By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum set up a mismatch bout for May 7th between his number #1 cash cow Manny Pacquiao and 39-year-old Shane Mosley, who hasn’t won a fight since 2009 when he beat one of Arum’s slow stable fighters Antonio Margarito. Since then, Mosley took a year off from boxing and then came back for a beating against Floyd Mayweather Jr. and then a 12 round draw against Sergio Mora. It wasn’t just that Mosley came up empty in both fights, it’s utterly inept he looked in both fights.
The guy has the classic looks of a fighter that is totally shot. This couldn’t have been lost on Arum and trainer Freddie Roach. Never the less, Mosley was chosen anyway for Pacquiao over fighters that are in their prime and still fighting at a high level like Juan Manuel Marquez and Andre Berto. Now that Arum has made his decision of choosing the aged Mosley, it’s going to be fun to see Roach build up Mosley to be someone that will be a threat to Pacquiao instead of just another mismatched opponent picked from a litter of struggling fighters.
Normally, Roach talks down Pacquiao’s opponents giving them zero chance, but in this case he’s going to have to work it the opposite way and try and built Mosley up because no one is giving Mosley a chance in this fight. Roach has already said recently that he sees Mosley as tougher than Marquez and Berto, which was laughable. We can expect more of the same from Roach, because this is a fight that is going to really need a tough sell to get boxing fans to show interest.
This could really go badly if Pacquiao beats Mosley up really bad and puts him in the hospital. It’s going to look like Arum picked out some poor old guy for Pacquiao to beat up. It’s bad enough that Arum has matched Pacquiao up against his stable fighters Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito in Pacquiao’s last two fights, and neither of those were fights that boxing fans wanted to see. But now they’ve picked an old guy for Pacquiao to fight. I just don’t know how Roach and Arum are going to sell it. How do you cover up the fact that Mosley is looking completely shot? They’re going to have to really market this fight with a lot of old photos and videos of Mosley, because they can’t use recent video because he’s looked as old as the hills and has looked like a punching bag in his last two fights.
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