By Cliff Rold

The easy answer is to take the damn tests.

By the time this column runs, given the pace of negotiations to date for the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather megafight, perhaps it will already be the answer reached.  One can assume it might take another extra day or two.

We’re not talking about a normal fight after all.  We’re talking about a fight which could end up generating in the neighborhood of $200 million dollars, if not more.  More starts moving into range of one quarter…

…of one billion…

…dollars for a single fight.  That’s Wall Street bailout money.

For those who have been under a rock for the last 48 hours or so, the issue at hand is not if but how performance enhancing drug (PEDs) tests will be administered for the fight.  Mayweather wants Olympic style, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), testing; Pacquiao wants something else.

There have been suspicions and allegations before about whether or not Pacquiao takes PEDs.  He’s never failed a test.  He’s never remotely been caught cheating.  But, over the last couple days, none of that has mattered.

We live in a sports era of guilt before innocence.  It’s an earned paradigm.  Marion Jones and Shane Mosley never failed tests for PEDs.   

They both did them.  Hell, Jones did them and passed rigorous Olympic-style tests for years. 

In this case, while there has been much backstage innuendo and discussion, Mayweather’s father probably did as much as anyone to draw publicity to the Pacquiao questions earlier this year.  He made the allegation outright.  He didn’t have any evidence or anything.

It didn’t matter.

As Joseph McCarthy proved once upon a time, asking someone to prove what they are not is just as good as saying one knows what they are even if it is not true. 

In this may be a clue as to why PED testing has become a source of controversy.  Ultimately, there are three possibilities which bear further examination.

The first possibility is easy cynicism: Pacquiao has or does use PEDs and doesn’t want to get popped.

Option one doesn’t really need further evaluation.  Trying to restrict, or structure, PED testing in that scenario makes sense.  The scarlet “S” (for steroids…not Superwapakman or whatever) is a heavy burden and ruins reputations.  Trying to avoid it makes human sense, even if the experience of Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire in Baseball indicates it won’t come out well.

Possibility number two is also cynical but in a fun, boxing-as-carny-act way: Pacquiao and Mayweather are loving all this free press and the PED stuff is just great for headlines.

More than one analyst of the fight game has noted that the proposed date of March 13th for the fight provides a short window to get such a massive promotion done.  In the old days, big fights could get done easier because the press covered the sport like it mattered.  A major fight could count on literally weeks, if not months, of coverage.  Promoters had to promote, but nothing promotes like serious press.

Lo and behold, there was Pacquiao-Mayweather leading off Sports Center today.  It’s a major sports story everywhere one looks.  This new element is the sort of sports talk show fuel simply signing the fight wouldn’t have in the Christmas season.  For the next week, lots of folks have lots of free time.  More will spend more of that time talking boxing than they have in years.

PED testing isn’t a new issue as regards this fight.  The Olympic testing was a publicly known request weeks ago.  The Pacquiao camps reaction this week, a reaction that could come across as this being something new, was so hyperbolic as to evoke a laugh.  Promoter Bob Arum’s quote about Mayweather being “a coward” could be read as “I wonder if we could squeeze another five bucks a head on Pay Per View.”

In this business angle one can also find the head games at work.  No matter how their images have been cultivated, both Mayweather and Pacquiao are used to getting their way and imposing their wills.  These are guys whose friends are also often employees, who are used to being treated as stars, to being catered to. 

I mean, seriously, what’s Manny gonna’ do?  Fight Yuri Foreman?  Paulie Malignaggi? 

Really?

It’s hard to imagine even Buboy would want to watch that.

There is also the chance the fight is ‘dying’ so as to be resuscitated later in the year with a larger promotional window and even more attention than it’s already getting.

Finally, there is possibility number three.  Number three isn’t the easy answer.  It’s the answer which isn’t cynical, which asks observers not to give in to the impulse to assume the worst.

Possibility number three: Pacquiao has never failed a test because Pacquiao is clean on the PED issue.

If this possibility is the point of truth, than resistance to Team Mayweather’s testing requirements makes a lot of sense.  The idea that he has some superstition about blood being drawn too close to the fight sounds silly, but athletic superstitions often are.  As Kevin Costner’s immortal Crash Davis noted in the baseball classic Bull Durham, “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, or because you wear women's underwear, then you are!”  Athletic mindsets are a tricky thing. 

Beyond superstition, one can cite Pacquiao’s moves up the scale (from Jr. Featherweight to Welterweight inside the last ten years) as reasons for doubt about a natural rise.

The official scales are misleading in this time.

Pacquiao is roughly the same size, as a small Welterweight, as men like Barney Ross, Jimmy McLarnin, and Jose Napoles were in their day.  Like Pacquiao, McLarnin started as a teenager near Flyweight yet scored big knockouts on all points of the scale.  While Pacquiao was as low as Jr. Lightweight in 2008, and is competing successfully at Welterweight now, those were weigh-in weights rather than in-ring weights. 

For the first fight with Juan Manuel Marquez in 2004 at Featherweight, Pacquiao hit the scales at 125 pounds.  He entered the ring, according to the unofficial HBO scales, at 137 (or Jr. Welterweight).  By 2006, for the third fight with Erik Morales, Pacquiao had moved up a weight division and weighed 129 officially and 144 (a Welterweight) unofficially.  Other notable spreads for Pacquiao include:

• 129 and 145 for the Juan Manuel Marquez rematch in March 2008;
• 142 and 148 ½ for the Oscar De La Hoya fight in December 2008;
• 138 and 148 for the Ricky Hatton fight in May 2009.

In other words, fighting in a division now where he doesn’t have to dramatically dry out, he winds up weighing about the same on the scale as he has in the ring for the better part of four years and his in-ring weights are fairly consistent. 

The day before weigh-in era skews much of what is known about fighter size.  Based on the amount of weight Pacquiao was able to put on at lower weights after weighing in, and the fact that he doesn’t grow nearly as much past his official weight higher on the scale, one could argue Pacquiao has been a small classical Welterweight for longer than he’s been in the division (and of course the larger Welterweights are really Middleweights in another time but that’s a different subject).

Perhaps his real prime growth, from 2004 to now, is really Lightweight to Welterweight in most other eras in history.    

There is more of course than the scale.  Pacquiao is obviously a proud man.  If he’s clean, and there is no evidence to the contrary, then being accused of cheating is a strike at his pride, at his character as a man.

Those things don’t come with a price tag, even at one quarter of one billion dollars.

Make no mistake.  The request for Olympic testing is an accusation.  Statements to the contrary exist in the words of Team Mayweather, but standard testing for fights is to pee in a cup before and after the fight.  The testing being requested allows for the possibility of consistent monitoring throughout training camp, the chance for more than ten tests (blood and urine combined) where one or two is the norm. 

Pacquiao didn’t ask for this. 

It’s a microscope pointed at him despite passing every test asked of him, in and out of the ring, since turning professional in 1995.

If Pacquiao knows he has never cheated, the quickest answer becomes “Go to hell.”

The easy answer, with potentially the richest fight in boxing history in the balance, remains take the damn tests anyways.
  
The Weekly Ledger

But wait, there’s more…

Cliff’s Notes…

Happy Holidays to all of BoxingScene’s faithful readers. 

Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com