By Manuel Perez: Recently, Manny Pacquiao has moved up in weight to fight opponents out of his weight class, making Oscar De La Hoya have to move down to 147 in order to fight him. This resulted in De La Hoya having to diet drastically to make weight, leaving weak and only a shell of his former self. Pacquiao then goes out and beats Oscar badly.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see how Pacquiao can be given any kind of pound for pound attention when Manny isn’t able to meet De La Hoya at his normal weight. Roach says that he’s just looking out for his fighter by making Pacquiao’s bigger opponents have to come down to unrealistic weight requirements in order to fight Pacquiao.
Now, Roach is trying to duplicate this with fights against Miguel Cotto and Shane Mosley, letting them know that if they want to fight Pacquiao then they’ll have to strip down to a skinny, weight drained 142 to make it happen.
Pacquiao walks around in the low 140s, and if he can’t fight meet a fighter like Mosley or Cotto, both of whom fight at 147, at the welterweight limit, then I think they should just scrap the idea altogether and let Pacquiao continue to fight people in the lower weight classes.
There’s no victory over an opponent that is forced to strip off muscle in order to make a fight happen, because the version of the fighter that Pacquiao ends up fighting is a weak, weight drained version and not a prime one.
If you don’t believe me, try getting in really good shape and then having to take off five pounds of muscle to take a fight. Yes, you could do it but you’d be weaker than you were before you started and you’d be in trouble against a fighter that is used to fighting at the smaller weight.
What gets me is that Roach is okay with Pacquiao fighting De La Hoya at 147, but he’s not okay with Pacquiao fighting Mosley or Cotto at the same weight.
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