By Eric Thomas: WBA welterweight champion Antonio Margarito weighed in at 145.8 for today’s weigh-in while challenger Shane Mosley came in at 147.2 and had to come back later to be reweighed after shedding the extra weight. In the second try, he came right in at 147. Mosley, 37, is facing a difficult task in taking on Margarito on Saturday night at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California.
While Mosley has had an impressive career, he’s faced no one like Margarito before. Wins against Fernando Vargas, Oscar De La Hoya, Luis Collazo, David Estrada, Ricardo Mayorga and Jose Luis Cruz, easily Mosley’s best since moving up to the welterweight and light middleweight divisions, are essentially meaningless against a fighter as good as Margarito.
Indeed, Margarito would have likely easily swept those fighters, beating them even worse than Mosley did. That’s not a knock against Shane but more of clue that he never really had the size to be a truly dominating welterweight or light middleweight and had mixed results against the best fighters in those divisions over the years.
At lightweight, Mosley was a dominant force, amassing a 32-0 record before moving up to the welterweight division where he soon after defeated De La Hoya by a 12-round split decision to pick up the WBC welterweight champion in June 2000.
However, Mosley didn’t have the size, at 5’9”, to stay at the top of the welterweight division for long, losing back to back fights with 6’0” Vernon Forrest in 2002. Since then, Mosley has had mixed success in his career, once again beating De La Hoya in 2003 but then losing twice more when facing the bigger 5’11” Winky Wright in 2004. The wins since that time haven’t been anything to brag about, beating Luis Collazo, David Estrada, Cruz, and a faded Vargas (twice) and Mayorga.
Mosley was beaten once again, this time by Miguel Cotto in a 12-round decision loss in November 2007. Mosley came close to getting the win, but came up short in losing a narrow decision. Based on this, there’s no evidence there that tells me that Mosley has either the prior experience or the size to beat a fighter as big (5’11”) and the activity level of someone like Margarito.
He might be able to give Margarito some tough rounds for awhile but overall, Mosley just doesn’t have the ability at this stage of his career to beat a punching machine like Margarito, nor does it look as if he ever did. There are some people who feel that Mosley would have been able to beat Margarito nine years ago when Mosley was firing on all cylinders, but there’s nothing there on his record that would indicate that he could actually do this.
Beating De La Hoya, a good fighter but not a particularly tough one, is one thing but beating Margarito is a completely different thing altogether. In truth, Mosley would have likely been beaten similar to the way he was beaten by Forrest in back to back fights in 2002, though probably much worse due to Margarito’s relentless style of fighting.
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