LAS VEGAS — Looking at the way Manny Pacquiao has been throwing those lightning-quick combinations these days, you would think you’ve traveled back in time 12 or 15 years ago when he was in his mid-to-late 20s.
“Have you noticed any changes in me?” Pacquiao said during one training day.
The couple of guys shook their heads as if the police were asking them if they had committed a crime.
Pacquiao, getting ready to return to action after an absence of more than two years, then smiled, his eyes lighting up and his eyebrows bouncing up and down to show everything is in order.
The two fellows weren’t there to please him. They were not certified rah-rah boys who would not hesitate to say “How high?” if the big boss asks them to jump.
One had been with him since the start of his long and tumultuous journey to the top while the other had also been tailing him for quite some time, accompanying Pacquiao across the United States.
“Honestly, you wonder if he really has aged given the things his trainers want him to do,” said the one with the glasses.
“It doesn’t look as if he’s slowed down considerably,” the other said.
“It’s been two years but he is still fast.”
Sean Gibbons, who runs the Pacquiao owned MP Promotions, insists he knows the answer.
“You know what? He discovered the Fountain of Youth a long time ago.”
On Saturday, Cuban Yordenis Ugas bids to shut off that mythical spring that has enabled Pacquiao to punch his way past a bevy of great rivals, many of them retired and waiting for their respective turns to be enshrined into the Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
Ugas is dangling the World Boxing Association welterweight title that once belonged to the Filipino, who at 42, is attempting to break his own record of being the oldest to win the 147-lb diadem.
Pacquiao had pulled that off at age 40 in July 2019 when he defeated Keith Thurman.
If he victimizes Ugas, 35, he would raise the bar again and ringsiders agree that the record might stay that way forever.
Oddsmakers believe that signs lead to another breathtaking performance by Pacquiao, who has been installed as the -375 favorite ($375 wins $100) and Ugas, the heavy underdog, as the +295 underdog ($100 wins $295). So favored is Pacquiao that betting experts list a Pacquiao first-round KO win as 40-1 and Ugas 125-1 for the same kind of ending.
Meanwhile, the official weigh-in will be held Friday at the Grand Garden Arena at 2 p.m. where Pacquiao recorded the vast majority of his epic victories beginning with his June 2001 US debut that made a lot of heads turn. On fight night, action will explode at the T-Mobile Arena, just across the Las Vegas Strip, where Pacquiao hopes to find another well that could restore his youthful strength.
