By Dave Lahr: After watching the third episode of the HBO Mayweather-Marquez 24/7 episode 3, I think Jan Manuel Marquez (50-4-1, 37 KO’s) is going to beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. (39-0, 25 KO’s) this Saturday night at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The reason I’m choosing Marquez is simple. Marquez looks to be the much stronger fighter and better trained of the two fighters as far as I can see during the 24/7 episodes. Mayweather, 32, doesn’t look as strong, which I’m not surprised because he’s never been a real puncher, even when he was fighting as a featherweight and lightweight division.
Mayweather has never been a big puncher mainly because he doesn’t like to follow through with his punches and put power into them for fear that he’ll countered. Instead, Mayweather prefers to load up with short punches which are powerful but not the type where he can stop somebody with one big shot along.
With Marquez, he’s not afraid to put everything he has in his punches because he trusts his chin to be able to take the shot and feels confident that he can counter whatever gets thrown at him. At the same time, Marquez is able to put a lot of power on his short punches and is able to throw short uppercuts with a ton of power.
Mayweather seems proud of his ability to adapt to situations during fights. That may be the case, but Mayweather has done that against much lesser fighters than Marquez, so you got to throw that all out the window for Saturday night’s clash against the 36-year-old Marquez. Mayweather points out that 39 fighters have attempted to overwhelm him with punches and all of them have failed at this.
However, what Mayweather fails to mention is that in many of those fights his opponents haven’t been all that talented, especially recently. Mayweather has gone through a long dry spell of talented opposition in the past four years and filled it with a lot of fluff opponents like Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Carlos Baldomir, Zab Judah, Sharmba Mitchell, DeMarcus Corley, Arturo Gatti, Henry Bruseles, Phillip N’dou and Victoriano Sosa.
Those are Mayweather’s opponents in the past six years, and frankly, I don’t see any of them as measuring up to Marquez’s ability. I hope Mayweather has had some better sparring partners than those guys because he’s going to be in for a world of hurt on Saturday against Marquez. I already heard that light welterweight Lamont Peterson was beating up on Mayweather last week.
This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, because Peterson is a top fighter and not a washed up fighter or one of limited talent like most of Mayweather’s opponents in the past six years. That’s his own fault, by the way. Mayweather could have been fighting guys like Kostya Tszyu, Antonio Margarito, Shane Mosley and Miguel Cotto, but instead he opted for Judah, Baldomir, De La Hoya and Hatton.
Do you see a trend here? Mayweather has taken the safer fights on a consistent basis, which is probably why his opponents have failed in beating him with their pressure oriented strategy. It takes talent first of all to have success with a given strategy.
You can give the perfect strategy to a fighter but if they don’t have the talent to follow it though, it’s useless. That’s why I find it laughable that Mayweather is patting himself on the back for having turned back 39 fighters and saying that they need to come up with a new strategy to beat him.
Yeah, Mayweather, you’ll never lose if you always pick lesser fighters than you. I guess is why he selected Marquez, an opponent two divisions smaller than him in order to hedge his bets. However, I think Mayweather picked the wrong fighter in this case because Marquez is a top guy, much better than the sorry lot that Mayweather has faced in the past six years and still in his prime.
Marquez has not only put on nine pounds of muscle to get to 144, but he’s done it in a way that’s made him a stronger puncher. I think Mayweather is in trouble on September 19th.
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