FanHouse Fernando Vargas

Floyd Mayweather was nowhere to be seen in the MGM Grand Hotel during the lead-up to this past Saturday night's Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto welterweight megafight. Nor could the undefeated, five-time champion and Las Vegas resident be found when Pacquiao made history by lifting from Cotto the WBO's 147-pound title belt.

But in the days since Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, stood in the ring before a packed MGM Grand Garden Arena and called out his name as the man he wanted to be Pacquiao's next opponent, Mayweather has gotten the message loud and clear.

Mayweather's name was even chanted by the crowd of more than 16,200, but he says that he just hasn't heard it from Pacquiao's own mouth.

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LAS VEGAS -- Miguel Cotto is a star in Puerto Rico, just not the major attraction that Manny Pacquiao is in his native Philippines.

And among the contributing reasons is that while Cotto's nation has a long list of fighting predecessors against whom to compare him, Pacquiao's essentially has none. [See note at bottom.]

"The Puerto Ricans have a whole collection of stars and they're not wrapped up in one guy like the Filipinos are in Manny," said promoter Bob Arum, listing former Puerto Rican greats such as Felix Trinidad, Wilfredo Gomez and Wilfred Benitez, among others.

"To Filipino fans, Manny's just absolutely incredible. Manny comes from a poor, impoverished country where he is the icon of hope and he represents their country on the world stage," said Arum.

"Puerto Rican fans want Cotto to win, but it's much more rational," said Arum. "Manny's situation is a lot different from being simply the best fighter in Puerto Rico."

Southpaw former world champions, Zab Judah, and Joel Casamayor will return to the ring on Friday night at The Palms Casino in Las Vegas.

Judah, a 32-year-old welterweight (147 pounds), will be ending a nearly 12-month layoff. The 38-year-old Casamayor will be ending a nearly 14-month ring absence when he enters the ring as a light weight (135).

Judah (37-6, 25 knockouts) will face 31-year-old Adailton De Jesus (23-4, 18 KOs) of Brazil, who has won four of his last five fights.

Once in a while, a sport located further down the food chain from the NHL will mistakenly smell blood in the water and attempt to knock hockey down a few links. Remember when indoor lacrosse was on the rise? Or when MLS was going to surpass the NHL, before David Beckham logged more minutes on reality television than he did with the LA Galaxy?

One sport I didn't expect to have hockey in its cross-hairs was professional boxing, which has been as marginalized as a former mainstream sport can become; hell, even horse racing still has the Triple Crown to attract annual attention from the casual fans. Boxing also has something that professional hockey does not, which is serious challengers to its popularity from within its own genre: UFC and MMA, both of which have captured large chunks of younger demographics, as well as valuable airtime on non-pay-per-view television networks -- unlike boxing.

In many ways, boxing and hockey face many of the same stigmas, marketing obstacles in the face of shifting cultural tastes and numb-nuts in the ESPN-ized mainstream media who think "boxing is dead" or "hockey is dead." I wish boxing fans and hockey fans could just get along, like Ilya Kovalchuk and Evander Holyfield in the photo above. Alas, one boxing writer feels that hockey is "the proverbial falling tree in a vacant forest," and that the sweet science is poised to surpass it in popularity -- if it hasn't already.