By Cliff Rold

It’s almost here and the head scratching continues about exactly what is coming. 

In little more than a week, 29-year old WBC Lightweight titlist Manny Pacquiao (47-3-2, 35 KO) will step up 12 pounds from his latest home on the scale to face 35-year old former lineal Jr. Welterweight, Welterweight and Jr. Middleweight champion Oscar De La Hoya (39-5, 30 KO) at Welterweight.  They’re two of the biggest and most storied names in the modern fight game but skepticism about the matchmaking remains.  Something about this fight still just doesn’t feel right, feels cynical.

It starts with the size difference.  It’s real and attempts to downplay it should be taken with a grain of salt.  While some might cite that De La Hoya started his career at the weight Pacquiao has campaigned most of the last few years at, 130 lbs., there’s more to it.  De La Hoya has been at Welterweight or Jr. Middleweight since 1997 or nearly 12 of his 16 years as a professional.  That’s his real, peak fighting weight.  Pacquiao has been between 122 and 130 for the better part of 9 of his 13 paid years. 

On paper, this fight makes only slightly more sense than it would have made for Alexis Arguello or Salvador Sanchez to jump up and fight Tommy Hearns in the early eighties and only because of how an aging Oscar is currently perceived.   

Folks will watch anyways.  It’s a given when Oscar is on screen and a plus when he’s fighting the most exciting elite fighter of the decade, one currently regarded as the game’s best fighter period.  The Boxing world is in the throes of the hard sell period.  “Contact your local cable provider” and all that good stuff.  Some of it feels authentic; a lot of it feels forced.

It comes across in the latest HBO 24/7 show which, paired with the Roy Jones-Joe Calzaghe edition just weeks ago, could be re-titled “Dear God Floyd Mayweather, Please Come Back!”  Gimmicks and montages are no substitute for personality or drama.  These last two editions have been, well, boring, because they have little of either. 

Shows like 24/7, sustained fight hype in mass media generally, works best when the public can identify an antagonist and a protagonist.  The natural protagonist, the good guy, is Pacquiao and they’ve gotten his story fairly right.  He’s the hero of a poor nation.  Defeat for him devastates the hopes and dreams of millions who are portrayed as needing them.   

The bad guy should be Oscar, the big bully trying to secure a win over a much smaller but highly acclaimed man to avoid the truth about the prime behind him.  Unfortunately, Oscar doesn’t do bad guy so we get the same tired garbage about why he needed a new trainer for the 467th time, his Dad issues (how pre-Trinidad!) and some phony-feeling feud dealing with the corner men.

Yawn.
 
The schmaltz multiplies. 

Bringing in living legend Angelo Dundee to hang out at Camp Oscar, take some notes, and leave isn’t drama.  It’s contrivance, a chance to show clips of the great trainer with Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali in the hopes of creating false sentimentality in the purchaser. 

Seriously, when did warm fuzzies become gate draws? 

Fights are elemental; they beg the question of who can whoop whose ass.  This fight has that question, but the predicates for it are flawed.  Show of hands…anyone on Earth think Manny Pacquiao competes with the Oscar De La Hoya who warred with Ike Quartey and Shane Mosley in 1999 and 2000?  If that were the version of Oscar we were getting, than the admittedly intriguing risk Pacquiao is taking would be jaw dropping. 

That’s not exactly the risk he’s taking.

There are comparisons throughout the press right now to men like Henry Armstrong, Sam Langford and a natural comparison point for the journey Pacquiao has made up from Flyweight, Jimmy McLarnin (even if it’s a flawed comparison since McLarnin campaigned at Welterweight for over half of his career).  Pacquiao stacks up to those men in some strong ways, but in terms of this fight it’s more commercial hype than valid substance. 

Pacquiao is the only fighter in history to ever win the lineal Flyweight and Featherweight crowns.  This past March, he garnered popular recognition as the World Jr. Lightweight champion.  His body naturally matured from 112 in his teens to 130 as a man and still looked solid at 135.  However, there are some differences between him and, say, an Armstrong which should be food for skeptics of the big show on December 6.         

Even in his biggest wins at 130 lbs., Pacquiao was still fighting career Featherweights and Jr. Featherweights.  Great fighters all, men like Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez weren’t functionally bigger than Pacquiao.  He wasn’t facing the Jr. Lightweight class of the early 2000’s featuring young versions of Floyd Mayweather, Diego Corrales and Joel Casamayor. 

In other words, he wasn’t stepping up in weight as much as moving along with a crowd.  David Diaz, whom Pacquiao demolished in June for his Lightweight belt, was at best a mid-level top ten guy if the alphablets are shelved and, most importantly, not a power threat.  There is nowhere to point to in saying how Pacquiao does against a peak, elite Lightweight and yet he’s headed towards a guy who has campaigned at Jr. Middleweight since 2001. 

And that’s the selling point of course; the hard selling point.  The size difference for the current pound-for-pound king to topple and make his way towards the immortals mentioned before.

The difference here is that all of those men moved up against the very best, win and lose.  Langford fought a prime Jack Johnson (and Harry Wills, and Sam McVea and Joe Jeanette); Armstrong won the outright World titles from 126-147 lbs. and damn near pulled the trick at 160.  Heck, former Welterweight and Middleweight champion Mickey Walker fought the two best Heavyweights in the world at the time, Jack Sharkey and Max Schmeling in the early 1930s in a draw and loss. 

This fight doesn’t rate with those challenges.  Should the smaller man win, it is closer in significance to Hector Camacho knocking out Leonard than it is any of that fare. 

Pacquiao is stepping up for a non-title fight against an Oscar who barely makes the top five at Jr. Middleweight right now and who arguably hasn’t won a serious fight at the elite level of the game in six years.  2002.  That was when De La Hoya defeated Fernando Vargas.  He’s been in some competitive affairs since with outstanding fighters like Mosley in a rematch, like Bernard Hopkins, like Floyd Mayweather.

He didn’t win any of them, nor convincingly win a round past the eighth in any of them.  The best he’s mustered is a 2006 blast out of Ricardo Mayorga. 

In his last bout, at 154 lbs. with veteran Steve Forbes, Oscar looked like a fighter whose inactivity has far outweighed his ring time since being stopped by Hopkins in 2004.  He was hittable and slower than he’d ever been even as he dominated a fighter who didn’t belong anywhere above 140 lbs.  Now, he takes the biggest fight out there in which he can feel secure in knowing he should win.  If he cannot, it says more about what he isn’t anymore than what he is.    

It’s that element which will have many fans wondering, during a belt tightened holiday season, whether to drop some fifty bones-plus on this prizefight.  It’s a fight Pacquiao can perceptually only win if Oscar is far enough past it to lose to a guy he’s never been within approximately twenty pound of before.  It’s a fight that sells on a negative premise; “Tune in to see if Oscar is shot.”   

Rumblings of ticket sales below expectations (i.e. still on sale and at reportedly big discounts) and early ruminations about the state of the economy point to a Boxing public less enthused than anticipated.  It doesn’t mean this fight won’t still make a huge economic mark, but the tempering of expectations in the weeks leading to Vegas is interesting at the least.

It points to a fundamental problem evident in the recent Pay-Per-View bombs that were Calzaghe-Jones and Kelly Pavlik-Bernard Hopkins.  The names scream ‘Superfight’ but the paying jury has thus far ruled otherwise.  None of these fights have the organic quality of a Hagler-Hearns, Whitaker-Chavez or even De La Hoya-Mayweather.  They lack the sense of anticipation built over time and the feeling of two great fighters guaranteed to be at the top of their game.

Those older fights were about what the market wanted.  This triad of pay-per-views is about what some assume they can get the market to buy.  The assumption will be right on some level December 6, but it’s still a big difference.

No matter what happens next week, it will probably be fun while it lasts but it’s likely to end with the same question the hard sell works to overwhelm.  In a fight where the only points which are likely to be proven are ‘too small’ or ‘too old,’ what’s the point?

Loyal reader, the answer is in your wallet.  Little more than a week to go…

The Weekly Ledger

But wait, there’s more…

Cliff’s Notes…

Jorge Arce-Vic Darchinyan is on.  Will Fernando Montiel risk Nonito Donaire in the meantime or wait for the winner?  Tough question…Nice slam dunk by Kevin Iole over at Yahoo.  The veteran journalist printed a blog which revealed a letter of rejection from Bob Arum’s Top Rank for a proposed Antonio Margarito-Paul Williams rematch after Top Rank had claimed no offer was made.  Telling the truth today we can assume…Paul Williams has other business this weekend in his titular Jr. Middleweight debut.  It looked in his last two fights like he was finally waking up to the leverage he can generate in his shots.  If so, the must-see Williams will become even more so…Following Celestino Caballero’s victory over Steve Molitor last weekend at Jr. Featherweight, what’s with people saying divisional World champion Israel Vasquez still deserves a break after the Rafael Marquez series?  Isn’t a break what’s he’s been on for the last nine months and counting?  A true warrior still recovering from recent eye surgery, Vasquez certainly is entitled to a little more time to get to full speed, but when he does Caballero is his most deserving challenger at the moment…I do love the Juan Manuel Lopez-Sergio Medina fight underneath Pacquiao-De La Hoya.  It’s a potential show stealer.

Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com