By Manuel Perez: With only a week to go before super featherweight Manny Pacquiao (46-3-2, 35 KOs) faces off with WBC lightweight champion David Diaz (34-1-1, 17 KOs) for his lightweight crown at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada, it’s difficult for me to get too excited about this fight for a couple of reason. The most important reason is simple, Pacquiao is going into this fight having recently defeated Juan Manuel Marquez by a 12-round split decision in March, a fight that Pacquiao appeared to lose in every which way you can lose the fight except for the final scoring.
For most people, other than his legions of fans from his native country, Pacquiao appeared to lose the fight. Okay, it’s fine that Pacquiao is choosing to ignore the vast public opinion in the boxing world and choosing to move on and fight Diaz rather than giving Marquez an immediate rematch, but it doesn’t mean that I like it or accept it. For me, it’s like a person taking math class, say Algebra, for example, and they then fail the class with a D grade. Then, instead of returning to school to take the class, they then move on to pre-Calculus, even though they never proved that they could handle Algebra, much less Calculus.