By Chris Williams: WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) expects to find his long lost power when he moves down to light welterweight in the near future. His fight next Saturday night against Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs) will be taking place at 144 pounds when they step inside the ring in Macau, China.
Depending on how well Pacquiao does in that fight, he will then move down to light welterweight in order to find his power and find additional opponents for him to fight. If Pacquiao stay at 147, he’ll be pretty much stuck fighting the likes of Tim Bradley, Mike Alvarado and Brandon Rios for the remainder of his day, because that’s pretty much all Top Rank has in that weight class. But if Pacquiao moves to 140, he can fight Terence Crawford, Jessie Vargas, Ruslan Provodnikov, Mikey Garcia and additional fights against Algieri.
Pacquiao believes that he can even make 135 if he wanted to, and he thinks he would have more power in that weight class as well. Never mind the fact that the lightweight division is pretty empty right now in terms of big names.
“The reason we are fighting this fight at 144 pounds is because I wanted to see how I performed at a lower weight. If I do well, I could easily fight at 140 for my next fight,” Pacquiao said via RingTV.com. “At 140 is the weight I walk around at when I’m not training for a fight. So that is no issue, and even 135 would be easy for me to make.”
I believe Pacquiao is kidding himself if he thinks he’s going to have more power at 135 or 140 than he did at 147 and 150. I don’t see that happening. Pacquiao will likely continue to come up empty in trying to knockout his opposition. The only difference is that he’ll have less interesting opponents to fight once he moves down to 140 and 135.
It’s not as if Pacquiao will be able to fight Al Haymon guys like Danny Garcia or Lucas Matthysse. Pacquiao can move down to 140, but I don’t see anything changing as far as his lack of knockouts. He can’t run from his advancing age. His age is going to follow him no matter what weight class Pacquiao moves to. The fact is he left his best years behind him 10,000 yesterdays’ ago, and moving down to 135 or 140 is only going to bring about the same results Pacquiao had at 147.
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