Manny Pacquiao took the welterweight division by storm between early December 2008 and mid-November 2009, with increasingly spectacular victories over Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto. By then, Cotto, now a prominent middleweight, was the best of that trio, and that?s why Pacquiao?s defeat of Cotto is often regarded as the best of his victories in the division.
The only way to top it would be a victory over Floyd Mayweather on May 2 in a bout that has been brewing ever since the upset of De La Hoya.
Reports of chaos in the Pacquiao?s training camp preceded the Cotto fight, partly because Pacquiao didn?t travel from the typhoon-ravaged Philippines to the West Coast as early as trainer Freddie Roach would have liked, and largely because Manny?s large entourage was regarded as a distraction.
But it was the Cotto camp that had the biggest problem, the loss of trainer Evangelista Cotto just when Miguel Angel needed every asset at his command.
This wasn?t the boy becoming a man, like Nonito Donaire?s flap with his father. This was Cotto and his uncle literally fighting, seven months before the Pacquiao fight.
Young, little-accomplished Joe Santiago took over, but he was no match for Roach, who boasted that he had devised a stratagem for Pacquiao to exploit and cemented the notion that Cotto and Pacquiao weren?t getting equal benefit from their trainers. After all, Roach said he?d exploit De La Hoya?s weaknesses, and Pacquiao backed it up. Here?s how he did the same against Cotto:
PACQUIAO?S STOPPAGE OF COTTO IS HIS BEST VICTORY YET (NOVEMBER 2009)
There can be no denying Manny Pacquiao?s greatness in the wake of his 12th-round TKO victory Saturday over Miguel Cotto.
Pacquiao asserted his superior speed and punching power in the middle of the second round, knocked Cotto down in the third and again in the fourth and battered him throughout the rest of the fight in Las Vegas as Cotto remained dangerous despite the beating he sustained.
Any time Pacquiao forced the action, he landed devastating power punches, but any time he didn?t force the action, Cotto landed jabs and some power shots, which is how he won the second and fifth rounds.
?I tried to taste his power early,? Pacquiao said after claiming the seventh title of his career, the WBO welterweight belt, ?both to the body and the head.? Trainer Freddie Roach said Pacquiao did that to a fault.
Whatever the wisdom of the strategy, it was a dramatic fight until Cotto wore down.
The knockdown near the end of the fourth, on a left cross, after a round Cotto had dominated, turned the fight in Pacquiao?s favor to stay after Cotto won the first round on most scorecards and the second on many. But after Cotto won the lackluster fifth round, it was all Pacquiao.
?We were very careful in the early rounds,? Pacquiao (50-3-2, 38 knockouts) said in explaining the feeling-out process ? which after all did produce the two knockdowns, the first of them a sudden one from a right hook. The fourth-round knockdown was far more concussive and conclusive.
?I was looking for a knockout punch,? Pacquiao said. ?That?s why I wasn?t throwing a lot of punches.?
Cotto (34-2) continued to move and look for opportunities, even as his face began to take on precisely the look that was plastered on it by Antonio Margarito in July 2008, Cotto?s only previous loss. But it began to look hopeless in the ninth and 10th, as there was no way Cotto could land a fight-turning punch, retreating as he was.
Although Cotto thanked his handlers for ?respecting my decision? to continue, tragedy was very much in the air.
Casting a dark shadow over the proceedings was the life-threatening brain injury Filipino bantamweight Z Gorres suffered a night earlier in his unanimous decision victory over Luis Melendez at the MGM Grand. Gorres was knocked down in the final seconds of the fight but was celebrating the victory when he collapsed. Gorres sustained a subdural hematoma and physicians induced a coma.
But Pacquiao conveyed a festive mood before his fight and clearly enjoyed the bout itself as he truly was able to rise above adversity and win a more hotly contested bout than his two other recent stunning victories over seemingly larger men, Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton.
Pacquiao was more magnificent than ever in the Cotto fight. By the time referee Kenny Bayless finally stopped the bout after Manny landed a big overhand left, it was clear that Pacquiao is much better at 145 pounds than at any lower weight at which he has fought, and he is beginning to seem like as good a welterweight as any of us has seen.
