By Chris Williams: HBO’s 4-part 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito series kicks off on Saturday night to help hype the November 13th bout between Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito. The fight will be taking place at the Cowboys Stadium, in Arlington, Texas. So far, it’s a fight that is hard to really excited about because Pacquiao hasn’t fought anyone at junior middleweight and is going straight into a title fight with Margarito, who fights out of the same Top Rank stable as him. It’s weird situation. It’s like having a fighter on the same team as you fight you for a title in a weight class that neither of you have any real experience in.

Margarito has fought only once at junior middleweight in the past six years. I wonder how the other junior middleweight contenders feel about being skipped over by Pacquiao, who isn’t even ranked in the junior middleweight division. As far as the HBO 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito series goes, I have no idea how they’re going to do this. Margarito can’t speak English and needs an interpreter to be understood, and Pacquiao has a thick accent, and he uses a lot of pauses when he speaks. The conversations aren’t going to be flowing very easily, and it’s not really interesting to have to hear through an interpreter or having to read it.

Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is obviously going to be talking a lot and I’m not looking forward to that. He’s always so sure of himself and the fight is already a mismatch going in. Of course, Roach is going to be smug about this fight because Pacquiao is probably going to win it unless he falls apart from the pace that Margarito sets out. I’m not sure how interesting the series will be. I don’t want to hear Roach crowing over and over again how Pacquiao is going to knock Margarito out in the 8th round.

We already know about the hand wrap issue, and I guess the first episode is going to spend some time on explaining that for the casual viewers. For a lot of them, this will be the first they’ve heard of it. I don’t imagine that it will make them feel too excited about this fight. I think maybe HBO would be better off not speaking about because it might turn away some potential pay per view buyers if they hear too much about Margarito’s hand wraps. It’s a hard sell as it is, because Margarito was stopped in the 9th round just two fights ago and hasn’t looked good in the ring since beating Miguel Cotto in 2008. It’s bad enough that he was chosen after the hand wrap issue, but with him not looking good in over two years, it really seems like potentially a bad deal for boxing fans who will be forking over the $55 to see this fight.