Will Ariza be back with Pacquiao?

April 26th, 2012 By Allan Fox: By now everyone knows that WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza was given permission from Pacquiao to leave the training camp in the Philippines in order to fly back to the United States to help out with the conditioning of WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. to get him ready for his June 16th fight against Andy Lee. Ariza is supposed to join up with Pacquiao later on when he flies over to the United States to start his 2nd part of his training at the Wild Card gym in Los Angeles. Although Ariza was given permission, it has angered a lot of boxing fans and it appears it hasn’t won points for him with trainer Freddie Roach or promoter Bob Arum. To some, this looks as if Ariza has abandoned Pacquiao in his hour of need as he gets ready for one of his toughest fights in quite some time against undefeated WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley on June 9th. With Pacquiao coming off of a disappointing 12 round decision win over Juan Manuel Marquez last November in a fight many people thought Pacquiao lost, you would think Ariza would have wanted to stay with Pacquiao for the full camp in order to try and whip him into tip top shape. Pacquiao has been suffering a leg cramp condition in his last three to four fights, and there’s clearly something not right with his conditioning that needs fixing. Ariza leaving the camp early to work with Chavez Jr. seems like a bad move on his part, because if anything goes wrong in this fight in terms of conditioning and/or the leg cramp problems, Ariza will likely be blamed by some of Pacquiao’s followers if anything goes wrong. Ariza thought Pacquiao’a last fight against Marquez was going to be an easy fight for him. When things didn’t work out as planned, Ariza later said that Pacquiao needed to follow his full regimen of training to avoid problems. It just looked like Monday morning excuse making from Ariza. If he wanted Pacquiao to follow his full regimen, then he’s not helping him by leaving camp early to train with Chavez Jr. Will Pacquiao decide to keep Ariza after this or has this move shut the door on Ariza’s stint as Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach? One thing you have to look at is the leg cramp problems. If Pacquiao is still experiencing those problems after his last three to four fights, something isn’t right and needs to be changed in the training program. Whether that be with a different coach or with Ariza, it’s unclear. It certainly wouldn’t hurt for Pacquiao to look at other options at this point because he needs to make sure he doesn’t continue to have the leg cramping problems in the future because it’ll eventually cause him problems in a close fight against a good opponent.