Will We See Manny Pacquiao Score a Knockout for the 1st Time in Years?
Once upon a time, a Manny Pacquiao KO was a stone-cold lock.
Over an 11-fight stretch that followed a scorecard loss to Erik Morales in 2006, the whirling Filipino dervish scored no fewer than eight inside-the-distance wins while traipsing across four weight classes.
And after a bludgeoning of Miguel Cotto in 2009 that yielded both a final-round stoppage and the battered Puerto Rican's WBO welterweight title belt, it seemed no man within 20 pounds possessed the stuff to stand in with him for a full 36 minutes.
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Suddenly, though, that run of unfettered violence seems the stuff of dusty scrapbooks.
In fact, by the time he enters the ring to face Jessie Vargas this Saturday night, Pacquiao's post-Cotto stay on the KO wagon will have reached 2,548 days—that's 364 weeks (or 6 years, 11 months and 22 days, if you prefer) —and covered the now-37-year-old's last 11 fights.
He's also lost three times since, been stopped once himself and walked away from the sport for a pseudo-retirement that lasted all of three months before the return against Vargas was announced.
But, lest anyone suggest otherwise, this is no ordinary boxing comeback.
Pacquiao is neither penniless nor shot, and, he insists, the weekend date with an opponent 10 years his junior—Vargas was five years old when the seven-division champ turned pro—might just remind skeptics of the days when a foe's survival to the final bell was considered a newsworthy event.
"I will try to establish my will over his early in the fight," Pacquiao told Bleacher Report.
"I will need to dictate the terms early. Freddie and I have three game plans for him. He is a young and strong champion. His height and reach are also factors that I will need to overcome. I do not want to give anything away, but if you watch my fights against Oscar De La Hoya and Antonio Margarito you will see that my speed and footwork will be my key weapons in establishing my plan."
Such ferocity would be more than sufficient come Saturday.
The 2008 obliteration of De La Hoya was the Golden Boy's final fight and perhaps the signature win of Pacquiao's career, while the scorecard annihilation of Margarito two years later left the Mexican in the hospital with a fractured orbital bone and essentially ruined him as a main-event commodity.
And though Vargas, 27, is far younger than either De La Hoya and Margarito when they met their Waterloos, his comparative lack of main event accomplishment is no less glaring.
The Las Vegas resident was a unanimous-scorecard loser to Tim Bradley—a two-time Pacquiao victim—in his second-to-last fight in June 2015 and worked his way onto the big-fight radar by picking up the WBO title Bradley ditched in order to secure his own rubber match with the Filipino.
Had Vargas not held a belt, Pacquiao conceded at the press conference announcing the fight, his phone would not have rung.
"Vargas is a champion and I want to be a champion again," he said.
To do so, he'll need only hit a soft target.
Like De La Hoya and Margarito before him, Vargas holds significant edges in both height (5'10" to 5'5 ½") and reach (71" to 67"), but he'll be far behind even a late-30s version of Pacquiao when it comes to alacrity with hands and feet. He was outworked and out-landed in June 2015 by the same Bradley whom Pacquiao routed 10 months later and became a champion only by stopping a foe—Sadam Ali—who'd never beaten anyone among the welterweight division's top-15 commodities.
The Independent World Boxing Rankings labeled Ali 12th-best at 147 pounds at the time of the Vargas fight, which means Pacquiao has beaten more incumbent WBO champions (two)—Cotto in 2009 and Bradley in 2014—in the weight class than Vargas has beaten top-10 contenders (zero).
It's little wonder, then, that Freddie Roach is spending as much time discussing future bouts for his top training charge as he is concerning himself with a real weekend threat.
"He's been more explosive in training. He's been showing me a lot of the old Manny Pacquiao," Roach told Keith Idec of BoxingScene.com. "I can see him knocking Vargas out.
"He's a young kid, he's not a big puncher and I think Manny can walk right through him. If he wants a rematch with Mayweather, he's gonna have to fight like that."
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