By Keith Idec

As Manny Pacquiao begins the second stage of his training camp in the United States, the boxer will reportedly be more distracted than ever.

With an important senatorial election looming in the aftermath of his third fight against Timothy Bradley, Pacquiao is rumored to have had a troublesome training camp thus far in the Philippines. He’ll train for slightly more than three weeks at Freddie Roach’s Wild Card Boxing Club in West Hollywood, California, before leaving for Las Vegas, where he’ll battle Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs, 1 NC) on April 9 at MGM Grand (HBO Pay-Per-View).

That’s a little less time than Pacquiao typically trains at Wild Card for a fight, but Teddy Atlas doesn’t expect any of these supposed distractions to impact Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) on fight night. Bradley’s trainer has heard about Pacquiao’s pre-fight distractions throughout the Filipino superstar’s career, only to watch Pacquiao compete at an elite level once the bell rings.

“I wish I could say yes, because I’ll take any advantage I can get for my fighter,” Atlas told BoxingScene.com. “But I don’t think I can say yes. I don’t think it’ll impact him in any negative ways at all. I go by what there’s a precedent to go by. I go by history, by what’s tangible. And he’s had distractions and if you want to call it chaos sometimes, but definitely a lot of things swirling around him throughout most of his career.

“And whether it was politics, whether it was singing, whether it was some personal situations he was going through that everybody goes through, whether it was religious thoughts and growth so to speak, whether it was all the pulls on him because he’s an iconic figure in his country, where he gets all that attention you could never get here for one fighter … he has always dealt with that. It’s never impacted him.”

That innate ability, according to Atlas, is one of the few things the 37-year-old Pacquiao has in common with Floyd Mayweather Jr.

“I make the comparison to Floyd Mayweather,” Atlas said. “They said the same things about Floyd throughout this career. ‘You think this distraction’s gonna bother him, Teddy? No, because the last one didn’t. And the one before that didn’t. And the one before that didn’t.’ Floyd was a guy who always had distractions, who always had stuff going on in his life that might distract somebody else.

“But at the end of the day, it did not [distract] him from what he was doing. And it always showed that it didn’t. I feel like Pacquiao is the same kind of person in that way, where he’s able to handle all these things and still keep his eye on the prize and what he has to do in that ring.”

Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.