By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach is convinced that there will never be another fighter as great as WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao. Roach talks of Pacquiao’s accomplishments of winning eight world titles as part of the reasons why he sees the Filipino guy never being matched by fighter in the this lifetime.

With multiple titles available to fighters nowadays, it makes it easy to win a lot of titles like Pacquiao. If you’re into collecting titles and don’t really care whether you’re taking on the best or the weakest of the champions, you can win a lot of titles if you start out as a lower weight fighter and keep bulking up as you go.

Roach said to Philstar.com “There’ll never be another Manny Pacquiao in our lifetime, he’s set the bar so high; eight time world champion. We’ll never see that in our lifetime.”

Here’s my take. I don’t think Pacquiao’s eight world titles record will stand for long, and really you’ve got to put asterisks next to two of them – Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito – because those catchweight fights. How can you count a catchweight title? And Margarito was a welterweight that got pushed near to the top of the junior middleweight after beating one fighter at that weight Roberto Garcia. Pacquiao then fought Margarito for the vacant WBC junior middleweight title. It was a weird situation and I don’t know how you can feel good about fighting a welterweight for a junior middleweight vacant title over other contenders that are ranked higher? How was it that Pacquiao got to fight for a title in the first place when he’s not even a junior middeweight and then he faced a welterweight who had just suddenly been ranked by the WBC. Sorry, I don’t count that win for a title. And I don’t count Pacquiao’s win over Juan Manuel Marquez in 2008 to win the WBC super featherweight title. I think there should be another asterisk for that one because a lot of boxing fans had Marquez winning.

As for Pacquiao’s other titles, he fought a lot of little known guys for lighter weight titles and I’m not too impressed with any of those wins. Never heard of half of the guys and with the divisions being watered down with as many as 6 world champions, it’s not hard to win multiple titles nowadays. If you put your mind to it and get help with handicap catchweight fights, you can win a lot of titles. It certainly helps being as popular as Pacquiao is because he was able to get catchweight fights against guys that other less popular fighters wouldn’t have been able to get.

I think there will be another Pacquiao within our life and will be a lot better than him by far. Floyd Mayweather Jr. could have won even more titles than Pacquiao if his thing was collecting straps. Mayweather is more into fighting the best guys than just picking up worthless straps.