Boxing is currently caught up in a frenzy of frustration and fans are in a mutinous mood. Attractive matches are sinking in a morass of greed and incompetence, while pretenders looking for an easy buck seem to have overrun a world once populated by hard men itching for a fight.
Welcome to boxing, 2016 style.
Amid all the cancellations, postponements and alphabet idiocy comes the return of Manny Pacquiao, an event that was virtually guaranteed the moment Manny said he was retiring following his April 9 victory over Timothy Bradley.
Pacquiao is no Tyson Fury when it comes to such matters, but by normal standards a seven-month hiatus can hardly be considered a retirement. Not a serious one, anyway, so when Pacquiao signed to fight Jessie Vargas it seemed more an inevitability than a betrayal.
Manny talked about missing boxing and maybe he did. But that’s secondary. It’s all about the money. It always is. And when it comes to Pacquiao, we’re talking megabucks. Not quite Floyd Mayweather money, but close enough.
Pacquiao’s fights have sold approximately 18.4 million pay-per-views, generating roughly $1.2 billion in revenue. According to Kurt Badenhausen, who covers sports business for Forbes, Manny’s share, combined with endorsements and other ancillary earnings, totals about $500 million.
Even after taxes, that’s a staggering amount of money. What’s even more mind-blowing is the rapidity with which Manny spends it. Pacquiao’s lifestyle is unsustainable without massive infusions of cash that only boxing can provide. He has to keep fighting and he knows it.
“Boxing is my main source of income,” Pacquiao told reporters in the Philippines when he announced he would return to the ring. “I can’t rely on my salary as public official.”
One can only imagine what will happen when Pacquiao can no longer demand eight-figure paydays, and those days might be coming sooner than later. His third PPV fight with Bradley performed poorly and the announcement of Pacquiao-Vargas was not greeted with anything approaching universal approval.
Social media was inundated with negative feedback, most of it of the “no way I’m buying the pay-per-view” variety. It’s a perfectly valid point of view, but as many abstainers would agree, the Vargas match — set for Saturday in Las Vegas — is not a bad one in itself. It could very well be a fun fight. It’s just not what most consumers consider PPV-worthy.
When HBO passed on the match, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum bristled but soon switched to boasting about all the money he would save by cutting out the middleman.
From here, however, it looks like Arum is gambling on the future, confident he can maneuver Manny into another massive payday — or at the very least make sure that if Arum’s meal ticket loses, is to one of his own guys.
Not even Arum is audacious enough to peddle Pacquiao-Vargas as super fight, but maybe we should be grateful for small favors. At least Pacquiao-Vargas is happening and has a reasonably good chance of being an entertaining bout.
That is more than you can say for Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko (or Fury-Klitschko, for that matter), Daniel Jacobs-Gennady Golovkin or even Orlando Salido-Takashi Miura, all of which have vanished from the boxing calendar like spit on a hot stove.
Sure, better fights have been promised farther on down the road, but we’ve heard that before and know how quickly things can fall apart. That’s just the way it is in boxing. The only thing you can count on is inconsistency, and things have been so drab of late any dash of color is welcome, even if it’s overpriced.
Pacquiao is still one of the most recognizable names in boxing, and if the Vargas bout turns out to be a good one, the fighters will not be the only beneficiaries. An exciting contest will also help hoist the sport’s sagging image while we wait for Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev to finally get down to business.
There is no doubt Pacquiao chose the easiest option among the opponents Arum offered. Terence Crawford would have pacified the cognoscenti, but he was little more than click bait and never really part of the equation.
Crawford is only marginally better known to the casuals than Vargas. The money simply wasn’t there to make the risk-reward factor worthwhile. But it’s not all bad news.
Vargas is better equipped to give Pacquiao a tough fight than recent opponents such as Brandon Rios and Chris Algieri. Rios was outclassed and overwhelmed by the occasion, while Algieri’s chin turned out to be as soft as his punch, resulting in six trips to the canvas and an easy win for Manny.
Vargas is tougher both mentally and physically and comes armed with the hungry determination of a man who always thought he would make it to the top and can’t quite understand why he hasn’t gotten there yet.
That Vargas has only 10 knockouts to his credit in an overall record of 27-1 is misleading. His latent power surged to the forefront in his two most recent fights in the form of a concussive right hand.
It first emerged in June 2015 when he had Bradley out on his feet with just 15 seconds to go in the final round. Vargas ran out of time and lost the decision, but his newfound power was confirmed when he pancaked highly touted Sadam Ali eight months ago. The vacant welterweight title Jessie won that night will be on the line against Pacquiao.
This is not to say that Vargas has morphed into Tommy Hearns. Nonetheless, knowing Vargas has the power to turn a fight around with one or two punches should give him added confidence going into the biggest fight of his career. And a confident Vargas means a better the fight.
Pacquiao did the bulk of his training in the Philippines, splitting his time between the gym and his job as a first-term senator. Such a crazy schedule could prove disastrous for most fighters, but Manny’s multitasking skills have never let him down before and are unlikely to do so now.
Conditioning has never been a problem and Pacquiao looked sharp in training videos, ripping into the heavy bag with rapid-fire combinations. But the bag doesn’t punch back. Vargas does.
Pacquiao, 37, remains an aggressive fighter, but he’s nowhere near as reckless as he was in his prime. Now he prefers to use his legs to get in, unload and get out. He’ll occasionally revert to his whirlwind style of old but it’s just a flashback, not a renaissance.
Vargas is 10 years younger than Pacquiao, 5 inches taller and has a 4-inch reach advantage. That alone will not be enough, but no fighter, not even George Foreman or Bernard Hopkins, can go on forever. If Saturday is the day the weight of 66 professional fights against the best of his era comes crashing down on Manny, an upset is within Vargas’ reach.
Not even Pacquiao knows how long he’ll be able to keep competing at the highest level. Money is his chief motivation but boxing is still what he does best, his first love, the one that made everything else possible. Voluntary retirement is not an option. Never was.
It’s like Louis Armstrong once said, “Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.” It’s the same for boxers; they stop when they have no fight left in them. Judging by the way he handled Bradley earlier this year, Pacquiao still has quite a lot left, enough to defeat Vargas at any rate.
