By Dave Lahr: Manny Pacquiao won his 3rd Fighter of the Year award on Friday night by the Boxing Writers Association of America at the Roosevelt Hotel. I don’t want to drizzle on Pacquiao’s parade, but why was he chosen rather than Floyd Mayweather Jr? I think Mayweather accomplished more in coming back from a two year retirement to easily defeat Juan Manuel Marquez compared to what Pacquiao accomplished.
All Pacquiao did was beat Miguel Cotto at a catch weight and then a totally shot and weight drained looking Ricky Hatton, who ignored his trainer’s advice and went out slugging against Pacquiao like a primitive caveman. I’m sorry, but beating Cotto and Hatton isn’t enough for me to award Pacquiao the fighter of the year award. They needed to put me on the Boxing Writers Association of America so I could help balance out the vote and get people to see reason.
Okay, Cotto was a really good fighter a couple of years ago but by the time Pacquiao got to Cotto, he’d already sledge hammered by Antonio Margarito into submission a year earlier. Cotto hadn’t done much of anything to redeem himself after the beating by Margarito other than stopping Michael Jennings, who had no business being in the ring with a quality fighter like Cotto in the first place, and winning a controversial 12 round split decision over Joshua Clottey.
I thought it was a bad choice for Pacquiao to fight Cotto to begin with. Why was Pacquiao fighting Cotto rather than Shane Mosley, who had already proven himself as the number #3 welterweight in the division after stopping Margarito in the 9th round in January of last year? When I saw Pacquiao and his team bypass Mosley to fight Cotto, I was shocked and repulsed for what appeared to be cherry picking.
And then to top it off, Cotto had to come in at a catch weight to fight Pacquiao, even though Cotto was the champion and Pacquiao just the challenger. Cotto didn’t want to have to have his WBO title on the line for the fight because he wasn’t going to be allowed to come in at the full 147 pound limit for the fight because of the catch weight involved.
But in the end, Cotto had no choice, the WBO pushed Pacquiao to the number #1 position all of a sudden, meaning Cotto had no choice but to put his title on the line because it would be on the line automatically put on the line anyway by the WBO. Okay, so I wasn’t impressed with that win at all. I saw Cotto as not being the same fighter after the Margarito beat down. And the Hatton fight was hardly the kind of fight that I would consider in giving an award to Pacquiao for fighter of the year.
The reason why is because I saw Hatton as a relic of the distant past by the time he fought Pacquiao. Hatton may have been thought of as one of the best fighters in the light welterweight division by some people but I certainly wasn’t one of them. I saw Hatton as number #10 or 11 in the division by the time Pacquiao fought him. I saw guys like Devon Alexander, Timothy Bradley, Marcos Maidana, Victor Ortiz, Lamont Peterson, Victor Cayo, Ajose Olusegun, Mike Alvarado, Andriy Kotelnik, Kaizer Maibuza and Ruslan Provodnikov all as better fighters as Hatton. This is why I was kind of baffled at why Hatton was selected as an opponent for Pacquiao.
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