Within the bowels of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, amid the furor regarding the unpopular decision to award Saturday’s main event to Manny Pacquiao, fans and press alike have had a swath of issues to debate.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Pacquiao lost on Saturday. Yes, he lost. Although the record books will forever show a “W” on the ledger and his bank account is accordingly larger, in every other sense, this weekend was a humbling experience for boxing’s one true transcendent star.
Pacquiao maintained that he took a third fight with Juan Manuel Marquez to definitively settle the issue of who won their previous two bouts, which had been ruled a draw and a split decision in Pacquiao’s favor. On both occasions, large enough sections of the gladiatorial gallery had crowned Marquez the winner, making it an eternal niggling asterisk on the Filipino’s Hall of Fame CV.
So how vehemently vexing it must have been for Pacquiao to be interviewed amid an ocean of jeering after the judges awarded him yet another victory against his most capable foe.
Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, along with the majority of the press corps, claimed we would see a knockout. We didn’t. Marquez’s age and bloated size would be vanquished by the younger, lithe and mercurial Pacquiao, many asserted. Not the case.
But the real cherry on this not-so-trifling matter is that Pacquiao’s camp now seems to be avoiding a fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr., something the boxing world has lusted after for years. The two have been verbal sparring partners of late and have fought pitched battles in the courts, but it seems perhaps the war — in the media at least — may have been won by Mayweather.
