(Photo credit: Stephanie Trapp/Showtime) By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum doesn’t think Floyd Mayweather Jr has much of a chance in their fight on May 2nd. Arum sees it going really badly for the 38-year-old Mayweather with him getting beaten in a non-competitive fight similar to the way Golden Boy Oscar De La Hoya was beaten by a younger Pacquiao in 2008 by an 8th round stoppage.
Arum thinks Pacquiao can do the same, even though things are much different between where De La Hoya was at in 2008 and Mayweather in 2015.
The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight “will be a replay of the Oscar De La Hoya fight,” Arum said via Viva Sports boxingmirror.com. [Pacquiao will] “win by a convincing twelve round decision. In other words not even a doubt who wins the fight.”
I hope for Pacquiao and his trainer Freddie Roach’s sake that they’re not counting on Mayweather being shot, weight drained and rusty like De La Hoya was when he fought Pacquiao, because when Mayweather shows up in prime form, you don’t want to see them surprised.
Mayweather isn’t giving Pacquiao a ton of handicaps the way De La Hoya did, so things are going to be much different for this fight than the ancient Pacquiao-De La Hoya fight.
If I remember the Pacquiao-De La Hoya fight right, De La Hoya had to lose seven pounds to face Pacquiao at 147. De La Hoya hadn’t fought at that weight in the past 8 years since 2000, and he was no longer an active fighter at that late stage of his career. De La Hoya had fought three times in the last four years.
Pacquiao had everything stacked in his favor for the De La Hoya fight – age, weight, activity and speed. Why De La Hoya ever agreed to fight Pacquiao at 147 is anyone’s guess.
In hindsight, that was a stupid move by De La Hoya, because he could have dragged Pacquiao all the way up to 160 if he’d wanted to, and there would have been nothing that Pacquiao could have done about it other than agree to it. Pacquiao was nowhere close to De La Hoya at the time in the popularity department.
Pacquiao is so much slower now compared to how he was fighting back then. Besides being slower, Pacquiao is heavier and more flat-footed than he was back then. Pacquiao isn’t going to be facing a fighter so weight drained and rusty that he can’t even throw punches.
De La Hoya was too weak to throw punches during his 2008 fight with Pacquiao. Mayweather isn’t going to be weight-drained, because he would never agree to give Pacquiao a handicap like De La Hoya, Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito all did.
If Pacquiao can’t beat Mayweather in a fair fight without handicaps at 147, then that’s just the way it is. Pacquiao’s not going to get another weight handicap. So, I don’t think Arum knows what he’s talking about when he says that Pacquiao will beat Mayweather like he did De La Hoya, because Mayweather didn’t handicap himself the way De La Hoya did.
I don’t know why De La Hoya didn’t push Pacquiao to fight him in a rematch at 160, because I think the fight would have been a much different story if they had fought with De La Hoya not weight drained.
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