Manny Pacquiao betting on the speed of lightness

Manny Pacquiao realized a few weeks ago his attempt to make the 150-pound catchweight limit for his Saturday night junior-middleweight title fight against Antonio Margarito would be detrimental to his brilliant speed.

On Friday, the champion boxer who enjoys gambling publicly revealed the boldness of his belief as if he was announcing, “All in!” at the poker table.

Pacquiao weighed in at a surprisingly low 144.6 pounds, and there’s a good chance Magarito, who weighed in at 150 pounds, will step into the Cowboys Stadium ring at 160.

“I’m not worried,” Pacquiao said, walking off the stage at Cowboys Stadium. “That’s what we did for training — train hard. My weight came down from what it was to make me faster.

“For the last week and a half, [trainer] Freddie Roach let me do what I wanted to do, get to where I’m as fast as I can be.”

Roach stood behind Pacquiao (51-3-2, 38 KOs) and nodded as he heard the Filipino star’s explanation, saying it was “100%” accurate.

Pacquiao’s manager, Michael Koncz, said the fighter expected to weigh in the 147-148 range but got caught up Friday in “the excitement of the fight” and didn’t stick to his routine of four or five meals a day.

Alex Ariza, Pacquiao’s conditioning coach, extended his hand in a nervous shaking motion when asked if he approved of the weigh-in number.

“It doesn’t really matter to me because Margarito looks shot,” Ariza said. “You get a little Christmas tree-like shape in small of your back when you’ve lost every bit of fat you can. He has that. I think he’s lost some muscle.”

Margarito hustled off stage, after posing for some photos with Pacquiao, and shuffled down a flight of stairs to a stadium suite and peeled a banana, dipping it in a jar of peanut butter.

He scoffed at the Pacquiao camp’s suggestion that he looked dehydrated.

“It’s very good. I’m very strong,” Margarito (38-6, 27 KOs) said. “They can say what they want.”

Margarito, a former world welterweight champion and a 5-to-1 underdog in Saturday’s fight, expressed no surprise at Pacquiao’s weight. “He’s going to be no problem for me to push around. I push bigger guys than me around,” Margarito said.

“It’s a big advantage,” Margarito’s manager Sergio Diaz said of the weight disparity. “Advantages don’t matter. We have to win the fight.”

The bout marks Margarito’s return to fighting in the U.S. following a 21-month banishment for nearly taking plaster-loaded hand wraps into a January 2009 fight versus Shane Mosley at Staples Center.

The California State Athletic Commission revoked Margarito’s license and declined this summer to reinstate it. But Texas licensing chief William Kuntz licensed the Tijuana fighter, and more than 50,000 fans are expected at the stadium Saturday.

“We can’t rule on innuendo and speculation,” Kuntz said, referring to the uncertainty about whether Margarito knew his trainer had intentionally loaded his gloves. “There was nothing we could see that would prohibit us from giving him a license.”

The weigh-in crowd weighed in, deriding Margarito with chants of “cheater.”

Pacquiao’s camp will send a representative to Margarito’s locker room Saturday night to supervise the entire hand-wrapping process.

The question now is if Margarito’s more loaded body can affect the outcome.

lance.pugmire@latimes.com

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