By Jim Dower: With the pressure of trying to juggle his political career with a career in boxing that’s finding him facing bigger and stronger opponents, eight division world champion Manny Pacquiao (52-3-2, 38 KO’s) could be hanging up the gloves in 2011 unless his promoter Bob Arum is able to convince Manny to stay on longer and perhaps wait for a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
At this point the fight against Mayweather is the only real reason for Pacquiao to stick around. There’s really no one else for him to fight other than Mayweather. Arum doesn’t plan on pitting Pacquiao up against a powerful middleweight like WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, and the junior middleweight division is pretty much barren of quality fighters worth putting in with Pacquiao.
Arum could match Pacquiao back up with WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, but that’s hardly a fight and more of an execution. There’s no one in that division for Pacquiao to compete against.
In the welterweight division, other than Mayweather, there’s only WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto, but that’s not an interesting fight because Berto has failed to fight enough quality fighters during his career to win fans. He continue to win his fights but against largely obscure fighters. This practice has now turned around and bitten him now that he’s been passed over by Arum as an opponent for Pacquiao.
WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan would be an interesting opponent for Pacquiao, but he’s close friends with him and they both share the same trainer. That makes a Khan-Pacquiao fight all but impossible. The only real interesting fight for Pacquiao other than Mayweather is Juan Manuel Marquez. However, Arum doesn’t seem interested in this match-up, and there’s talk that Marquez wants too much money to fight Pacquiao.
Other than Mayweather and Marquez, there’s no point in Pacquiao continuing to fight unless Arum wants to use him to build up the names of the fighters in his Top Rank stable by putting Pacquiao in with all of them. That’s a double-edged sword because Pacquiao can also hurt the value of these fighters by badly beating them and making them look bad, as he did with Antonio Margarito and Joshua Clottey. I don’t think either one of those fighters got much out of the fight other than a good payday.
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