By Chris Williams: The more and more I think about the Manny Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey fight the more I believe this fight should be on regular HBO and not on pay-per-view. The reason is simple. Clottey is about as basic a fighter that you’ll ever see. He throws few punches, covers up all the time, has no right hand and is a sitting duck on the ropes much of the time. Pretty much everyone knows he’s going to lose on Saturday, including Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach, who talks nonstop for anyone willing to listen how Pacquiao is going to dominate this guy. Well I hope so.
Come on, Clottey just got beat by Miguel Cotto, another one of Pacquiao’s victims. What does that tell you? That’s enough for me to not consider the fight PPV worthy. If you know someone is going to lose and probably lose bad, how can you consider it a pay-per-view fight? You can’t call it worthy of PPV because of the undercard that’s been lumped with it.
An old Jose Luis Castillo facing Alfonso Gomez, as well as fights between David Diaz and Humber Soto, John Duddy vs. Michael Medina. I just don’t see any of those fights as interesting other than for free television. I know for Pacquiao fans that have the dying interest in seeing anything that he does, they don’t really care. They just want to see him and be able to have a memory of having seen the guy fight so they can talk about it later.
But for me, I’m person that wants to see a fight in which both fighters have an almost equal chance of winning. If I’m going to pay to see a fight, it has to be one that I feel that there’s a chance that either of the fighters will win. I can’t say that about the Pacquiao-Clottey fight. I think Clottey was picked out by Bob Arum as a hasty alternative after the fight between Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. went out the window.
If this was something that Arum had planned all along – a brief stab at negotiations with Mayweather and then on with a fight with Clottey – I think it was a poor one. I don’t want to see fights that are a mismatch going into the fight. I just don’t want to see that kind of thing if it means I’m going to have to pay for it. This is why I see the Pacquiao-Clottey fight as not being worthy of a pay-per-view bout.
You have Pacquiao, a star, facing an unknown Clottey, who has mostly been beaten by the good fighters that he’s fought in his career. He hasn’t really beaten anyone that I consider a talented fighter in his own weight class. Zab Judah was a small welterweight who should have moved back down to light welterweight ages ago, Diego Corrales was a lightweight who moved up for the Clottey fight, and that’s pretty much it for Clottey in terms of big wins in his career. The other guys he’s beaten have been 2nd tier or fringe contenders.
I see Pacquiao-Clottey as a stay busy fight, one that you put on regular cable to show to the masses. It’s not one you put together and try to present that it’s going to be a competitive fight, because frankly it’s not going to be. You can paint it anyway you want to, but I see it as a hopeless mismatch and not something to get excited about.
Like I said, it might bring in halfway decent numbers because the casual boxing fans have become excited about Pacquiao because of his three fights recently against Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto. The numbers we’re seeing now are partly because of the attention Pacquiao got in those fights. But that doesn’t mean that they have to take advantage of the fame that Pacquiao has got and make boxing fans pay big money to see him in with a non-star.
And that’s the thing. Clottey isn’t a star, hasn’t beaten anyone worthy of his number #1 ranking in my view, and is totally limited as a fighter. People can defend him, but watch the fight on Saturday and tell me if I’m wrong. I won’t be.
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