Pacquiao vs Margarito | Pacquiao Fight Updates

That is not exactly stop the presses news, a fight promoter telling a whopper.

It’s about as newsworthy as birds flying or fish swimming. It’s them doing what they do best.

“He (Cotto) and Pacman is a dead even fight,” Arum said in the wake of Miguel Cotto’s split decision victory.

Good thing the bossman of Top Rank doesn’t have a wooden nose which grows with each lie or he would have a schnozz which would make Pinocchio’s wooden one look microscopic.

So, as his star client Megamanny, wife Jinkee and their small entourage got ready to board a long Northwest Airlines flight out of New York just after noontime Sunday (returning to Manila via Detroit and then Nagoya), is must be said that the diminished Cotto is exactly what Arum wanted for a Nov. 17 Pacquiao bout.

Cotto displayed diminished capacity at Madison Square Garden Saturday night as he barely escaped the one time “Temple of Boxing” with a split decision victory over “B” level opponent Joshua Clottey.

By making a somewhat furious run from round six onward, Clottey nearly rained on the enthusiasm of the heavily majority Puerto Rican crowd (17,734) in the old arena. The Boricuas have their big annual parade down Fifth Avenue today and a Cotto loss would have been a real mood killer.
As I mentioned previously, this was a Pacman audition for the WBO welterweight champion and he passed it…just barely.

Which is fine with Arum and Team Pacquiao because they weren’t shopping for the most formidable foe for Manny’s final fight of 2009. In other words, neither the more dangerous Floyd Mayweather or Sugar Shane Mosley were ever in the running.

Am I allowed to use the word running, as adjective or noun, when discussing PBF, lol?

No matter what anyone says, Cotto is not the same, ultra confident aggressor he was before he got pounded into submission by Antonio Margarito.

Against Clottey, Cotto looked like a Mayrunner as he continually pranced about the ring.

The sight of Clottey steadily stalking Cotto and of Cotto going sidewards and backwards was informative I am sure.

Cotto, in his diminished state, is made to order for a Pacman thrashing. Cotto may be as stuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey come November in Vegas but it’s the Pinoy Idol who will make the feathers fly.

Pacquiao is still an elevator headed for the top floor, improving noticeably with each outing, while Cotto’s ride is going down.

I certainly can’t fault the thinking of Arum and Coach Freddie Roach, after having Pacquiao face De La Hoya and then Hatton, as to having Manny in with a marketable Latino foe who is not really scary.

Cotto is simply too slow to contend with the blizzard of punches Pacman will rain upon him.

On the business side, it would be better if he was Mexican but he is not. Cotto, as the crowd for Clottey proved, is still a draw. He won’t drag thousands of Boricuas to Vegas the way Hatton brought the Mancunians there but, more importantly, mixing the Cotto and Pacquiao aggressive styles makes for a fan friendly matchup.

So some will knock Cotto-Pacquiao as a pre-election “breather” for Manny.

Fighters are allowed such bouts. In the NBA, you don’t have to play the Lakers or the Cavaliers every night you know.

For Top Rank, using the depleted Cotto makes great sense as he has threatened to leave the company when his contract expires at the end of December.Getting Cotto hammered by Packy before the term expires leaves Arum in the nice position of being able to opt to throw money to keep Cotto or to let him leave.

While Pacquiao stock keeps rising for the foreseeable future, Cotto’s stock is sliding in the other direction.

Hiring Cotto for November also puts “Money May” exactly where his ex-promoter Arum wants him, in the Big Fight waiting room where his demands of money parity with Pacquiao may lessen as time marches on.

Cotto gets hammered, Mayweather’s motor idles and Pacquiao can go do what he didn’t do in Gensan against Dazzling Darlene, win the election.

It says here that Mayweather will fight the new Congressman from Sarrangani in 2010.

We’ve got to let the Pinoy politics and the Mayweather politics play out.


http://www.examiner.com/