Mayweather, Pacquiao and the Future of Boxing

As we amble along through the excesses and excrescences of yet another big Vegas fight week, the importance of Mayweather/Marquez begins to press upon us with the weight of a sharp ache in our sides, one that is almost small enough to be ignored, almost but not quite.

To agree with Dana White for a moment (not something I'm inclined to do very often), Mayweather vs. Marquez is not a fight that we ever asked for as boxing fans, not at all. I'd rather see Floyd fight Andre Berto. I'd rather see him fight Mosley. Hell, I think I'd rather see a De La Hoya rematch than to be subjected to this semi-farce between two admittedly great fighters of drastically different proportions.

But, of course, the one fight that I'd most like to see, that the entire world would most like to see for that matter, is Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, Money vs. Manny, the pound-for-pound showdown of the millennium.

Pacquiao himself came out today and demonstrated his grasp on the bleeding obvious by telling ABS-CBN news in the Philippines that if Mayweather beats Marquez on Saturday and he beats Cotto in November, then the next logical fight would be him against Mayweather.

Really, Manny? What a novel concept.

To my mind, when looking at this fall's big-fight semi-finals from the most objective standpoint that I can muster, Pacquiao is the more vulnerable of the two titans seemingly on a clash-course. It's very, very difficult to imagine a scenario in which Floyd loses on Saturday, which is a big part of the reason that the fight has struggled so much to capture the imagination of the fans. But Pacquiao? It's very, very easy to imagine him losing to Cotto.

Lost in this assessment, however, is the fighting heart of Juan Manuel Marquez, not an organ to be taken lightly. We anticipate an autumn of anticipation in the boxing world, one in which we look forward to the Pacquiao/Cotto fight knowing that it quite possibly could be fight of the year (fight of the decade?) type material, and knowing that the stakes involved are stratospheric.

But not a small amount of that anticipation is expected to come from the fact that Mayweather will have held serve, kept up his end of the bargain towards the making of the Super Duper Fight for which the world truly awaits.

Should that not be the case, should Marquez somehow manage the impossible, well… it won't be the end of the world. For the boxing cult, certainly, the prospect of Pacquiao/Marquez III will be nearly as tasty a morsel to savor, and if Floyd ends up having to step in the ring with Cotto, or Mosley, or even Berto, we'll all be tuning in to put it mildly.

But as someone who always looks for boxing to occupy the largest portion of the sporting spotlight as it possibly can, I admit that I'll be severely let down if that's the way this all shakes out. To my mind, the sweet science has been a rising tide ever since it was lifted by the tsunami of attention garnered by De La Hoya/Mayweather in 2007, and now we find ourselves facing a fight that potentially could outdraw and out-spectacle even that Titanic at the box office. The fight game depends on these leviathan moments to provide the very oxygen on which it survives in the mass media, and a Pacquiao vs. Mayweather extravaganza could have us all breathing hot and heavy until about 2012.

And thus, I confess, as Mayweather/Marquez grows nearer by the day, a fight that I find utterly uninteresting at best and borderline cynical at worst, I nevertheless find myself getting nervous. Come Saturday night, the marquee future of the sport will hinge on the likelihood that Floyd Mayweather is pretty much the same fighter that he was about two years ago at this time, and that Juan Manuel Marquez, a supremely skilled technician with the heart of a lion (a Mexican lion, for Pete's sake!) will find himself outmatched and out of his weight class to an extent to which his intelliigence and renowned powers of improvisation simply will not be enough to carry the day.

It's what should happen, and it's what I think will happen. I mean, come on - it's what we ALL think will happen. But people, I ask you... how often have we been collectively wrong in the past?

Source: http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/The_Rumble/entry/view/34673/mayweather,_pacquiao_and_the_future_of_boxing