By Jason Kim: In a recent interview, former International Boxing Federation welterweight champion Joshua Clottey (35-3, 20 KO’s) candidly admitted why he’s had problems knocking out opponents as of late. Clottey, 32, says “This is the problem. I’ve been a welterweight for 16 good years. If you look at me from my head to my toe – my legs, my body, are all big. So sometimes I have to train hard to make the weight. So when you stay at the same weight for too long your knockout percentages comes down. I trained too much for the welterweight division. It’s not that I lack stamina.”

Whatever the case, the process of Clottey melting down to 147 has the effect of ruining his stamina and at the same time driving down his knockout percentage. If what Clottey says is true, then he should have really considered moving up to the junior middleweight division as early as 2004, as that’s when Clottey’s knockouts began to dry up.

At that time in his career, Clottey had a record of 26-1 with 19 knockouts. Since that time, Clottey’s knockout percentage has dropped off dramatically to the point where he’s had only one knockout in his last 11 fights. That’s a bad KO percentage for a top fighter. It means that Clottey is having to work harder for his wins, fight longer and take many more head shots than he would have if he was still knocking out his opponents.

On March 13th, Clottey faces World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao at the Dallas Cowboy stadium. Pacquiao is knockout pretty much everyone with his explosive punching power, and fast hand speed. Clottey’s revelation about his problems to make the 147 makes it even harder to see him having any chance against Pacquiao.

However, it didn’t take his comments to realize that Clottey has little chance to beat Pacquiao. Clottey hasn’t looked good in the ring for awhile now. In 2006, Clottey struggled to beat Richard Gutierrez, a good fighter but someone that Clottey should have been able to dominate. In Clottey’s next fight, he was soundly beaten by Antonio Margarito in a 12 round decision loss.

Clottey said afterwards that he had injured his hand during the fight, but he looked exhausted after the 4th round, fighting with his mouth open and sweating like crazy. That wasn’t because of his hand. If it was because of his struggles to make weight, Clottey should have considered moving up to the junior middleweight division at that time.

There were some good fighters at that weight class at the time such as Oscar De La Hoya, and Clottey might have had a chance to get a fight with him had he moved up in weight and dominated. However, Clottey chose to stay at welterweight, where he’s racked up wins over Diego Corrales, Felix Flores, Shamone Alvarez, Jose Luis Cruz and Zab Judah in the past three years.

His best opponents, Judah and Corrales, were too small to compete with Clottey. Corrales had been a lightweight for much of his career, and Judah has had only mixed results since moving up from the light welterweight division in 2005, losing four out of the eleven fights he’s had at welterweight.