By Chris Williams: Tim Bradley (28-0, 12 KO’s) will be moving up from the light welterweight division to challenger Manny Pacquiao (54-3-2, 38 KO’s) for the WBO welterweight title on June 9th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The conventional wisdom is that Pacquiao will be the bigger fighter in this bout because he’s been fighting at welterweight since 2009 when he beat then champion Miguel Cotto with the use of a catchweight handicap. However, Bradley will be the bigger fighter on June 9th, and he could out-weigh Pacquiao by as much as 15 pounds.

Bradley, although slightly shorter than Pacquiao at 5’6″ compared to Pacquiao’s 5’6 1/2″, Bradley carries much more muscle on his upper body and his walking around weight is in the 160s of pure muscle. For his part, Pacquiao struggles just to get his weight to the low 140s and he put on much weight at all after his weigh-ins. So technically we could be seeing Bradley with a near 20 pound weight advantage in this fight.

Bradley told Fighthype.com “I’m walking around right now [at] 165 pounds…I’m actually coming down from 160-something pounds. My natural body structure, man. I’m massive”

Bradey is right. He is massive. In looking at photos of him between fights, he looks like a little tank. He’s huge and looks like a body builder in between fights, but he doesn’t lift weights. Bradley is one of those guys that is naturally really muscular and has to trim down weight through dehydration to get down to 140, and in this case, 147, for his fights.

Pacquiao is going to have some big problems with Bradley’s size because he’s not faced a short with that kind of size in any of his fights. Pacquiao fought Antonio Margarito in 2010, but that was another catchweight handicap where Pacquiao fought for the vacant WBC junior middleweight title against Margarito at a catchweight of 150lbs instead of at the full weight of 154. Margarito was lanky and not compact and powerful like Bradley.