WORLD Boxing Council founding secretary-general Rudy Salud yesterday defended the choice of featherweight champion In Jin Chi as the opponent of Filipino ring idol Manny Pacquiao for a scheduled April 28 fight in Macau.
Salud said Pacquiao’s former manager Shelly Finkel was sour-graping when he criticized the choice of the Korean.
The lawyer said nobody, including Finkel, complained that Oscar Larios was a mismatch when the former super bantamweight champion moved up two weight divisions to fight Pacquiao in Manila and was paid $450,000.
Salud said now that Pacquiao is going to be matched against the WBC featherweight champion, who some years ago gave Erik “El Terrible” Morales a helluva fight, Finkel claimed it’s a shame.
He noted that before Pacquiao-Morales III, everybody, including Finkel, warned that it would be a hard fight because that was the perception.
But Salud said he studied the tapes of Morales’ fights as well as Pacquiao’s latest fights and predicted on television that if Pacquiao trained hard, “it would be a breeze. And it was.”
“It’s the same thing with [Marco Antonio] Barrera. They are all saying this is the fight Pacquiao should take because he is the best fight out there, but I tell you, if Manny trains hard, it will be another mismatch just like Morales.”
Salud stressed that it was not because the caliber of his opponents was bad, but Pacquiao is “a couple of cuts above all fighters in the universe in the super featherweight division. If Pacquiao prepares properly, he will make mincemeat of Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez or Joan Guzman, just like he will against In Jin Chi.”
