Manny Pacquiao’s Draw Shows Boxing Legend Should Finally Hang Them Up

OK, let’s dispense with some particulars first.

It was impressive that a 46-year-old Manny Pacquiao, a few weeks off a Hall of Fame induction and six years beyond his last victory, got himself into good enough competitive shape to go 12 rounds with an active fighter who was 3 when “Pac Man” won his first title.

And it was no less impressive that he performed well enough against Mario Barrios to warrant at least the majority draw that was announced after the fight, and perhaps the 116-112 score—which translates to 8-4 in rounds—he earned on the B/R combat scorecard.

But those accolades don’t make another reality any less true.

It should be the last time he climbs into a ring for anything beyond a ceremonial wave.

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Though he retained the competitive muscle memory to out-skill and out-hustle a man 16 years younger, that hardly indicates Pacquiao, whose last win came against Keith Thurman in 2019, still has the stuff to compete on anything beyond a middling level.

Lest anyone forget, the match with Barrios wasn’t pursued because the reigning WBC champ was considered the cream of the crop at 147 pounds.

The 34-year-old is listed well behind fellow title-holders Jaron Ennis (WBA) and Brian Norman Jr. (WBO) in the latest divisional rankings on BoxRec, and placed behind Ennis, Norman and Lithuanian tough guy Eimantas Stanionis in The Ring’s final pre-fight tally.

The Prime Video broadcast team claimed Saturday that the fight was made at the suggestion of Pacquiao’s wife, Jinkee, who saw Barrios struggle to a split-decision draw against a pedestrian Abel Ramos on the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson undercard last November and figured he was on a level that her diminished husband could still surpass.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

Ex-140-pound champion Chris Algieri, a former Pacquiao opponent who moderated Saturday’s viewer chat on PPV.com, echoed the sentiment during fight week. He suggested Barrios’ style was reminiscent of other taller fighters—he is 6’ to Pacquiao’s 5’6”—who leaned heavily on their front foot and were sitting ducks for his in-and-out style.

“Oscar De La Hoya was a left hooker and a jabber,” Algieri said.

“He was very heavy on that front foot at times, especially when he fought Manny. (Antonio) Margarito was always a front-foot fighter because he's a hooker and he wanted to bang with you. All those characteristics are tailor-made. I think, as people saw things in Mario, they were like ‘You know what, we can beat this guy.’”

But not anyone else of welterweight substance.

“He's not fighting Brian Norman,” Algieri said. “He's not fighting Jaron Ennis. He was not coming back to fight Terence Crawford. Those are styles that were just not going to play the right role. Mario Barrios, though, does.”

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

The younger man fared moderately well in the first handful of rounds when he appeared confident and set the pace for his older, smaller foe. But Pacquiao’s superior speed was clear by the middle rounds, and he consistently won exchanges by throwing flashy, if not exactly devastating, blows and escaping before Barrios could reply.

Barrios became assertive again down the stretch and swept the final three rounds on all three scorecards, salvaging the 6-6 deadlock on two and earning a 7-5 margin on the other.

Both he and Pacquiao said they thought they’d won, and both indicated interest in a rematch that’d give the Filipino another shot at becoming both the first Hall of Famer to return for a title-fight win and the first fighter to hold belts in four different decades.

It’s an inconvenient hurdle for Pacquiao to clear again, given the prevailing Twitter theory that he’d have parlayed a Saturday victory into a call-out of generational rival Floyd Mayweather Jr. for a rematch of their 2015 blockbuster, or Algieri’s suggestion that the team would cast a line toward reigning lightweight champ Gervonta Davis.

JOHN GURZINSKI/Getty Images

Mayweather, now 48, retired four months after beating Pacquiao and returned in 2017 to defeat UFC crossover star Conor McGregor to run his record to 50-0. Davis, meanwhile, is just 30 years old but is the same height as Pacquiao, would have only a negligible reach advantage and is promoted by the same Premier Boxing Champions apparatus.

Either would ensure a financial windfall, but neither would do anything to enhance the legacy of a fighter who began his run at flyweight and captured titles all the way to 154 pounds while engaging in some of the generation’s most memorable rivalries.

And while Saturday’s effort may have woken up the echoes for the sentimental types among us, the specter of a graying ex-champion simply hanging around to feast on subpar opposition or compete for novelty recognition yields more sadness than celebration.

Enough is enough.