Around the time of the Hopkins - Pavlik fight, i was leaning towards Pavlik to squeeze out a decision with a superior work rate. When the weigh-in came round i looked at the photos and thought to myself, Pavlik looks about as physically impressive as myself (yes i am aware boxing isn't a bodybuilding contest, but sometimes there are useful links). I thought Bhop looked simply a much better athletic specimen, stronger, better conditioned etc etc. I changed my pick to Hopkins after this gut feeling shifting my opinion, it proved accurate. At the Oscar - Pac weigh-in, i thought to myself, hey, Pac doesn't actually look much smaller than Oscar. His arms, chest and overall upper body are physically more impressive and he looks better conditioned. I kept this thought to myself, as i thought it was somewhat blasphemous to boxing knowledge, i was wrong in keeping it to myself. After the Hatton - Pac weigh-in i had the same thought. Pac was thicker in the chest and bigger in the arms. I thought to myself, Pac looks physically more impressive than Ricky. I decided to throw 25 bucks on Pac by stoppage (i put money on Oscar in the previous bout and thought i should pay heed to my natural instinct upon seeing the weigh-in this time). Yes 25 bucks is nothing, but i am young and poor. :yep Anyone else ever change their pick on the basis of a weigh-in photo and it paid off (not necessarily financially, but in terms of making an accurate prediction)? How much can you learn from weigh-in photos?
Good post. Weigh-in pics are useful if you know what to look out for; trouble is, most of the time we don't, and even worse, we tend to look out for the things that are supposed to give us confidence that our original pick was right, instead of looking really analytically at what we're seeing. What surprised me about the fight was how Manny was sometimes pushing Ricky back! If that wasn't a sign of strength, than, what was? Another thing that I couldn't picture before the fight was to what extent Ricky was going to be allowed to hold and hit. Well, he tried to do it very little, and even made a shot of not doing it by raising his arms out wide, when Manny was holding onto him and pushing him back. The ref, I thought would not let Ricky use rough-house tactics. I was right about that. Another thing I couldn't picture before the fight was what Manny was going to do to get out of Ricky's clinches, whilst protecting his sides and head from hooks at the same time. I was a bit surprised to see him deal with it so well - he raised his hands very quickly to the side of his head, then quickly lowered them and the moment Ricky was thinking of reacting to what he was seeing, he was pulling himself out of Ricky's grasp. He also threw himself over Ricky when his back was against the ropes, to give the impression that Ricky was smothering him. That was very smart because it gave Ricky no working space and the ref instinctively broke them up, to free them up. Pacman's gameplan was A+. Little of that, though, could be guessed from the weigh-in pics, in this case, though. Granted, however, Pacman did look strong (upper-body)...I noticed that too....that was important to spot, I think. But...take the Froch v. Pascal weigh-in...Pascal looked like a million dollars...really strong and well conditioned...who would have thought that he'd gas after 6-7 rounds...?
Every weigh-in seems to create its own storyline. I was big on Manny before the weigh-in yesterday, but I liked two things I saw, and maybe a third, although I took it with a big grain of salt. As you said, he didn't look markedly smaller, he was standing at eye level with Hatton and had almost the same upper body frame. More importantly, Hatton looked tense as all hell, and that carried over into the fight big time. I honestly think that as great as Manny was, the stage last night had Hatton oddly spooked. Maybe he couldn't get out of his head what went down the last time he fought the P4P#1. Third, the GBP braintrust's predictions were humorous. Shane obviously didn't think Hatton would win, but didn't want to offend the British fans. Bernard was drumming for crowd support, and Oscar's anti-Pacquiao bias has been comical for weeks.
Hatton has looked like that in almost every weigh in. and Pac has looked like that in almost every weigh in too
