By Dan Ambrose: WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (30-0, 12 KO’s) is ready to take another Hall of Fame scalp this Saturday night when he defends his title against the well accomplished Juan Manuel Marquez (55-6-1, 40 KO’s) on HBO from Las Vegas, Nevada. Bradley already took the popular fighter Manny Pacquiao’s scalp last year, and now he’s looking to take the almost equally popular Marquez’s on Saturday.
Bradley sees a victory over Marquez putting him in the history books because no one fighter has beaten both Marquez and Pacquiao before, and he would be the first to take them both down. The only name that would be missing from his list after that would be Floyd Mayweather Jr., if he could get a fight with him.
Bradley said to the Boxing Channel “It’s going to be one tough night for him [Marquez]. History is going to be made. It’s going to be another Hall of Fame fighter going down the drain.”
If this fight were to have taken place 8 years ago, I wouldn’t give Bradley any chance at all against Marquez, but now that he’s 40-years-old, and coming off of a performance last December where he looked slow, I think it’s realistic to assume that Bradley will out-box Marquez to get the victory in this fight.
Marquez can’t throw as many punches as Bradley because of his age and lack of speed, so he’s in a position where he needs to knock him out. If he can’t do that then it’s not going to happen. Bradley is too fast and he’s going to be too quick with his combinations for Marquez to beat him with his one punch at a time pot shots.
Bradley learned his lesson from his last fight against Ruslan Provodnikov that he can’t afford to stand in the pocket and trade with his opponents. That won’t work if he tries that, and he’s not going to.
If Bradley had been fighting Marquez last March instead of Provodnikov, then he would have lost the fight Marquez would have chopped him down with his power shots. But thankfully, Bradly was fighting a limited Provodnikov, and the Russian fighter wasn’t skilled enough and wise enough to take advantage of Bradley’s mistake of going to war with him. But Marquez won’t get that opportunity to fight Bradley in a toe-to-toe battle because Bradley is going to box him.
I see this as the same transformation that Floyd Mayweather Jr. made after he opted to fight Miguel Cotto in a telephone booth type of fight. Mayweather took a lot of punishment, but still got the win. But more importantly, he learned his lesson and made sure that he went back to his boxing in his last two fights against Robert Guerrero and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and he’s looked very impressive in both fights. Bradley is going to go back to what he does best and that’s box.
Marquez trained wrong for this fight by trying to focus on improving his speed, but not his power. He’s not going to be any faster, and he won’t have the power to stop Bradley because he neglected that part of his game.
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