By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is picking his number #1 fighter Manny Pacquiao to beat Antonio Margarito on November 13th. It’s not that much of a surprise pick for Arum, because Pacquiao is seen as the cash cow in boxing and it would be crazy for Arum to choose against him. What’s weird is that Arum is making his pick known, because he promotes both Pacquiao and Margarito. You would think that Arum might want to keep his pick under his hat for fear of upsetting Margarito in the process. It looks bad that Arum is outright picking his number #1 money maker to win. If I’m Margarito, I’d be angry and would want to beat Pacquiao to a pulp just to fix Arum’s wagon.

Speaking with Philstar.com, Arum says “It’s either a late stoppage or a close decision for Manny. I see Margarito coming right at Manny and trying to bully him. But Manny will stand in there and trade punches with him. And once he gets going, as he always does, he’ll start moving around and start nailing him with his left and his right.”

It’s pretty obvious that Pacquiao is going to be hopping around and trying to change directions against Margarito. He isn’t just going to stand in front of him and make it easy on him in this one. Arum sees this fight going a lot like Pacquiao’s fight with WBO welterweight champion Miguel Cotto last year. Pacquiao was able to knock the short 5’7″ Cotto down a couple of times early in the fight and get him running from the 5th round on until the bitter end in the 12th when Pacquiao stopped Cotto with a flurry of shots.

That wasn’t even a fight after the 4th round. I think Arum is way off in seeing Margarito-Pacquiao as being similar to Cotto-Pacquiao. Margarito won’t run from Pacquiao, and he’ll put a lot more pressure on him than Cotto was doing. Cotto was mostly throwing jabs and getting nailed when he was coming in trying to throw body shots. Margarito will be coming forward all the time and looking to tag Pacquiao to the head with his shots and looking to blast him with uppercuts. Pacquiao looked vulnerable in his sparring sessions with his bigger sparring partners Michael Medina and Glen Tapia.

If Margarito can put hands on Pacquiao the same way Medina was doing, we could have a bloody Pacquiao within no time. Pacquiao doesn’t fight well when he’s cut and this could be a very interesting fight if Margarito can get the blood flowing early in the bout. He needs to land as many head shots as possible to get the blood flowing. I’d forget about working Pacquiao’s body in the early going because Pacquiao will be too much of a threat at that time of the fight. Once Pacquiao starts slowing down and is bleeding, then I would have Margarito focusing more on landing body shots.