Six months after their enthralling 12 round battle, Erik Morales and Manny Pacquiao will once again share a squared circle Saturday night. Only, they will enter the ring at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles about an hour apart and will be facing Zahir Raheem and Hector Velazquez, respectively, rather than each other.
March’s Morales w pts 12 Pacquiao bout would have been a fight of the year any almost any annum which didn’t feature an epic of the intensity of Corrales v Castillo. And the plan is for the two superstars to have their eagerly awaited return bout on HBO pay-per-view on December 10, although any slip-ups here will rip that blueprint to shreds.
As ‘marking time’ fights go, this a respectable double-header even though both El Terrible and the Pac-Man are naturally heavy favourites to win. Of the two co-main events Morales looks to have the harder night’s work ahead of him in the form of once-beaten American Raheem, 26-1 (16).
The lone loss on the Tula, Oklahoma, born stylists record came last July when he got the sour side of a controversial decision to hot-property Rocky Juarez. But the 2000 Olympic silver medallist is the only recognisable name on Raheem’s record. A career featherweight, the American may also not have the physical power to deal with Morales, who started off as a super-bantamweight world champion but has fought his last five bouts at super-featherweight.
This bout is made at lightweight.
There are some are fearful of an upset, feeling that Raheem fights in a stylish, off/on tempo and quick footed manner which could frustrate Morales. And after nearly a decade as a pro, the 28-year-old Philadelphia native finally has a chance to gatecrash the big money scene and will most certainly be ‘up’ for this fight.
But promoter Bob Arum knows these lower weight fighters as well as anyone in the sport and he actually released Raheem, a 1996 Olympian, from a professional contract and he obviously wouldn’t have done that if he believed Raheem had a major upside.
Yesterday Bob thought Raheem was limited, but today he thinks he’s a world-beater?
Nah.
Morales in eight.
And Pacquiao may also have concluded his business by the two-thirds mark despite the fact that opponent Hector Velazquez, 42-10-2 (31), hasn’t been knocked out or stopped by punches since 1997, since he was halted by Valetin Lopez in what was Velazquez’s third consecutive KO loss.
Now free of promoter Murad Muhammad, who Don King once dubbed ‘the world’s most stupid man’, the enormously popular Pacquiao has so much to fight for and will hopefully be back to his attacking best now the business side of his career is now in safe hands.
The 30-year-old Mexican has mixed in decent class, at least sometimes, in his 12 year career and holds a win over faded former WBC 126lbs champ Guty Espadas but he usually loses whenever he gets in with the big names. Rocky Juarez, Robbie Peden, Israel Vazquez and Kevin Kelley all defeated him.
“Manny has fought Marco Antonio Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez and Erik Morales in his last (four) fights,” promoter Gary Shaw told SecondsOut. “He’s been in tough fight after tough fight, he’s been taking on the best fighters of the era and I don’t believe that a fighter needs to be a life-and-death fight every time. In this case Manny’s coming off a real war with Morales and this is a tune-up fight for the next war with Morales.”
But one gets the feeling that Pacquiao (and his new team of promoter Gary Shaw and adviser Shelly Finkel) is keener on the return than Morales is. The Tijuana native has openly spoken about adding a lightweight world to his collection and thus becoming a four-division ‘world’ champion. Morales has even challenged the winner of next month’s Corrales v Castillo rematch.
Morales beat Pacquiao by scores of 115-113 thrice but despite this uniformity, there are different interpretations of the bout. Morales’s supporters (and probably, secretly, his promoter Bob Arum, too) believe Morales exposed the Pac-Man a little bit; showing him up as a pure power-bomber who is slightly too small of frame to cut it in the 130lbs division.
Of course, Team Pacquiao feels differently: “Manny lost the first fight by one round and that was with all kinds of turmoil behind (the scenes),” Shaw said. “He was also forced to use the Winning (brand) gloves he wasn’t at all comfortable with rather than the Reyes he always fights with and on top of that he got badly cut early on.
“Things didn’t go his way that night but Manny still came within a round of getting at least a draw. He also had Morales almost out of there at least twice. Watch the tape – Manny had Morales all over the place.
“I guarantee you that Manny will shock the world in the rematch and knock Erik Morales out. I guarantee that.”
Another significant bout on the Top Rank card, albeit one which HBO didn’t have time for, will see newly crowned WBC junior flyweight champion Eric Ortiz defend against heir apparent Brian Viloria, the undefeated ‘Hawaiian Punch’ who impressed at the Sydney Olympics five years ago.
Ortiz, 24-4-1, is a good campaigner but look for Viloria, currently 17-0, to join Sydney team-mates Jeff Lacy and Jermain Taylor as a world champion here, probably on points.
