By Sean McDaniel: World Boxing Organization lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez will be fighting next on May 1st against a still to be determined opponent. It was originally thought that Marquez had an optional defense available for that date. However, it now looks as if the WBO will be forcing Marquez to defend his WBO title against interim champion Michael Katisidis or risk having the title stripped from him.
There has been talk that Marquez would be fighting former IBF light welterweight champion Ricky Hatton on May 1st. However, even if Marquez is risk having his title stripped from him for not going ahead with the Katsidis fight, there’s a question whether Hatton will have taken off enough weight for him to fight Marquez by that time.
Hatton still looks huge despite that he reportedly started training recently, and it’s unclear whether Hatton will be able to take enough weight by May 1st to go ahead with a fight with Marquez. Hatton normally bloats up between fights getting really big. However, Hatton normally fights every four months or so, which prevents him from getting really big.
This time, however, Hatton has been out of action for eight months and has ballooned up to huge proportions, and looking fatter than I can ever remember him getting. While it’s possible that Hatton can take off that amount of fat that he’s put on his hide with his eating and drinking, he may be left feeling drained and weakened for his fight with Marquez – or whoever Hatton ends up fighting next.
Hatton obviously would like to look good in his comeback bout after being destroyed in a 2nd round knockout by Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd. If Hatton doesn’t take the weight off slowly, it’s doubtful he’ll perform well against Marquez, and may end up getting knocked out once again. It probably is worth Marquez’s while to vacate the WBO title if they’re going to force him to fight Katsidis and cause him to lose a big money fight against Hatton.
Marquez can always take on Katsidis after the Hatton fight, and probably easily beat Michael to win back his WBO title. The Hatton fight would seem to be the bigger priority if Hatton can take off enough weight, that is. Hatton looks be around 180 or so. That would mean that Hatton would have to strip off 40 or more pounds of blubber to make a fight with Marquez. That’s a tremendous amount of weight for a professional athlete to take off and still expect to fight at a high level.
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