One day away. Us Rumble boys have been talking about Pacquiao-Clottey for quite a while now, but we’re not done yet. Take a good seat because we’ve got a mega-roundtable for you. Corey Erdman, Graydon Gordian, Anthony Wilson and yours truly give our last thought. Enjoy.
My final prognostification piece will be up this evening, so there’s still a bit more coming your way. The weigh-in is supposed to be webcast live on Top Rank’s site around 6 Eastern and will probably be shown on ESPN as well.
AVI KORINE: Let’s get started guys. I know we all have a lot to talk about, particularly Pacquiao, but I’ve probably written about 10,000 words on him this week so I thought I’d begin with Clottey.
Part of me still can’t believe that this fight is actually happening. Clottey is the type of guy avoided by even marginal contenders, so it seems so unlikely he would be chosen to face one of the economic powers of the sport. It seems too risky… until I remember who Clottey is. He is a guy that just can’t ever seem to bring it all together. Somebody I like to refer to as a natural loser, or a born second place.
In a piece about Clottey last year I compared watching Joshua fight to my ability to woo a woman. If you’ve ever seen me in action, that’s not a compliment.
My head keeps telling me that Clottey has advantages. He’s rough and strong and a bit dirty. If he can just keep punching and retain a workrate he can win this fight. He could open up a cut on Pacquiao and pound him against the ropes. He has the capacity!
But, really, does he? He’ll be in front of a crowd of 45,000 people in the biggest moment of his life, will he reach out and grab his opportunity? Am I asking a fish to sprout wings and fly? I usually root for guys like Clottey, the underdogs and the long shots, but he’s just so frustrating. I hear him talking about being satisfied if he thinks he has won the fight but the decision goes against him and it gives me chills. We know what Manny will bring, it’ll be the “Charge of the Light Brigade” if it comes to that. What can we expect from Clottey?
Corey Erdman: Boxing purists always marvel at the evolution of Manny Pacquiao each fight, adding new elements to his repertoire, but equally as mind-boggling is Joshua Clottey’s ability to remain completely stagnant.
Yes, Clottey is always a tough out. He’s extraordinarily difficult to hit flush, and when he does get caught, he has a chin harder than those microwavable Aunt Jemima sausage biscuits.
So let’s assume based on those two features that Clottey will be able to go the distance. He still presents a fairly easy puzzle for Manny Pacquiao to solve.
Without his trainer of choice in the country (let alone his corner), there is absolutely no way that Clottey could have changed his style or approach in any substantial way during camp. At best, Lenny De Jesus, who spent time in Pacquiao’s corner, will have shown him a few things to capitalize on using his existing tools.
Ultimately, we can expect more of the same, which plays into all of Pacquiao’s strengths. He will keep his high guard up eighty per-cent of the time. If he chooses to lay back, he will get picked apart by Pacquiao, who is strong and accurate enough to potentially break through the guard with relative consistency, and if not, isn’t overly anxious or dull enough to wear himself out pounding a leather wall. He’ll step back and find a way around it.
His other option is to chase Pacquiao, which he is unable to do because of inferior footspeed, and the fact that his shell defense prevents him from throwing punches with regularity.
If you’re not throwing punches and walking forward, you’re losing rounds. And I’m afraid Joshua Clottey will lose enough of them to allow Pacquiao to retain his title.
Anthony Wilson: First off, I want to say that Avi, the analogy you use about your struggles with women is especially poignant to me. It’s one of the stories of my life. There’s this one broad who I like and cross paths with every other day, but I’m too much of a coward to make a move on her, ya know? Let’s just move on before I start sobbing in self-pity.
I think one of Clottey’s main problems is that he’s not competitive. A person who really, really wants to win is predisposed to engaging fully in the pursuit of victory. A lot of times, that seems to lend itself to killer instinct. You get a guy in trouble, you go after him. You want nothing more than to win.
I would never downplay the significance of a hand injury to a fighter, but we’ve seen cats suffer them during fights and keep killing themselves to win (Arturo Gatti in his third fight against Micky Ward immediately comes to mind). Clottey had built up a lead against Margs, hurt his hand, and that was pretty much that. In the same situation, I think Manny wills himself forward. Clottey had Cotto wounded but refused to step on the gas even a little. We know what Pac did in the same situation: made Cotto start running for his life.
I’m not saying Clottey should be as competitive as Manny, few are. The problem with Clottey is that he’s not even close.
Graydon Gordian: I agree that, from a tactical standpoint, Pacquiao has a number of advantages. And, yes, as of now, we have yet see anything in Clottey that suggests he is mean-spirited enough to step on Manny’s throat were he even able to get him in trouble. Nonetheless I feel compelled to defend Clottey.
I’ve always been hesitant to echo those who criticize Clottey for his apparent lack of competitiveness. It could be because of the countless hours I’ve spent defending the sport to its detractors, or maybe it’s because I’ve strapped on the gloves a few times myself, but I have always been slow, possibly in this instance to a fault, to claim any man who has made his living with his fists doesn’t have a little pit bull in his blood.
I’m also struck by how little some of us think it would take for Clottey to make life tough for Pacquiao. Avi said, ” If [Clottey] can just keep punching and retain a workrate he can win this fight.” I agree with that assessment. The funny thing is, that’s not a tall order. The gap between what Clottey showed against Cotto and what he needs to show if he intends to challenge Pacquaio is narrower than it may seem.
Given the situation with his trainer, and some of the underwhelming remarks he’s made in the lead up to the fight, I’ll admit that I don’t expect him to close that gap. And even if Clottey did get busy and mean in Dallas on Saturday, still I’d expect Pacquiao to outwork and outmaneuver him. But I think the chances of Clottey showing us something we haven’t seen are better than they seem.
AW: You’re right, Graydon, Clottey is absolutely a hard man, a tough SOB. You have to be just to step that ring, and more than just being a fighter Clottey has stood in there with world-class opponents and more than held his own. He is a very good and rugged fighter nobody really wants to face. But to be great you have to want it more than Clottey has shown. He has more than a little pit bull in him, but not enough.
And I think Clottey will need to go to a level he’s never been to beat Manny. Can he reach it? It’s certainly possible. Would you bet on it though? I wouldn’t.
AK: An excellent point, Graydon. None of us are really in a position to judge Clottey because we don’t really know whether he has more to give. Maybe he is at the limit and that’s it. It’s hard not to find it frustrating, though, just as it’s hard not to yell at Anthony to be a man and talk to that girl of his, though I doubt I would do so in a similar situation.
But, despite what wrote in my first remarks, I don’t really think Clottey has agency in this fight, because Manny has achieved a higher plane. Clottey can give him troubles if he lashes out, but Manny will have an answer, I imagine. I’ve loved him since he first fought Marco Antonio Barrera; Pacquiao was the main reason my passion for the sport was rekindled after a hiatus, but I never felt he was fully in control. Before he faced De La Hoya and Marquez and even Hatton I was nervous. But there was a different quality to the Cotto fight, and there’s a different quality to my feelings about the Clottey fight.
I think that quality is contempt… or maybe, to put it a different way, a willingness to luxuriate in mastery. Floyd has always had that quality. I am never nervous before he fights, just eager to watch him perform. When Pacquiao toyed with Cotto in the early rounds – as magnificently described by Andrew Corsello in his GQ piece I linked to yesterday – I felt as though I was seeing him for the first time. That electricity is impossible to harness for long, but when it happens it’s incredible to see. In some ways I love this fight because we get to see what happens when you put a generational champion in with a very good fighter. It’s a little cruel, but isn’t it thrilling to anticipate what he’s going to do this time?
AW: I’ll talk to the girl.
At gunpoint.
Avi, what you just said at the end there gave me goosebumps. I am so grateful to get to watch Manny. I think he’s a genius. He’s been given a rare gift. David Halberstam once wrote about the athletic genius of Michael Jordan. To me it was most personified by Jordan’s first half performance in Game 1 of the ’92 Finals. You guys know the one: six threes from a guy not known for threes, and that little shrug. The thing about it was that he did it on call. Jordan did whatever he wanted on the court. Manny has reached that same point. It’s kind of freaky when you think about it, it’s like they really are immortal. I savor every chance I get to watch Manny work, it’s like experiencing the supernatural.
GG: Although I was quick to defend Clottey, It would be disingenuous of me to claim I didn’t agree with Avi at the end of the day. Even if Clottey were to reach that next level– get active, get vicious –it’s pretty clear that Pacquiao’s transcendent talent would overwhelm him. There’s a slight (and I mean slight) chance that Manny has finally come across that fighter we were warned of when he stepped into the ring with De La Hoya and Cotto: The fighter who is just too big. But after Pacquaio was able to dispatch both with such ease, I’m done doubting the man.
CE: I think I sounded a bit too harsh when talking about Clottey, because I genuinely like the guy and want him to succeed in boxing.
At the same time, a Pacquiao win, both in how he makes it happen, and the aftermath are so incredibly exciting that it’s hard to cheer against him, even if you’re prone to the underdog as I am.
Walking home yesterday, I saw something very curious in the neighborhood tavern windows. Normally I can peer inside to see a few folks shooting billiards or satiating their wagering desires on faux video poker machines (I’m in Canada–real ones are illegal). Instead, I saw a poster for Pacquiao-Clottey.
A fight being shown at a bar? If only for one night, boxing is the cool, fun thing to do. The reason you want to get inebriated on Saturday night.
I can’t remember the last time that was the case, but I do know the reason why it is the case this weekend.
His name is Manny Pacquiao.
AK: And with all this talk of Manny’s brilliance it just brings me back to Floyd Mayweather. In a deep sense, that is who Manny will be fighting on Saturday. That’s also who Floyd will be fighting in May. They are living parallel and interlinked lives, dance partners from a distance.
It has struck me recently just how lonely it must be to be Manny or Floyd. Or if lonely isn’t the right word, at least isolating. Their entourages and lavish lifestyles and idiosyncrasies are all symptoms of the crazy that comes from being wealthy and famous and not entirely prepared. But it’s also the strangeness of being so good at something that you literally have no one to speak to… the last who knows the mother tongue, a dead language. How debilitating! Aren’t both of their crazed lives just a pushing away from the void? The terror of being the palm at the end of the mind? If you watched the HBO documentary on Magic and Byrd you got a little bit of that sense.
And that’s what I’m looking forward to in the fight on Saturday. I suspect that in some deep part of himself, Manny will be sending Floyd a message… a coded shibboleth that only a fellow traveler can decode. I can’t wait to try to catch it, though if his recent performances are any indication it might only be as subtle as Moses come down from the mountain!
CE: Don’t you get the sense though, that Manny and Floyd are so good that they render nearly everything else in boxing irrelevant?
Avi, you made a great comparison to Magic and Bird, and it’s akin to Federer and Nadal in tennis a year ago as well. You might win a tournament, but if you don’t go through them, it’s somehow not real. In that sense, I feel bad for every other fighter in boxing right now.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the media’s sentiment toward Manny and Floyd’s opponents. After that destruction in November, suddenly Miguel Cotto is shot, and his extraordinary event at Yankee Stadium facing Yuri Foreman has been largely ignored. Unfortunately, he was tested against a legend and came up short, but now any mystique or hype he had is absolutely gone.
It was the same way for Clottey. A couple months ago he was dangerous, and would give anyone in the division fits–but that’s because the thought of him fighting Manny Pacquiao was utterly outlandish. If he now loses to Pacquiao, it will be futile for Bob Arum to market him later on.
AW: I think the comparison to Magic and Bird is excellent. Floyd and Manny carry boxing on their shoulders right now. Their respective combinations of performance and star power are simply unmatched in the fight game at the moment. As Corey said, everything that’s really important to the sport on a mainstream level revolves around them. They receive such a disproportionate amount of attention relative to any other fighter that it’s almost like they are worshipped.
On Saturday, Joshua Clottey looks to crash the altar.
AK: And that’s the final word, Anthony. Thanks everyone and I hope it’s a terrific fight.
