Pacquiao-Cotto best of November schedule that includes Ward-Kessler

Manny Pacquiao vs. Miguel Cotto on Nov. 14 has to be considered the most attractive fight on the docket this month, and for most boxing fans, the most important. But get a load of how many good main events are scheduled Nov. 21.

Yes, it’s that time of the month when your Welterweight Champion here designates the Best and Worst fights of the new month and the past month and is more willing that normal to speculate about match-ups of uncertain likelihood.

The fight of the month for Bay Area fans has to be Andre Ward’s big step up Nov. 21 against Mikkel Kessler at Oakland’s Oracle Arena in the Super Six tournament on Showtime. I’ll be there, and so will about 10,000 other folks, but there are lots of interesting fights elsewhere that night that you probably won’t be able to see even on TV.

There’s a WBC cruiserweight title match in Germany between 40-year-old Giacobbe Fragomeni and Zsolt Erdei (and no, I’m not qualified to handicap the match; neither are you).

There’s unbeaten Filipino bantamweight teenager Marvin Sonsona’s fight against journeyman Alejandro Hernandez in Rama, Ontario, Canada, and Rodel Mayol’s WBC light-flyweight bout in Chiapas, Mexico, against journeyman Edgar Sosa.

And Marcus Maidana, the guy who beat Victor Ortiz last June in Los Angeles, fights journeyman William Gonzalez in Argentina.

When you’re paying $55 for pay-per-view, as you will for Pacquiao-Cotto, you should get an undercard that varied, but you seldom do. Still, Pacquiao-Cotto should be a hellacious main event.

BEST AND WORST: If Pacquiao and Cotto go 12 rounds, as I’m beginning to expect, they’ll be hard-put to throw as many punches as Yonnhy Perez and Joseph Agbeko fired last Saturday in Las Vegas as Agbeko lost his IBF bantamweight title. If Pacquiao and Cotto were to land that many (we don’t know how many, because Showtime doesn’t have “PunchStat”), their fight wouldn’t go 12 after all.

I decline to name a worst fight of November. There are a lot of good ones, like the Chad Dawson-Glen Johnson rematch Nov. 7 on HBO, the Nov. 7 David Haye-Nicolai Valuev heavyweight bout (which could become a bad fight), and the Lucian Bute-Librado Andrade super-middleweight rematch on Nov. 28, with an intriguing sub main matching Ali Funeka and Joan Guzman for the IBF lightweight title.

Besides, there were at least two bouts in October that had to be worse than Andrew Golota’s latest loss, to Tomasz Adamek back in Poland, one of those assuredly being former heavyweight champion Oliver McCall’s latest comeback victory, over 6-foot-8 Lance Whitaker.

But it’s hard to beat this one for worst: Hector Camacho Jr., who is already 31, eked out a split decision victory Oct. 30 in El Paso over Yory Boy Campas, who supposedly is only 38 and was coming off a 2008 draw with Camacho’s 47-year-old dad. The younger Camacho suffered three point deductions, for low blows in the third round, roughhousing in the fourth and holding in the 10th, which enabled Campas to win 95-92 on one scorecard. Now that’s an ugly fight.

Source:
          Examiner