By Brent Matteo Alderson
Marco Antonio Barrera’s brain trust ended up being right. Despite the fact that most insiders felt that Barrera was making a mistake granting the young and talented Juarez a rematch instead of taking a fight against somebody seemingly less threatening, Marco’s management team and Golden Boy Promotions took the calculated risk and now the tentatively scheduled super fight with Manny Pacquiao is bigger than ever.
Barrera could have fought a softy, but he wanted to erase all doubt surrounding his razor thin controversial victory over Rocky Juarez in May and in doing so he showed again why he is one of the three or four greatest fighters in Mexican history. If Barrera would have waited around for the Pacquiao fight, the match still would have been seen as a big name big money match up, but the general public would have doubted Barrera and fans would have thought, “If Barrera can’t decisively beat Rocky Juarez then how is he going to beat the Pac-Man?”
Before the first Juarez match, most experts didn’t give Barrera a chance against Manny in the rematch and scoffed at his reasons for losing and rationalized that Pacquiao beat Barrera because he hits harder and has faster hands. This past weekend the world saw that there are two Marco Antonio Barreras and that the one who wasn’t focused for Juarez the first time is a vastly different fighter than the one who gave Juarez a boxing lesson this past weekend.
Just prior to facing Pacquiao in November of 2003, Marco suffered a number of disruptions and distractions that sent his training camp into disarray. First he had to leave his training camp in Big Bear because of a major forest fire. Then in the weeks leading up to the fight it was revealed that he had a steel plate instilled in his head in 97 and he had to go to Texas to undergo numerous medical examinations which further disrupted his training. After seeing how the distractions revolving around the cancellation of his bout with Chavez negatively affected him in the first Juarez fight, it’s easy to fathom how the situation surrounding his fight with Pacquiao detrimentally affected his performance.
Last October, I interviewed Barrera for Ring Magazine over the course of a four-hour dinner and he talked about the fight with Manny, “I don’t want to discredit his win over me, but there was a lot of stuff going on, a lot of distractions. My camp knew going in that I wasn’t 100 percent. He hit me more than I should have been hit because I didn’t train accordingly. Again, I don’t want to take credit away from Pacquiao. He beat me that night because he was the better fighter that night. If we fight each other in the near future he’s going to see a different fighter, a different Marco Antonio Barrera.”
Now with his dominating victory over Juarez, Barrera has emphatically showed he is one of the best fighters in the world and made it clear that he still has the skills to seriously challenge if not beat Pacquiao in a proposed rematch. In a way Golden Boy Promotion’s course of action was similar to how Butch Lewis steered Michael Spinks towards the mega-fight with Mike Tyson. Originally Spinks had been scheduled to face Iron Mike in HBO’s heavyweight tournament. Instead of fighting Tyson in the tournament, Spinks abdicated the IBF belt he had won from Larry Holmes, pulled out of the tournament, and signed to fight Gerry Cooney in Atlantic City in a bout that was titled as the War at the Shore.
With hindsight you might think that he was bolting the tournament just to make another hefty pay day before he had to face Iron Mike, but that wasn’t the perception at the time. Michael was a small heavyweight and only had three bouts as a heavyweight and most insiders questioned his power since he had barely squeaked by Larry Holmes and only weighed about 205 pounds. Even though Gerry had been inactive, he was a huge heavyweight with a big punch and a lot of people thought that Cooney had a chance to blitz Spinks out of there in a fashion similar to how Tyson ended up doing it in 88. The general consensus among insiders was that Spinks would pepper and pity-pat Cooney and win a unanimous decision.
Instead Spinks looked like a beast and knocked Cooney out with one of the most vicious offensive onslaughts in heavyweight history. He landed an array of about 30 consecutive hooks and uppercuts and stopped Gerry in the fifth. Nobody thought that Cooney was going to be the one that was blitzkrieged and Spink’s performance validated his position as the world’s best heavyweight next to Mike Tyson and fanned the flames for their match because before hand few people thought that Spinks had a chance against Tyson, but afterward experts began to jump out of the wood work picking Spinks to beat him. Even Butch Lewis realized that he had made the right move and proclaimed, “I’m a genius,” because he knew that not only did he garner Spinks an extra seven figure payday for the fight with Cooney, but that he had substantially increased Michael’s purse in a Tyson fight.
That’s exactly what Golden Boy Promotions has done. Barrera looked to be in tip top form the other night and implemented the same strategy that he used to retire Prince Naseem. Now Barrera’s emphatic victory has fueled the fire for a return match with Pacquiao and boxing fans, especially ones of Mexican heritage, are beating the drums for the revenge match. Now all Pacquiao has to do is get by Morales in November.
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