By Jason Kim: Juan Manuel Marquez has nothing to lose this Saturday night against unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. and everything to gain. In fact, Marquez, 36, stands to gain quite a lot if he can somehow pull off a miracle win over the previous number #1 pound-for-pound star Mayweather. This would be a huge win for Marquez, one of the biggest victories in years.
It doesn’t matter that Mayweather has been out of boxing for the past 21 months while in retirement. What boxing fans will be concentrating on is that Mayweather, who is still considered to be the best fighter by some fans, was beaten, period. If Marquez can knock Mayweather, it will be icing on the cake.
A knockout win would be the best possible scenario because there would be no room for interpretation, and Mayweather wouldn’t be able to complain about it afterwards saying that he was ripped off. That wouldn’t prevent Mayweather from making excuses after the fight about being rusty from retirement, but I doubt that too many sympathetic fans would be listening to him after the fight.
Marquez would he a monster with this win. By moving up two divisions to beat a natural welterweight, Marquez would be a star overnight. This would no doubt vault him into the class of some of the other big pay-per-view stars and would pave his way for a third fight against Manny Pacquiao, whom he’s fought twice already, fighting to a 12 round draw in one and losing the other.
Marquez wouldn’t even need a fight with Pacquiao immediately. Mayweather would almost certainly be pushing for an immediate rematch and I think this is a fight that the public would want to see. They may not be interested in seeing Mayweather fight Marquez right now because a lot of the casual boxing fans have no idea who Marquez is and the ones that do know of him, don’t see him as having much of a chance against Mayweather.
However, by beating Mayweather, a second fight between them would very likely be a bout that fans would like to see. I think for some boxing fans, they want nothing better than to see Mayweather lose. This may have been one of the reasons why tons of people flocked to see the Mayweather-De La Hoya and Mayweather-Hatton bouts in 2007.
Mayweather became kind of a person that many fans wanted to see get beat because of the way that he would portray himself in the media as a bad boy type character. Obviously, this wasn’t the real Mayweather and was merely a persona that he used to sell tickets, but it worked well because the Hatton and De La Hoya fights were huge. Marquez then would have his pick of who to fight.
Some people think that a Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight would go ahead immediately regardless if Mayweather beats Marquez or not. I don’t think so. I think Mayweather wouldn’t be happy with being beaten and knocked out by Marquez and would be gunning for a rematch with him instead of going after Pacquiao.
Mayweather’s ego is too big to let him get knocked out and not do anything about it as fast as he could.
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