A friend visited me from Mexico last week. Between trips to Austin and strolls along the San Antonio River, we had occasion to watch a number of old Marco Antonio Barrera fights ? the Junior Jones debacles and the classic trilogy with Erik Morales. But it was the first Manny Pacquiao fight that filled me with a dull sense of foreboding about November.
What does Barrera have to do with November? Probably not much unless Top Rank needs undercard filler. What Barrera tells us about Pacquiao?s waning interest in combat, though, might be plenty instructive as we begin to look forward to Pacquiao?s third fight with Juan Manuel Marquez.
First, a note or two about what it was like to be an average boxing fan in Mexico for the last decade. My friend lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas, a city located about 300 miles south of the U.S. border. In the 1940s, he boxed in amateur events as a boy in the Mexican state of Veracruz. He loves boxing at least as much as you do.
But until last week, he had never seen Barrera-Morales I, II or III. Those fights, you see, were on pay channels, and a municipal employee in Tamaulipas? fifth-largest city didn?t earn a salary large enough to justify such an expense. That meant, in some way, boxing stopped commanding his interest. There were the old days, nostalgia for such scrappers as Rodolfo ?Chango? Casanova, sure, but with its accessibility issues, boxing moved to a distant second behind soccer.
