Saturday Morning Fighting: You Canna Teck My Pounches.

I'm skipping today's HBO pay-per-view show headlined by a welterweight fight between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey. I just can't find a way to justify spending fifty bucks on a fight card loaded with fights that even I don't care about seeing; the only engaging aspect to any of the half-dozen undercard bouts is the notion that textbook-example journeyman Alfonso Gomez may be the last fight of yet another old, blood & guts welterweight in Jose Luis Castillo. Gomez was Arturo Gatti's last fight; if this keeps up, Gomez should adopt Pariah as his ring nickname, as he appears before a fighter just before that guy's professional world is destroyed.



As for the main event: I actually really like this fight, even if it has some unpleasant backstory. When negotiations for a megafight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. fell through, Pacquiao took a fight with the next-highest ranked fighter in his division. That's how these things should work, right? With Mayweather out, Sugar Shane Mosley and Andre Berto then scheduled to fight each other in a few weeks and Cotto already having lost to Pac, that leaves Clottey as the next available fighter.

I've already complained about how HBO is passively burying the fight, which is a shame considering some of the more ridiculous aspects of the fight that have steadily trickled out in the press coverage, like that Clottey is training with Lenny De Jesus, a Bronx "security specialist" [read: locksmith] who has 1.] never really trained a boxer for a fight before and 2.] is supposed to have the inside track on Pacquiao's weaknesses because he worked a handful of fights as a cut man in Pac's corner almost a decade ago ... when Pacquiao was a malnourished one-armed brawler fresh off the plane from General Santos City. I would have loved a 24/7 series just to see De Jesus' flop sweat as he continued to claim that he doesn't need to watch much tape on Pac's recent fights because he's basically the same fighter that De Jesus worked with back in 2001. [To be fair, Clottey's regular trainer is not an idiot; however, he couldn't get a visa to travel to the U.S. from Ghana.]

As for the fight itself, I see Pacman continuously moving while attacking from crazy angles and defending at the same time, Clottey initially blocking most of those punches with his high shell defense [counterpunching where Pac was until/unless he can time Pac's combinations, which he probably can't] until Pacquiao's secondary body shots start wearing him down. Clottey will still get land a fair number of excellent uppercuts and maybe a game-shifting headbutt or two early on, but at the level Pacquiao is at, Clottey's more of a Schrodinger's Cat than a live dog in this fight. It should be mighty exciting, just not so exciting that I can't wait to see it next week on the HBO package I already pay too much money for. [Or the following week on the Cayo-Maidana/Funeka-Guzman card, which would help it totally screw over Showtime and boxing fans around the world who want to see the Dirrell-Abraham fight in real time.] All that said, nobody tell me how Pac-Clottey turns out, OK?