Why Manny Pacquiao Will Defeat Floyd Mayweather JR.

Why Manny Pacquiao Will Defeat Floyd Mayweather JR. By Mike “Rubber Warrior” Plunkett-August 18, 2009 Part 1 I recently enjoyed a long deserved vacation at a cottage resort in north eastern Ontario where the Trent River and Rice Lake converge. It’s a place where I spent the lion’s share of the weekends and summers of my childhood up through and into my early teens. It’s a place steeped in personal history and having the chance to bring my loved ones up to enjoy that scenic beauty and peacefulness, as well as to have some fun, really brought matters full circle for me in a very tangible way. I’d get up early each morning and bask in the sunlight sitting comfortably on the dock with a steaming cup of coffee, just taking it all in and focusing on nothing in particular. I’d left the stress and worries of my profession behind. Boxing and my duties here at RSR were on hold. It was about having a week of fun, sun, relaxation and good times. Strangely enough, something that had been occurring to me for several months now kept creeping into my thoughts during those quiet early morning moments. I initially ignored it but by the week’s end I had for the most part finally put it all together, or rather, I allowed myself to acknowledge the feeling I’d had for months, after allowing my thoughts to coalesce. I was no longer actively posting or digesting the thinking of others or the generally accepted consensus. I was using my past experience with this sport and applying it to my opinions and personal convictions. And thus, here we are. Much has been written over the past year or so about Floyd Mayweather JR. and his sudden, almost inexplicable retirement. For the most part everybody never really bought into it. Personally I felt he was playing games or at the very least, indulging in sheer ego. I could not accept that a fighter with all of his considerable attributes, at the crescendo of his notoriety would simply up and walk away in the face of such lucrative opportunity, with so many options and open-ended scenarios at play. I simply did not understand Floyd’s decision, did not accept his reasoning, and did not believe it would last. During that period Manny Pacquiao moved-up in weight, made history, displaced our sport’s chief money maker with a surprisingly one-sided victory and in the process, reinvigorated interest in the subjective wheel spin known as the mythical pound for pound rankings. Not surprisingly, the drum beat began in earnest for an eventual Mayweather JR. return to face the streaking Pacquiao, a fighter that had seemingly taken his place atop those mythical rankings. For me, the real question was when “Money” would make the announcement on his rumored intention to return. On the very date that Manny Pacquiao emphatically underlined his pound for pound credentials, over the course of further enhancing his ever inflating bankability and legacy with a destructive hammering of England’s Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton, “Money” Mayweather announced his intention to return to the sport with the curious, if admirable choice of Juan Manuel Marquez as his initial comeback opponent. Consider the subtleties of Marquez as Mayweather’s first comeback foe. The current WBA/WBO Lightweight Champion is a three-division champion, currently riding a hot streak of notable success and known to be one of the most skilled technical fighters in the game today. He also has faced Manny Pacquiao on two occasions; a highly debatable draw back in 2004 in a bout that saw him climb off of the canvas three times in its opening stanza and a very close split decision loss in the rematch in early 2008. Consider that if Marquez had on not suffered a knockdown in the rematch he may very well have taken the win and gone on to become today’s recognized PFP king. A mere point or two away from the shoe being on the other foot, as it were. So when you look at it from the perspective of sheer pedigree, Marquez is one hell of a big pill to swallow after what will amount to twenty-one months of inactivity. The choice is as admirable as it is lofty. I tip my hat to Floyd for his self-belief and willingness to engage such a potentially dangerous and skilled foe. The big question is this, if Floyd gets past Marquez, which to me is not a given considering the current variables at play, does this prepare him for Manny Pacquiao? My feeling is no. The common train of thought I am coming across on the Ringside Report message boards is that Floyd will miraculously reappear just as he was in 2007 when he makes his return this September, skills, sharpness and reflexes fully intact. The generally accepted notion is that any rust he has accumulated will peel off over the opening rounds as he becomes acquainted with Marquez and his style. The common thinking is that “Money” really isn’t all that rusty to begin with given that he has stayed well within his typical fight weight and continued training all during his hiatus. The common thinking is that Floyd will reappear ready to hand the aggressive warrior that is Manny Pacquiao a Zen Lesson in ring tactics, negating all of his fury and momentum with his God-given athleticism, in-built radar, instilled ring instincts and practiced slight of hand. But to be utterly truthful, I have to wonder if in reality this will actually be the case. All along one unavoidable aspect of this whole Floyd playing matador to Pacquiao’s bull has bothered me. All along Floyd’s chances haven’t completely sat well with me despite my original stance that somehow “Money” will be on par with the active Filipino, should they meet, and over the course of getting away from it all on my vacation and just being still in the peace of those sunny mornings, undisturbed by the thoughts and valued views of other hardcore fans, it all came together. I have been known to look back at the past in order to get a feel for the future when it comes to the sport of boxing. I cannot help but remember how sharp “Sugar” Ray Leonard looked in September 1981 when he stood up to the very best Thomas Hearns served-up and turned the tables on “The Hitman” in their momentous welterweight unification showdown. It took everything he had in order to come out on top. After that just a few months later he made it look effortless dispatching the highly-rated welterweight contender Bruce Finch. He had the look of a supremely confident and special professional fighter at the top of his game. Two short years later after his sudden retirement, Leonard returned to face rugged journeyman Kevin Howard in what many dismissed as a mere tune-up in which “The Sugar Man” would shake some rust and send the hard-boiled upstart packing sometime about the middle point of the match. Instead, Leonard was pressured and made to fight tentatively, suffering a shocking knockdown along the way before managing to string together enough hurtful shots to convince referee Dick Flaherty to intervene. The episode was an eye-opener. Not just to Leonard himself, but to fans and experts that figured staying in shape was enough to eclipse the ravages of a layoff as it pertains to timing, sharpness and perhaps most of all, being used to getting hit and the trickle effect it can have on one’s confidence and ability to perform at that special level. As great and as special as “Sugar” Ray Leonard had been just two years before, it had little bearing upon his return mere days away from his twenty-eighth birthday – and it didn’t matter that his foe was levels beneath anything approaching notable on the pound per pound scale. Using “Sugar” Ray as my “look back point” relative to Floyd Mayweather JR., I cannot help but think that returning at age thirty-two, “Money” may in fact be deluding himself into believing what many on those message boards are chanting. Assuming he somehow gets by the game and complicated Marquez, a multi-division champion as hungry and composed a fighter as there is in the game today, Floyd is almost certainly not going to eclipse anything Manny has done with common opponents. His close win over Oscar De La Hoya was good, but it revealed a sluggish variant of the Mayweather I had become accustomed to watching previous to that shave. The stoppage of Ricky Hatton was emphatic, no doubt, but it came after being roughed-up some in the early going. Though Floyd is one to coast in the early going for the sake of sizing up a foe, I believe he had Hatton “sized” long before the first bell. If anything, I attribute those early rounds to perhaps something else. If anything, Floyd had to work to win both of those matches, something not really in the script at all over 2005 and 2006. In short, the pressure presented by both Oscar and Hatton seemed to trouble “Money” a tad more than expected by both himself and fans. Once he acclimated himself with those foes and the pace, he eventually dialed-in the right formula for victory, but the interesting thing here is when Pacquiao faced the aforementioned, he either turned it up an entire gear and mercilessly worked them into a defensive posture or outright obliterated his foe and ended matters right there and then.