WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather and eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao shouldn’t dillydally on their final decision to face each other in the ring or they risk being junked by their fans and supporters for fighting beyond their prime. By next year, Mayweather will be 38 years old while Pacquiao will be 36 and by then both of them would be past their prime years in the sport. Today’s boxing fans are far more intelligent than ever and they know that they won’t be seeing a high-level quality fight that will be worth their pay-per-view (PPV) money. If Muhammad Ali’s famous personal doctor Freddie Pacheco had his way, he would have have wanted Ali to exit the sport at 35. But the lure of money and the spotlight must have prevailed when Ali was lording it over in the ring. In one of New York Times article penned by Pacheco, he talked bout loss of elasticity and resiliency in the aging process.
“The simplest way of characterizing the aging process would have to be loss of elasticity. With the loss of elasticity comes the concomitant loss of resiliency, the ability to bounce back, to recover from injury whether by natural causes, illness or trauma.” Pacheco said. Pacheco stressed that boxing is a young man’s sport, saying that loss of resiliency affects the brain more than any organ. He equates the number of punches that land on the boxer’s head from the time he starts during his amateur days onto his professional career. “All organ systems are affected by this progressive loss of resiliency, perhaps none more than the brain and central nervous system. The rest of the body keeps apace, but the brain does not regenerate itself and injury done to these tissues, added to the normal aging, is multiplied and the downhill course of aging is accelerated. Boxing is a young man’s game. Until the age of 30, the body is on the upswing, building itself, getting stronger and stronger.” he explained. Short of saying that at 35, a boxer is past his prime, Pacheco said that one who continues fighting past this age is accelerating his early demise. “From 30 on, the loss of elasticity and resiliency is diminished – slowly, but progressively deteriorating until death. A boxer who fights after age 30 is helping nature along on its downhill course. A boxer who fights after 35 is pushing on the gas pedal, accelerating toward an early demise and making his trip there uncomfortable. The quality of his life after 40 will not only be speedily downhill but will carry with it the physical marks of his mistake, the marks of his profession,” he added.
If Mayweather and Pacquiao really want to please their millions of fans around the world who have supported them with their undying patronage, they must decide to face each other in the ring no later than 2015. Beyond this, not many fans will buy tickets to watch the fight. But even if the fight finally takes place next year, real fans may opt to just watch a post-fight video for free as they know that watching it live won;t be worth their money as both fighters appear to have lost their firepower in the ring during their last two outings. If the fight happened three years ago, it would have been the highest grossing fight in boxing history as fans would have been treated to a quality fight by two of the most sought-after fighters of their time as they facing each other on the prime of their careers.
