Pacquiao/Marquez 24/7 episode #1 this Saturday on HBO

By Boxing News - 10/18/2011 - Comments

Image: Pacquiao/Marquez 24/7 episode #1 this Saturday on HBOBy Chris Williams: This Saturday night HBO will air the first Pacquiao/Marquez 24/7 episode #1 on October 22nd at 10:00-10:30 p.m. ET/PT. This is part of a four episode series to hype the fight so that it can bring in big pay per view number.

As of now, unfortunately there isn’t a whole of interest in the fight for some reason. I’ve got good idea why Pacquiao-Marquez III isn’t exciting fans like the other two bouts between them, and it has a lot to do with the fight being put together four years too late. Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum likes to wait on fights to let them build up interest so that he can maximize the PPV numbers.

However, that’s not what I see happening here. Marquez gave Pacquiao huge problems in the first two fights with many boxing fans seeing Pacquiao as having lost both fights. My impression is Arum chose to protect Pacquiao from a potential loss by not putting him back in with Marquez. But things are different now four years later.

Marquez is old now at 38, slower, and Pacquiao has gained a massive amount of weight and fights two divisions above Marquez. There isn’t any real catchweight to give Marquez a handicap in this fight, and essentially he’s going to be facing Pacquiao at nearly the full weight for the welterweight division at 144 lbs.

Given that Marquez is older, slower, and fighting out of his weight class, this puts Pacquiao in the driver’s seat for this bout. For this reason, I believe that the fans just don’t see Marquez as having a chance and they’ve already paid out the nose to see Pacquiao mismatches against an old Shane Mosley recently, Antonio Margarito, Miguel Cotto, and Joshua Clottey.

I think fans are a bit turned off towards Pacquiao after these series of fights because there hasn’t been one exciting fight for Pacquiao since 2008. That’s three long years of mismatches. It was a bad idea to put Pacquiao in with the nearly 40-year-old Mosley, yet that’s what Arum did. I think what we’re seeing here is a backlash with boxing fans not wanting to see another mismatch that is so clearly a mismatch just coming into the fight.

Like I said before, Arum needs to discount this PPV fight by $50 and sell it for $4.99, because Pacquiao is facing an old guy fighting two divisions out of his weight class. I think the card is too expensive for what we’re getting.

Here are the undercard fights:

Timothy Bradley vs. Joel Casamayor = Mismatch
Jorge Arce vs. TBA = Whoopee! Don’t you love the TBA fights?
Luis Cruz vs. Juan Carlos Burgos = Who? Yawn
Mike Alvarado vs. Breidis Prescott = Decent fight but PPV material
Jose Benavidez vs. Gary Bergeron = Mismatch



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