By Chris Williams: A third fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez drew a step closer on Tuesday when the 37-year-old Marquez agreed to Bob Arum’s offer to fight Pacquiao at a 144lb catchweight for $5 million plus an upside for the pay-per-view profits in a fight that will reportedly take place in November, provided that Golden Boy Promotions, Marquez’s old promoters, don’t match the offer.

The chances of that happening are slim, as Golden Boy doesn’t have a huge star near that weight class. Richard Schaefer, the CEO of Golden Boy, says he’s going to try and match Marquez with WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz. However, it’s hard to see HBO agreeing to pay Marquez huge money like $5 million to fight a guy like Ortiz, who is only now becoming a star. Still, Schaefer sounds confident that HBO will agree to it, saying in an article at the LA Times, “I’m sure HBO would be on board.” Schaefer wants the Marquez-Ortiz fight to take place on September 17th and plans on packaging the fight with a title defense for WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez.

Marquez has already faced Pacquiao twice before in 2004 and 2008 at featherweight and super featherweight. Pacquiao has moved up in weight to welterweight, and Marquez has only moved up slightly to the lightweight division. The 144 pound catchweight for the Marquez is a bit of a joke. It’s not really even a catchweight because Pacquiao fights at 145, so he’d have to lose 1 pound. Marquez would have to move up nine pounds to take the fight. It probably doesn’t matter because this fight – like the Shane Mosley bout – will likely be a fight that will pad Marquez’s retirement. It’s not going to be competitive with the fight being held at welterweight. If the bout took place at lightweight, Marquez would have a good chance of winning. But not at welterweight. The fight will be a more competitive version of Mosley over Pacquiao.

A third fight between Marquez and Pacquiao will clearly be a successful one in terms of drawing interest from fans and bringing in big PPV numbers. However, it’s going to be another disappointing fight for fans hoping to see Pacquiao in an exciting fight. Marquez is too small, too old and too far out of his weight class to win this bout. It’s sad that Pacquiao wasn’t at least willing to meet Marquez half way with a catchweight instead of budging only three pounds and asking Marquez to come up in weight nine pounds. Not very fair, is it?