For disclosure purposes, I scored Saturday’s third and supposedly final chapter of the Manny Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez trilogy for Marquez. I scored the second fight in 2008 for Pacquiao, and I wasn’t scoring fights back in 2004 for their first meeting but remember feeling okay when the draw was announced.
So while the official records may say that Pac-Man is 2-0-1, in my mind the two fighters are 1-1-1. And that seems fitting, because this fight settled absolutely nothing.
To be sure, we still learned some things. We found out that at age 38, Marquez is certainly not washed up or over the hill by any stretch of the imagination. His commitment to adding weight the right way to get to 144 definitely paid off, and his helplessness against Floyd Mayweather was likely a combination of a bad style matchup and Floyd’s brilliance just existing one notch above his own.
Apparently, some observers had a revelation that Pacquiao is not invincible. But if you watched the first two fights in this series, you already should have known that. I’m not going to say I wasn’t surprised that the fight was a tight one, but I certainly wasn’t shocked. If boxing has shown us anything over the years, it’s that sometimes, one great fighter just has another great fighter’s number. For Pacquiao, it’s JMM, regardless of what the records now reflect.
Yet some things did change as the trilogy moved along, and in some ways, the third fight was almost the inverse of the first one (minus the knockdowns, obviously). Eight years ago, it was Manny landing the harder single shots – pretty much his whole game back then – while Marquez scored with more frequent, less powerful punches. On Saturday the roles were nearly reversed. Most of the hard, head-snapping blows that I could remember were landed by Marquez. Pacquiao was busier and connected in greater quantity, something that the final CompuBox numbers confirmed.
The decision was no doubt a tough one for Marquez, and he was right to be upset. I’d still stop short of calling it a robbery, which is a term that I reserve for situations so outrageous that everyone agrees the wrong man had his hand raised. Some reputable boxing pundits had it 8-4 in rounds for Marquez; I could see that if you gave him every close round. One of the official judges had it the opposite way for Pacquiao, and that felt too wide. Still, some people, including HBO’s Harold Lederman and our own Max Parker, preferred Pacquiao by a point or two. That’s indicative of a fight that it is too close to be a robbery in my book.
