Pacquiao-Vargas Far From First Choice, But Still Should Entertain

By Keith Idec

Ideally, Manny Pacquiao wouldn’t be fighting Jessie Vargas on Saturday night.

With Floyd Mayweather Jr. retired, at least for now, Freddie Roach would instead be spending these final few days preparing Pacquiao for Terence Crawford. Or Adrien Broner. Or Danny Garcia.

Any of the realistic possibilities presented to Pacquiao prior to picking Vargas would’ve better served boxing fans seeking seemingly better, more marketable fights for Pacquiao as the aging senator nears the end of his legendary boxing career.

Boxing being what it is, unfortunately, those attractive alternatives to Vargas failed to materialize for various reasons.

Promoter Bob Arum and apparently Roach want to keep Pacquiao away from Crawford (29-0, 20 KOs), the highly skilled Omaha, Nebraska, native who would at the very least present a complicated problem for the Filipino southpaw. Cincinnati’s Broner (32-2, 24 KOs) and Philadelphia’s Garcia (32-0, 18 KOs), meanwhile, made it clear before securing other fights that they would want more money than they’ve been led to believe they’d be paid for facing Pacquiao, whose fights must be televised via pay-per-view at this stage of his career because the boxer/politican commands too much money to fight live on HBO or Showtime.

That left us with Arum matching Pacquiao against yet another fellow Top Rank fighter not named Crawford in a bout the 37-year-old Pacquiao (58-6-2, 38 KOs) is expected to win rather convincingly. Las Vegas and Internet sports books list Vargas (27-1, 10 KOs) as more than a 4-1 underdog, despite that he is the defending WBO welterweight champion in their 12-round, pay-per-view main event at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center (9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT; $64.95-$69.95 in HD).

That doesn’t mean, though, that Pacquiao-Vargas won’t be an entertaining fight.

Their defensive flaws, combined with their offensive aggression, almost assure us a fight worth watching. That doesn’t mean anyone should be OK with paying $65 of $70 to watch it.

No, it just means that for a fight essentially no one outside of Top Rank’s Las Vegas offices wanted made, it’ll probably provide some moments when you’ll at least temporarily stop thinking of how you wish you were watching Pacquiao fight someone else.

Vargas is overly offensive at times. Sometimes he recklessly fights like a puncher, when we have plenty of evidence to prove he’d be better served by boxing.

But that’s what will help make this encounter entertaining.

Vargas won’t take nearly enough steps backward or sideways, even though that’s what he should do against obviously the bigger puncher between them, despite Pacquiao’s size disadvantage. That should lead to Pacquiao connecting with plenty of straight left hands and right hooks that’ll test Vargas’ chin, a reliable asset for the first 28 fights of his eight-year pro career.

Pacquiao, though an understandable favorite, has his own defensive vulnerabilities that might make the fight more interesting than some expect. Vargas has drilled Timothy Bradley and Sadam Ali with fight-changing, straight right hands in each of his last two bouts – a controversial loss to Bradley (33-2-1, 13 KOs, 1 NC) after referee Pat Russell strangely stopped their fight eight seconds early in June 2015 and a ninth-round stoppage of Ali (23-1, 13 KOs) on March 5 in Washington, D.C.

Rival Juan Manuel Marquez knocked Pacquiao unconscious with a right hand in the sixth round nearly four years ago in Las Vegas, thus those exchanges clearly bear watching.

“[Vargas] would be a superstar, there’s no question about that, if he were to beat Manny Pacquiao,” Arum said during a recent conference call. “You know, he has a hell of a shot to do that. This fight, I look at both guys, and how they’ve trained for the fight, and what kind of fight it’s gonna be and how explosive it’ll be. And, you know, I don’t know who’s gonna win. But Jessie has a hell of a shot to win this fight.”

That’s what Arum is supposed to say when he’s selling a pay-per-view fight.

We won’t know until Saturday night whether that emerges as anything resembling the truth. But Dewey Cooper, Vargas’ trainer, swears Vargas has developed into a more powerful puncher during their short time together than his knockout ratio (36 percent) would indicate. That improvement makes him much more than a live underdog, according to Cooper.

“Don’t forget who the champion in this fight is,” Cooper said on the same conference call. “Don’t forget who the challenger in this fight is. And that’s exactly what we’re viewing this guy as. We’re viewing him as our opponent, our challenger, and we’re gonna conquer him on November 5th. I’m totally confident in Jessie. This is just not promotion talk. This is just not theatrical hype I’m giving you guys. I’m giving you actual facts. We expect and we know and we will show the whole world November 5th how great of a fighter Jessie Vargas is. We’re looking forward to that night.”

Top Rank will produce and distribute this pay-per-view card on its own, without its usual assistance from HBO. Arum still thinks it’ll out-sell Pacquiao-Bradley III, which drew right around 400,000 buys, because Top Rank has aggressively marketed the event through such powerful social media platforms as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

“I know we’re gonna do great numbers just because of the magnitude of the fight,” Vargas said. “It’s two fighters that are known to attack. They’re known to give the fans great performances, great fights, an absolute war. And that’s what they’re gonna get November that. It’s a great matchup.”

The word “great” gets thrown around entirely too often in sports, but you can’t fault the 27-year-old Vargas for his confidence. The Las Vegas native fully expects to change his life by beating a superstar who was involved in the most lucrative event in boxing history – an infamous loss to Mayweather that generated 4.6 million buys and over $600 million in overall revenue 18 months ago.

Whatever happens in the ring Saturday night, frustrated fight fans deserve better than a Pacquiao-Vargas pay-per-view fight toward the end of what indisputably has been a horrendous year for the sport. That still doesn’t mean they won’t deliver some moments of entertainment that’ll temporarily make viewers forget that they’d much rather have watched Pacquiao fight another opponent.

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.