LOS ANGELES ? Manny Pacquiao has vowed to put on a show on March 15 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
But it won?t happen, he said, if Juan Manuel Marquez decides to run away ? inside the ring.
?I?m 100 percent ready,? said Pacquiao after a two-hour media workout at the Wild Card Gym here Wednesday. ?My concern is if he runs. Then it will be boring.?
?I want him to fight me toe to toe,? said Pacquiao, short of hurling a challenge against the reigning super-featherweight champion of the world.
Pacquiao said that if it comes toe to toe, it should be hard for Marquez to beat him.
He said he?s in the best shape of his life.
?Last year I was not a hundred percent focused on my career,? said Pacquiao who ran, and unfortunately lost in the congressional elections back home.
?I?m not satisfied with my last two fights (against Jorge Solis in Texas and Marco Antonio Barrera in Las Vegas),? he said.
Pacquiao won both, by a mile, but he said this one should be more convincing.
But Marquez will not go down without a fight. He vowed to do much better than the draw he salvaged against Pacquiao in 2004.
?What I can tell you is that I was pretty confident on that fight. I mean I was connecting well in the first round. And I was confident. I thought it was going to be an easy fight. But, whoa, I got a surprise that it wasn?t,? he said in a teleconference Wednesday.
?I mean he got me with three great punches. I went down three times (in the first round). But I got up. I got up because of the great condition that I was in at that time,? he said.
?But also because, I was defending two titles (in the featherweight class). Two titles that cost me a lot to win them. And I wasn?t letting them go in three minutes, just like that.
?So that?s why I got up and because of my great heart, and also because of my people, because of that great support that I was having that night,? he added.
Marquez flies in to LA from Mexico on Saturday.
It would be exactly a week before the fight. A lot of people just couldn?t wait.
