By Chris Williams: There’s less than a week to go before Floyd Mayweather Jr. is ruled out as Manny Pacquiao’s next opponent on November 13th, unless Mayweather speaks up before then and agrees to the contract that Bob Arum has sent to him. I’m not holding my breath on that happening, though, so it’s looking like a back-up plan will have to be used for Pacquiao.
Arum, who promotes Pacquiao, has said that he’ll have him fight either Miguel Cotto or Antonio Margarito next. Given that Margarito had his boxing license renewal rejected by the Nevada Athletic Commission on Friday, it’s fair to say that he probably won’t get the call for a shot against Pacquiao in November.
This leaves only Cotto as an opponent for Arum. I think this is a bad fight for Pacquiao because he already finished beating Cotto black and blue last November. Who in their right mind wants to have to pay $49.95 to see Pacquiao destroy Cotto again. I don’t care if the undercard is stacked with talented fighters in one-sided mismatches, I’m not looking forward to seeing Pacquiao destroy a guy that he just finished beating. Doesn’t Arum have anyone else for him to fight. Why not pick WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (25-0, 11 KO’s) to fight next?
After all, Bradley is much more popular than the last opponent – Joshua Clottey – that Arum picked for Pacquiao. A fight between Bradley and Pacquiao couldn’t do worse than the 700,000 pay-per-view buys that the Clottey-Pacquiao fight brought in. Those are decent numbers but not great ones by a long shot.
Since the casual American boxing fans actually know who Bradley, which is more than can be said about Clottey, it stands to reason that a fight between Pacquiao and Bradley could come in close to 1 million PPV buys. I think that’s probably better than a Cotto-Pacquiao II fight will bring in. Last time Cotto and Pacquiao reached over 1 million buys, but a rematch would likely do much worse than that because few people want to see Pacquiao beat the living daylights out of Cotto so soon after their last fight.
I honestly don’t know how Arum could even consider a fight between Cotto and Pacquiao. You’d have to have bad case of amnesia for the past eight months to want to see this fight again, because if you have any recollection of their previous fight, you’ll probably not be too thrilled at paying big money to see Pacquiao batter Cotto’s face beyond recognition.
This kind of fight would be okay if it was to take place two to five years later after Cotto had proven that he was back and had beaten some quality fighters to make people forget how badly he was thrashed by Pacquiao. But Cotto has fought only once, beating another one of Arum’s fighters WBA junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman in June.
It was a good win for Cotto, but the fight was marred by the injury that Foreman sustained to his right knee, which made him limp around the ring from the 7th until he was stopped in the 9th. The bout probably should have been stopped immediately after Foreman hurt his knee in the 7th, because he couldn’t fight and was just taking needless punishment from Cotto.
Bradley would actually have a chance to beat Pacquiao because of his hand speed, inside game and his ability to move around the ring without tiring out. You can’t say the same thing about Cotto. He stands no chance against Pacquiao and will get battered in another one-sided defeat if he’s selected.
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