What's disappointing about Saturday night's pay-per-view Golden Boy/HBO card led off by Shane Mosley-Sergio Mora is less its content -- although there is some valid reason to be disappointed by that, if only a little -- than the broken vows it represents. The reason is because nobody's under any obligation to spend $50 on it if they don't wanna, the same way anyone can ignore PPV cards by Top Rank that are just as lackluster, and often more lackluster, in content, but don't face the same kind of negativity this one has. But it most certainly isn't the stacked undercard Golden Boy claimed it would consistently deliver after a stacked undercard did good business earlier this summer. And it most certainly isn't the "mega-event" kind of pay-per-view card HBO had pledged to limit its devotion to, beginning last year.
As it is, it offers two developmental bouts for two young Mexican stars-to-be in various stages of their to-be's, which we'll discuss a bit later in the week, and beyond that, it offers what add up as two potentially competitive bouts. The first is Mosley-Mora, a junior middleweight bout that nobody really asked for due to Mora's crowd-displeasing style but that figures as a difficult fight for both men. It is at least modestly significant as a result of the presence of Mosley, still in my pound-for-pound top-10 and that of some others, a future Hall of Famer coming off the most one-sided loss of his career, to Floyd Mayweather. The second is between two of Ring magazine's top-10 featherweights, #7 Daniel Ponce De Leon and #10 Antonio Escalante,�a potential crowd-pleasing brawl to offset the Mora effect.
Because of the significance and potential competitiveness of those two bouts on the highest-profile card of the week, and because of the postponement of a far more desirable bout originally scheduled for Showtime the same night between featherweights Juan Manuel Lopez and Rafael Marquez, Mosley-Mora and De Leon-Escalane get the full preview and prediction treatment, including its applicability for TQBR Prediction Game 4.0. It's not meant to be any kind of elevation of the card, which overall is not as bad as some say but not terrific, either. HBO and Golden Boy have evidently reasoned that if they put a card together in Los Angeles on Mexican Independence Day weekend featuring any number of fighters of Mexican heritage -- that, plus Golden Boy's obligations to deliver fights to Mexican-American Mora being the only reason I can figure he's in the main event at all -- it'll sell enough to make their money back and then some. I'll figure out whether I want to pay for it later in the week, depending on how eager I am for what meager boxing pleasures it offers; I ain't saying YOU should buy it, either way.
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