What is shaping up to be the most exciting and explosive weight categories in international boxing nowadays are the feather-weight, super-featherweight/junior lightweight up to the middleweight division where you have the likes of Oscar de la Hoya and undisputed middleweight champ Bernard Hopkins mixing it up in the next few weeks.
Among the featherweights and super featherweights, the key personalities are Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Manny Pacquiao. If things still stand the way they were some days ago, as reported by Dan Rafael of USA Today, there are several exciting possibilities between the first and last week of November: Morales-Barrera, Part III; Morales-Pacquiao and Barrera-Pacquiao, Part II.
Morales and Barrera have met twice with both winning one apiece. Morales unified the junior-lightweight titles against Carlos Hernandez last July. Barrera, for his part, sent aging Paulie Ayala into retirement with a 10th round knockout.
The boxers, HBO (Home Box Office), promoter Richard Shaefer of de la Hoya?s Golden Boy Productions, to which Barrera belongs, all want the fight. The snag, however, is that Barrera wants a 50-50 split of the purse while the Morales camp has gone down from 60-40 to 57-43, according to Rafael.
Bob Arum, who handles Morales, says, according to Rafael, that if a deal between Morales and Barrera doesn?t get done, Morales would move to November 6 and fight Pacquiao who knocked out Barrera last November and fought unified featherweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez last May to a controversial draw. USA Today says that a less likely possibility is for Morales to face former champion Joel Casamayor since HBO feels that a Morales-Pacquiao fight will be bigger than Morales-Casamayor.
Barrera, for his part, wants to meet Pacquiao again should the Morales deal fall through. Morales won a narrow points decision in their 2003 fight. Barrera exacted his revenge when he won an equally controversial unanimous decision in 2002.
As for Pacquiao, he just wants to fight but would prefer to face Morales than Barrera. He could also go for a rematch with Marquez who has publicly said that he wants to fight Pacquiao again. I think this is all talk. I don?t think that Marquez really wants to meet Pacquiao. Would you like to fight someone who decked you twice and almost took your two titles away?
