By Chris Williams: In looking at how poor Manny Pacquiao has looked in his last several fights that haven’t involved catchweights, it has me wondering whether Pacquiao’s success in the last four years has been due to him fighting guys at catchweights? Let’s look at Pacquiao’s most important wins in the last four years and see whether this could be true:

Antonio Margarito
Miguel Cotto
Juan Manuel Marquez

Pacquiao beat Oscar De La Hoya by an 8th round stoppage in 2008 in a fight that took place at 147 pounds, which although wasn’t technically a catchweight, it was seven pounds below the weight class that De La Hoya had been fighting at. De La Hoya hadn’t fought at 147 for seven years before facing Pacquiao in 2008 at that weight. Clearly, it was a stupid move by De La Hoya to agree to the weight because he was greatly weakened for having drained himself to get down to that weight.

Before facing Pacquiao at 147, the last time that De La Hoya had fought at 147 was back in 2001 in his win over Arturo Gatti. It’s great that Pacquiao’s management were able to get De La Hoya, the more popular fighter, to agree to fight Pacquiao at 147, but it pretty much amounted to being a catchweight handicap for Pacquiao that De La Hoya gave up in that fight.

Here are Pacquiao’s non-catchweight fights in the past four years:

Tim Bradley
Shane Mosley
Joshua Clottey
Ricky Hatton

Mosley was 40-years old and completely shot, so it didn’t really matter whether a catchweight was used for that fight or not. He was way too old to win.

Clottey didn’t really put up much of a fight and just covered up all fight long.

Hatton had ballooned up before the fight and had to take off a ton of weight during training camp. The fight wasn’t a catchweight fight, but when you take off as much weight as Hatton, it sure didn’t help him.