Manny Pacquiao arrived home to a hero's welcome and went right back to his duties as a Congressman in the Philippines. He still the nation's biggest sports star so the media pressed him on what's next in the ring.
Pacquiao has three options. Stay at 147 pounds, fight someone in the 140 range or take another step up to face middleweight champion Sergio Martinez.
Juan Manuel Marquez seems like the obvious choice. For the first time in six fights, Pacquiao would be the bigger fighter and the two have already engaged in two wars that went the distance. Fight fans would love to see Marquez (51-5, 37 KOs) get another crack ... or would they?
"If I was boxing fan, I don't think I would watch a Marquez and Pacquiao fight," said Pacquiao.
But they wanted to see Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito? "Pac-Man" sells these fights on his own. The fight against the vastly over-matched Margarito did 1.1 million pay-per-view buys.
Fan wouldn't want to see Pacquiao against the guy who fought him to a draw in 2004 and lost a tight decision (112-115, 115-112, 113-114) in 2008? According to Pacquiao, a third fight would lose money.
"If it's Juan Manuel Marquez, that would be easy. Even if you wake me up in the middle of the night and asked me to sign a contract, that's easy. But the problem is - you can't just promote a match when the promoter would lose money. Boxing is also a business," said Pacquiao.
Pacquiao said the choice might Shane Mosley, because he has a bigger fan base. He does?
Didn't Top Rank Promotions just build half the promotion this month around a Mexican fighter in Dallas? Marquez and Margarito aren't even in the same league when it comes to respect amongst fight fans and passion in the Mexican community.
This is ridiculous. Yahoo! Sports' lead boxing analyst Kevin Iole nailed it last week. He pointed out that there's another cold war unfolding between Top Rank and Marquez's promoter, Golden Boy Promotions. Top Rank isn't very keen on co-promoting major fights with Oscar De La Hoya's company. Mosley has a stake in Golden Boy but doesn't need the promotion to be 50-50 on a fight with Pacquiao.
It'll be interesting to see how HBO sells a Pacquiao-Mosley fight. It was just 10 weeks ago, that the HBO crew trashed Mosley for 10-of-12 rounds during a listless performance against Sergio Mora.
As far as moving up to face Martinez, Bob Arum said the idea is preposterous.
"Because even if he beat Martinez, which I believe that he would, and even if he turns it into a fairly easy fight, because he's fighting someone who is a much bigger, stronger guy, he could get hurt like he did in there against Antonio Margarito," Arum said.
"At this point, I don’t want to put Manny in with another big guy, a guy even bigger than Margarito," he said in a report by Boxing Futures.com.
"That fight really affected him physically. He took a lot more beating in that fight than he did in his others. He got hurt. He’s banged up a little bit. It’s tough giving away that kind of weight and size."
Mark it down. Marquez will crush Michael Katisidis this weekend in Las Vegas. He'll have dominating wins over the Aussie and Juan Diaz on his ledger in 2010, and not even get a whiff of Pacquiao in 2011.
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