I’m as irate as the next boxing fan for the failure of a mega-fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao on March 13.  Had the fight taken place on that date, boxing history would have been made.  Pay-per-view records would have been shattered. Not to mention that rarely do boxing fans ever get to witness the top pound for pound fighters meeting in the squared ring.  Witnessing the buzz that surrounded the possible venues could easily have battled that of city bids on the Olympics.

But enough of wondering about “what ifs”.  The fight could still take place, just not on March 13.

The newly signed fight between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey does not garner the same spectacle that the originally proposed fight received.  It’s still a great fight, nonetheless.  I’m not hyped just cause Josh Clottey looks a lot like Brian, my neighbor who lived across the street from me growing up, but it makes sense:

1. If Pacquiao wins this fight, it will have been two serious fighters that Mayweather had dodged, with the first being Cotto.  Who’s PBF going to fight now?  Matthew Hatton?  Paulie Malignaggi?  I doubt there will be a contender PBF will take as competitive as Clottey.  Pipe dreams are the only locations where we’d see PBF take on someone like Paul Williams.

2. Clottey is a serious welterweight contender.  Many debate whether Cotto won the fight with JC.  I saw the fight as a JC victory.  JC should have done more in the later rounds, but he was clearly not beaten as bad as Cotto.  A victory over Clottey would surely demonstrate Manny’s position as a top welterweight.

3. It’s going to be an exciting fight.  Clottey engages.  He won’t present the great defense boring cautiousness that PBF is known.  JC is a counter puncher with a different type of defense.  His movements aren’t the swift and evasive type that PBF provides, instead, he has an exceptional blocking game.  Take a look at post fight pictures after Cotto fought Clottey and compare the two’s faces.  Manny can prove tons by winning JC.

4. None of us really know what took place in the negotiations with Manny and PBF, but who knows how much longer it would have taken.  We should be pleased that Manny is at least fighting during the first quarter of 2010.

5. He’s not Paulie Malignaggi or Yuri Foreman.  The “Jersey Shore” reject, Paulie M, would have made no sense being that he got technically knocked out by Ricky Hatton.  As for Yuri, do you remember his undercard fight before Pacquiao-Cotto? Exactly.  We all want to erase that and the other boring undercards from our memory of that card.

My only real problem with this match up is the threat it poses to Pacquiao.  As hyped as I am about an entertaining boxing match, there is a real danger that Manny could lose, which would gravely end the discourse of a Mayweather bout.

-Ninoy Brown

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.