s a fight that will be a big sell for the American public. But I’m not so sure that it will be. For one, the casual boxing fan has little clue who Marquez is. He’s mainly known for being the victim in the 2009 fight between Marquez and Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Although Marquez’s fights have, from time to time, been shown on HBO, he’s not brought in good ratings and he’s not a well known fighter in the U.S. Marquez is also old, small and clearly on the downward slope of his career. In other words, he’s a smaller version of Shane Mosley. He may put in a better fight than Mosley did against Pacquiao, but that’s not saying much because Mosley did zero after being knocked down in the 3rd round by Pacquiao. That’s not Mosley’s fault that he didn’t do anything, because he merely continued to fight the way he had been fighting in his two previous bouts before the Pacquiao bout.
Top Rank promoted the heck out of the Pacquiao-Mosley fight with the Showtime/CBS Fight Camp 360 episodes, and they basically sold the fight to a lot of casual fans who were expecting a great fight. They didn’t get a great fight nor even a good one. And they lost their $55 bucks in the process for this mismatch. Now Arum is going to try and sell another bad bill of goods to the same fans with Pacquiao-Marquez. I think it’s an awful idea and one bound to end with poor numbers in terms of pay per view buys. Those fans obviously aren’t happy with the bad deal that they got and sadly they didn’t know enough about boxing to see that Mosley was no longer his best. They wasted their money on a mismatch that was already a mismatch going into the fight. And now we have another mismatch. Will those fans be interested in seeing Pacquiao face another nearly 40-year-old fighter? I think not.
The guy that Pacquiao should be fighting is someone like Victor Ortiz. Other than Floyd Mayweather Jr., he’s the next best guy in the division. Why go after a little lightweight like Marquez and make him move up in weight to welterweight for a catchweight fight of 144 when you got Ortiz available? If not Ortiz, why not fight Sergio Martinez at 154? Pacquiao already fought Antonio Margarito at junior middleweight, even though Margarito was never a junior middleweight to begin with. I can’t believe Pacquiao won a world title in the Margarito fight. If it was me, I’d never accept a title if I were fighting a non-junior middleweight like Margarito at a catchweight. I still can’t believe Pacquiao got a paper title out of that fight.
Source: boxingnews24.com
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