HOLLYWOOD—Manny Pacquiao’s failure to knock out Joshua Clottey doesn’t disappoint chief trainer Freddie Roach a bit.
Boxing’s Hall of Famer trainer was just frustrated with the way Clottey fought Pacquiao Saturday night (Sunday morning in Manila) at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Roach knew Pacquiao went all out for the kill against one who simply wanted to survive.
The Ghanaian, supposedly the bigger and stronger guy, kept himself in a defensive shell instead of attacking, as title challengers are wont to do.
Roach, a four-time Trainer of the Year, gave Clottey an unsolicited advice: “If you fight for a world title, it comes once in a lifetime and you must try to win the fight.”
It was Pacquiao who dictated the fight’s tempo and initiated the exchanges, transforming Clottey into a virtual punching bag. Or like a sparmate.
“Manny fought a very good fight,” Roach told Manila-based sportswriters Sunday. “It’s hard to knock out somebody who doesn’t want to win a fight, just trying to survive. That’s what the guy was doing.”
Fight pundits said it was either Clottey was happily content with his $1.5-million fight purse—the biggest of his ring career—or he was trying to preserve his legacy of never losing by knockout.
Pacquiao, after all, had stopped David Diaz, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto in succession before agreeing to defend his World Boxing Organization welterweight crown against Clottey, now 35-4 with 21 knockouts.
“If I was (Clottey’s) trainer, I would have told him to engage a lot more because that’s the only way to win fights,” said Roach.
“I would rather get knocked out trying to win than going the distance because going the distance is not satisfying. He was satisfied with going the distance with Manny Pacquiao. But HBO will never use him again.”
“He had some success because he hit Manny with more right hands that I anticipated,” added Roach, who insisted he was never bothered by the fight’s outcome.
“I was never worried. I was frustrated trying to figure out how to open this guy up. It could have been a more dangerous fight trying to open him up. The only time that we could hurt him was when he was punching.”
But then Clottey threw very few punches, leaving Pacquiao little space to work with.
“He was very resilient and he was a lot more resilient that I thought he would be,” Roach said of the gun-shy challenger.
“The guy never changed. He did things over and over, so he’s very predictable. It’s hard to knock a guy who’s like that because if you fight for a world title, you don’t go on a survival mode. You try to win the title.”
