Too bad Pacquiao didn’t defend his WBC catch weight title

By Boxing News - 02/06/2011 - Comments

By Chris Williams: I was really counting on seeing Manny Pacquiao defend at least once his WBC junior middleweight catch weight title that he won over fellow Top Rank fighter Antonio Margarito in his last fight in November.

Since Margarito, a welterweight up until recently, was elevated to the #1 spot shortly before Pacquiao stepped up in weight to fight him instead of an established junior middleweight like Alfredo Angulo or Sergiy Dzinziruk.

I wanted to see what would Pacquiao look like when he was taking on actual fighter that had been fighting at that weight for a while instead of someone like Margarito, who fought once against a fringe contender Roberto Garcia and then was pushed to the top spot just in time for Pacquiao to fight him.

Pacquiao, like the previous when he captured the WBO title at welterweight, fought for the WBC junior middleweight title at a catch weight of 150 pounds instead of the full weight of 154 pound for the division. Since Pacquiao had won the title using a catch weight, I wanted to see what Pacquiao would do against a real junior middleweight like Angulo but without the catch weight handicap and without facing one of his own Top Rank stable fighters like Pacquiao has been doing recently in fights against Miguel Cotto, Joshua Clottey and Margarito.

Would Pacquiao have been able to beat a normal junior middleweight like Angulo or Paul Williams without a handicap catch weight? I would have liked to have seen it, because it’s hard for me to see Pacquiao’s win over Margarito as legitimate because the catch weight handicap used in the fight and because Margarito had been pushed to the number #1 spot by the WBC shortly before the fight.

Given that Margarito had fought only once at junior middleweight in the past six years, I have a hard time seeing him as the fighter that Pacquiao should have fighting for the WBC title. As such, I don’t count Pacquiao as having won eight world titles in my mind. I see that as asterisk title.



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