Manuel Perez's take on Manny's victory over weight drained Cotto

By Manuel Perez: First of all, I’m not quitting. I don’t care if Miguel Cotto lost, Manny Pacquiao looked like crap to me. And while Pacquiao won Cotto’s World Boxing Organization welterweight title, I personally don’t consider Pacquiao to be the WBO champion because the fight was held at an energy draining 145 instead of the full welterweight limit of 147. The win is tainted as far as I’m concerned. I think Juan Manuel Marquez would have beaten Pacquiao the way he fought on Saturday night and so would have Shane Mosley, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Paul Williams.


It’ interesting how Cotto was selected for Pacquiao instead of Mosley, Marquez and Williams. I wonder why that is? Could it be that Cotton was chosen because he had problems in his last fight and was beaten nearly senseless by Antonio Margarito last year? I think Cotto is a great fighter, but it looks like the combination of having to strip off weight to make the 145 pound catch weight and his beating by Margarito took too much out of him, making him vulnerable against the Filipino.

I don’t give Pacquiao credit for this win, because he picked an opponent that was going through big problems in two out of his last three fights and then made it necessary for him to lose weight to come in at a 145 catch weight. When I saw the emaciated looking Cotto at the weigh-in, I knew he was going to have problems because he looked like a human skeleton. Cotto was all bones and didn’t look the least bit healthy.
I thought maybe he might have enough energy to fight hard for a round or three, but after that he looked too weak to put up much of a fight. That’s why I hate catch weights. It’s easy for the fighter coming up in weight, but pure hell for the fighter having to come down in weight to meet the limit. Okay, so Cotto looked not well for this fight because of the catch weight limit, and I think that was the major cause for his loss.
So what we have here is a fighter that was took weak to fight well and who just never seemed to get into the fight because of his lethargic look. Cotto looked like he needed to be resting on a couch rather than fighting in championship bout. He still fought pretty well, barring the flash knock down in the 3rd and the other knock down in the 4th.
Cotto wasn’t hurt by either punch and was merely off balance when he got hit. You notice how Pacquiao didn’t go after him? Pacquiao knew better. If he had gone after Cotto, Cotto would have caught him with something big and probably taken him out.
Maybe Cotto got beat, but he held up well in the first half of the fight. In the second part, Cotto just looked tired and didn’t seem to have anything left to answer Pacquiao. It was still far from being a one-sided fight, because Cotto was still landing well even into the 12th round. I don’t know why the referee stopped the fight. Cotto was fighting fine and would have made it out of the round if the referee hadn’t jumped in between them after Pacquiao landed a hard left hand in the 12th. They would have had to kill me. I wouldn’t have stopped fighting for anything.
Okay, so people are starting to think that Pacquiao is some great hot shot fighter now that he beat De La Hoya and Cotto, both in catch weight fights. Well, I’m not impressed at all with Pacquiao and like I said, I’m not impressed with his sloppy performance against Cotto. Pacquiao used his face to stop punches all night long and didn’t look good at all in my book. Pacquiao is lucky he wasn’t in there with Marquez, Mayweather, Williams or Mosley last Saturday night because that would have been curtains for him.
Everyone is talking about Pacquiao fighting Mayweather next, so I guess that’s the fight Pacquiao will be taking next. But if anyone thinks that Pacquiao can honestly beat Mayweather, they must be deceiving himself. Pacquiao will be destroyed badly in that fight and it won’t be even slightly close. It takes talent to beat Mayweather