Las Vegas--Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather both comfortably made the weight in front of 10,000 raucous paying fans at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for their feverishly anticipated Saturday showdown.
A beaming Pacquiao made his way to the stage first, to chants of "Manny, Manny" by adoring supporters. World Boxing Organization champion Pacquiao, 57-5-2 with 38 knockouts, weighed in at 145 pounds (65.77 kg).
Then it was the unbeaten Mayweather's turn to stride to the stage, looking all-business as he gazed about at the crowd.
World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council champ Mayweather, 47-0 with 26 knockouts, tipped the scales slightly heavier at 146 pounds -- one pound under the welterweight limit -- for their career-defining world title unification bout.
Also at stake in Las Vegas, as ring announcer Michael Buffer weightily put it in introducing Pacquiao, is the unofficial title of pound-for-pound king.
For an event billed as an epic, the fighters were again somewhat subdued, even amid the adulation of thousands who had -- unusually for boxing -- paid as much as $100 or more just to see the men weigh in.
"My thing is to focus on what we've got to do tomorrow," Mayweather told ESPN. "I've dedicated myself to the sport of boxing for more than 20 years, and I'm ready."
By law, fight weigh-ins in Nevada are open to the public for free. But as a means to corral the crowd, tickets were sold for $10 apiece that was earmarked for charity.
As with the scarce tickets for Saturday's fight, plenty of weigh-in tickets found their way onto the secondary sales market, some changing hands for hundreds of dollars.
Touts could be heard soliciting tickets as the crowds milled around waiting to get through security checkpoints.
Ticket re-sale site StubHub, which reported weigh-in tickets selling for an average of just over $100, said it would donate its profits from weigh-in ticket sales to charity.
More than five years after a projected bout between the two fell through, Pacquiao even thanked Mayweather on stage for helping make it happen.
"All the fans deserve this fight," he said.
AFP
