Will Pacquiao make Cotto fight at another catch weight?

By Boxing News - 06/30/2010 - Comments

Image: Will Pacquiao make Cotto fight at another catch weight?By Dave Lahr: I’m not even thinking about the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight happening. I know it won’t. I see Bob Arum matching Pacquiao up against his plan B option, WBA light middleweight champion Miguel Cotto for a needless rematch. I see this fight taking place with another one of those god awful catch weights being involved, so that Pacquiao will have a handicap as he goes for his 8th world title. Last time Pacquiao fought Cotto, he had a similar handicap in going for Cotto’s WBO welterweight title.

Pacquiao won the fight, earning his 7th world title, but with a weight draining catch weight of 145 pounds being involved. I don’t know how a challenger has the muscle to get a champion to fight at a catch weight, and still have the title being on the line? That just seems wrong. If you’re going to fight for the title, then at least do it without an energy draining catch being involved.

It’s easy for the fighter that’s putting on weight to challenge a bigger fighter, but very difficult for a fighter to have to take off weight in order to fight someone at a smaller weight. With the ease of which Pacquiao beat Cotto last time, I would hope that he won’t use the catch weight again when he fights him in their likely rematch in November. I personally don’t recognize Pacquiao as having won the WBO title because of the catch weight that was involved. For me, I put a mental asterisk next to Pacquiao’s win over Cotto.

I recognize that he beat Cotto, but I don’t see Pacquiao as the champion because he didn’t fight Cotto at the full weight and had to put in the handicap to take the fight. If Pacquiao doesn’t want to fight at the full 154 for the light middleweight title, then he needs to stay down at welterweight and keep fighting guys like Joshua Clottey. But the last thing I want to see if Pacquiao fighting at a catch weight for yet another title. What is up with that. I know of no other fighter in the past that used a catch weight when going after titles. Doing it once is one thing, but going after two titles with catch weights?



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