By Cliff Rold
The pre-fight build was clear…if a 35-year old Oscar De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KO) was shot, if he couldn’t pull the trigger, then 29-year old current Lightweight and former Flyweight champion Manny Pacquiao (48-3-2, 36 KO) had a shot.
It turned out to be one of the great understatements of all time.
While clearly this was not the Oscar of years past, the man who warred with Ike Quartey and Shane Mosley, it took a leap of faith to believe Pacquiao would literally run him out of the ring. He did just that and the predictors who foresaw it as such, and they existed, deserve their props.
This scribe was not one of them. It took a flawless performance from Pacquiao to make a believer. More than that, it took a flawless performance to turn De La Hoya-Pacquiao into “Countdown to Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather.”
And you know that it’s coming.
No one has really taken the Mayweather retirement serious so far, and one has to think “Pretty Boy” realizes his biggest win was just made to look pedestrian. Boxing heads have wanted another Leonard-Duran for years, forcing the mantle on fights unworthy. Tonight, a modern incarnation was born organically.
It can’t come soon enough.
Pacquiao was an all-time great before Saturday night on the basis of his accomplishments at Flyweight, Featherweight and Jr. Lightweight as World Champion, the first man ever to post those marks in a single career. A win over World Champion Ricky Hatton at Jr. Welterweight would give him a claim to being the first man in history to capture four lineal World championships and a sixth overall major divisional title.
A fight with Mayweather would give him to chance to push past the brink to outright comparisons with names of a different breed.
Names like Armstrong…
Duran…
Rob…we’ll wait just a few more rounds, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun to speculate.
Is it to say comparisons to the likes of Armstrong are premature? Maybe. Maybe not. Like Armstrong, Pacquiao’s big statement in the Welterweight class came against a man out of time. De La Hoya, like Barney Ross, was on his last legs but Armstrong holds the advantage in having won the World title on the night he beat Ross. However, Armstrong was never the World Flyweight champion, beginning his career instead as a Featherweight, and the list of men who held the crown at 112 lbs. and also went on to beat a former World Welterweight champion might only be one Manny Pacquiao long. Those who react to the De La Drubbing by moving Pacquiao into their top-ten all time can feel free and Pacquiao will have chances to crystallize whether or not those gut reactions are correct. There’s a damn good chance they are.
Before a full look at the main event, a quick note on what turned out to be a terrible undercard. Boxing is not like other sports. On paper, fights can look at least mildly competitive and turn out otherwise. It’s one of the elements that makes Boxing a great sport but can also disappoint. While the Daniel Jacobs fight was obviously an easy showcase going in, both the Juan Manuel Lopez-Sergio Medina and Victor Ortiz-Jeffrey Resto bouts, while clearly favoring Lopez and Ortiz, looked like decent matches on paper. That they turned out to be less than solid on paper is no reason to feel cheated. Lopez and Ortiz, in one and two rounds respectively, simply did their jobs against opponents who appeared unready to do theirs. However…
Feel plenty cheated that Boxing has not figured out how to show swing bouts in favor of talking heads. Having the luxury of viewing the card at home rather than Las Vegas, I saw a houseful of people lose complete interest in the show for far too long, expressing open aggravation at a fight going on, live, in the ring, for actual multiple rounds, which they couldn’t see. UFC doesn’t make mistakes like this; they prop up filler time with full bouts. People who drop $54.95 on a show don’t want to listen to chatter about the main event they’ve paid for. They want to watch fights.
Those who had access to Yahoo or ESPN360 saw a pair of competitive pre-TV bouts. One was a decent upset of Jesus Rojas by Jose Beranza at Jr. Featherweight and the other undefeated Welterweight Danny Garcia wining a decision over Jose Lugo. Most viewers don’t know who those fighters are; they didn’t get a chance to learn. Any would likely have preferred finding out to watching endless analysis.
Enough already.
De La Hoya has historically headed terrible undercards and this showing ended up worse, yes worse, than the old school Mia St. John and Butterbean days. As Saturday Night Live’s Keenan Thompson might put it, “Fix It!”
PERIOD!
Let’s go to the report card.
Speed - Pre-Fight Grades: Pacquiao A; De La Hoya B+/Post-Fight: A+/B-
Power - Pre-Fight Grades: De La Hoya B+; Pacquiao B (only because the fight is at Welter)/Post-Fight: ?; B+
Defense - Pre-Fight Grades: De La Hoya B+; Pacquiao B/Post-Fight: C+; A
Intangibles - Pre-Fight Grades: Pacquiao A; De La Hoya B+/Post-Fight: A+/B
Really, how much in-depth analysis is needed? Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach said repeatedly, prior to the bout, that were it a younger version of De La Hoya, he wouldn’t have wanted the fight, that he wanted the fight for his charge because he didn’t think this version of De La Hoya could pull the trigger anymore. Roach was so right he could pass as Nostradamus.
From bell to bell on the road to an eighth round corner retirement, Pacquiao beat Oscar to the punch and made him look almost as hopeless as Muhammad Ali once did against Larry Holmes. He wore an expression which said he was thinking about throwing just in time to take the second punch of a combination. Pacquiao’s punches clearly didn’t have quite the same affect at Welterweight they do in lower classes. De La Hoya’s never hitting the floor while being hit from every which way attests to as much. Smaller men go to sleep when Pacquiao hits them as clean, as often. The blows still hurt enough for his corner to have to save him, speaking volumes about Pacquiao as perhaps the best fighter since Sam Langford in terms of bringing power up the scale.
Pacquiao’s defense was perfect. He never let his southpaw lead right foot get caught inside Oscar’s lead left, keeping him well out of the power zone of the De la Hoya left hook while keeping his right hand high in defense constantly. The vaunted power shot never landed for Oscar except for a brief moment when Oscar held and fired in the fifth to little affect. In terms of intangibles…Pacquiao embraced the moment and De La Hoya embraced an old quote from Alexis Arguello. “What you do when you enter, they do to you when you go out.” Memories of De La Hoya versus Julio Cesar Chavez come to mind.
Now the future beckons and it belongs to Pacquiao. After years of fighters with corporate backing who either failed in their biggest moments or held the sport hostage while fighting subpar opponents for years at a time, Boxing has a pound-for-pound king who not only regularly takes the big fights…he wins them in style.
Can he do it against the best of his contemporaries within reach? There can be arguments for and against, but it’s a question anyone who thinks not-too-hard will want to KNOW the answer to. They’ll pay to find out. The speculation about a Mayweather return is inevitable. Let the countdown to Pacquiao-Mayweather begin.
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
