Pacquiao’s Best, Even When Not at His Best at LinesMaker

Pacquiao’s Best, Even When Not at His Best

LAS VEGAS — This is how good Manny Pac­quiao has become: His legs were cramp­ing, he wasn’t on top of his game and he still nearly shut out Shane Mosley.

Pac­quiao, who was once dis­missed as a small fighter, knocked Mosley down hard in the third round and sent the one-time pound-for-pound king scur­ry­ing around the ring for most of the rest of the fight, unwill­ing to engage.

It was far from a scin­til­lat­ing per­for­mance and the crowd booed fre­quently in the sec­ond half of the fight. Pac­quiao, though, has improved to such a degree that even when he has an off night, he blows guys out. Pac­quiao won by scores of 120–107, 120–108 and 119–108 on Sat­ur­day before a sell­out crowd of 16,412 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.

Pac­quiao wasn’t thrilled that Mosley didn’t stand and engage. That left him with cramped legs try­ing to chase Mosley and resulted in the rare less-than-entertaining Pacquiao bout.

“I’ll tell you the truth: I was expect­ing him to fight with me at least five rounds of the 12 rounds toe-to-toe with me so that we could test our power, our sta­mina,” Pac­quiao said before head­ing across the street to Man­dalay Bay to per­form a con­cert. “But what could I do if my oppo­nent doesn’t want to fight toe-to-toe? It’s not my fault.

“I’m happy, because I know I won the fight. But I said my first con­cern is the sat­is­fac­tion of the peo­ple. I want the peo­ple to be sat­is­fied with my per­for­mance and to leave happy.”

No one who was expect­ing a great fight could have been happy, whether they bought tick­ets or plunked down the money for the pay-per-view. It was a low-drama, low-action match and the out­come wasn’t in doubt over the final 10 rounds.

Mosley, who said after the fight that “this could be it” for his superla­tive career, said he was shocked by Pacquiao’s punch­ing power. He said before the fight that he wasn’t fight­ing a small guy and Pacquiao’s power proved that.

But Pac­quiao throws with such lit­tle effort that it often doesn’t seem like it’s a dan­ger­ous blow until it lands.

“Manny Pac­quiao has the type of power I had to watch out for,” Mosley said. “Usu­ally, I can go in there and punch with guys, but it seemed like he had some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I had to watch out.

“There were dif­fer­ent punches that he threw that didn’t seem to be hard, but the impact def­i­nitely was hard. I really had to watch out for those par­tic­u­lar shots he threw. Like I said, Manny is a great fighter and he threw some great punches.”

Mosley’s plan was to work off the angles and try to counter Pac­quiao, but Mosley was unable to get off. He looked like a fighter within sight of his 40th birth­day and didn’t have the speed and explo­sive­ness that was such a big part of his game ear­lier in his career.

Pacquiao’s trainer Fred­die Roach said Mosley also didn’t appear to have the desire for com­bat that he dis­played for most of his career.

“I don’t think he tried to win the fight,” Roach said. “He just tried to sur­vive. When you get to that point in box­ing, it’s time to call it a day.”

Pac­quiao is so good that he’s lapped the field a sec­ond time and is almost mak­ing his fights anti­cli­mac­tic. Top Rank’s Bob Arum said he will sub­mit a new offer to the man­age­ment team of light­weight cham­pion Juan Manuel Mar­quez. Golden Boy has the right to match the offer and if Golden Boy matches, it would pit Mar­quez against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.

If Golden Boy does that, Arum said he’d offer a Pac­quiao bout, ten­ta­tively slated for Nov. 12 in Las Vegas, to one of two super light­weight cham­pi­ons, Tim­o­thy Bradley or Zab Judah. But as great as they are, it’s hard to imag­ine either being able to do much against this fight­ing machine.

Arum, though, isn’t afraid that he’ll lose pay-per-view sales even though Pacquiao’s fights have become pre­dictably one-sided.

“Peo­ple will pay to see Manny Pac­quiao,” Arum said. “Because he is not dull. He is the aggres­sor. He is an enter­tain­ing fighter. I believe most peo­ple who saw the fight bought it not with the expec­ta­tion that Shane Mosley would win. They bought the Mar­gar­ito fight, not because they thought Mar­gar­ito would win, but because they wanted to be enter­tained by Manny Pacquiao.”

Even Pac­quiao had dif­fi­culty being enter­tain­ing given the cir­cum­stances on Sat­ur­day. Mosley was given a knock­down in the 10th when he hurled Pac­quiao to the can­vas. Ref­eree Kenny Bay­less ruled it a knock­down in favor of Mosley, but later apol­o­gized to Pac­quiao for it.

Pac­quiao was angered by it and he went hard after Mosley look­ing for the finish.

“I got a lit­tle angry,” Pacquiao said.

It’s too bad that he didn’t get angry ear­lier. He spent much of the night touch­ing gloves with Mosley in a dis­play of sports­man­ship that didn’t do much for those who were look­ing for action.

Even when he’s not fir­ing on all cylin­ders, Pac­quiao is far bet­ter than the rest of the field. There aren’t a lot of guys around his weight who he could fight, par­tic­u­larly if Floyd May­weather Jr. con­tin­ues to be more inter­ested in watch­ing Lady Gaga than he is in boxing.

Arum said he wouldn’t rule out a bout with mid­dleweight champ Ser­gio Mar­tinez, though he is wary of it because by fight time, Mar­tinez might weigh nearly 30 pounds more.

“I still think Manny would beat him, but it’s not fair to ask him to give up that much weight,” Arum said.

It’s also not fair, though, to ask mere mor­tals to get into the ring with Pac­quiao. If May­weather doesn’t take the chal­lenge — and he’s show­ing no incli­na­tion he wants to do so — we might be in for a long string of these one-sided routs.

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