Pacquiao-Marquez 24/7 episode one = A lot of wasted video by HBO

By Dave Lahr: Well, I just finished watching Pacquiao-Marquez 24/7 episode one and must say it’s one of the most wasteful episodes I’ve ever seen before. It reminded me of a student paper thrown together with a lot of filler to get to a certain word length.

Instead of seeing a lot of good training between the two fighters, we the boxing fans got to see a lot of video of the first two fights between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez, along with video of Pacquiao’s sparring partner Jorge Linares getting beaten up by Antonio DeMarco and stopped in the 11th round. What a waste.

We already saw the Linares-DeMarco fight last week, and we don’t need to have the focus put on those guys. I got a kick how Pacquiao was saying that Linares is so similar to Marquez in fighting style, and then we watch Linares get stopped by DeMarco. Yeah, great comparison, Pacquiao. I’d say Linares and Marquez are about as similar as Marquez and Pacquiao. There is no comparison whatsoever.

So much of this episode begged for editing and should have never been made it to HBO on Saturday. We got to see a couple of Pacquiao’s helpers sparring with each other. Why this was shown? I have no idea.

A good portion of the broadcast centered around Alex Ariza, the strength and conditioning coach for Pacquiao. They showed Ariza putting through Pacquiao’s various resistance exercises and agility drills, all of which I see absolutely no benefit at all to Pacquiao. If anything, all the resistance exercises are adding muscle to Pacquiao but at the cost of slowing him down in terms of hand speed and ring movement.

If I was in charge of Pacquiao as his promoter, I’d lose Ariza so fast his head would be spinning. I feel that boxers are much better off training in the ring rather than wasting time developing muscle groups that will only slow them down. Since Ariza has been with Pacquiao, he looks a lot slower to me than he was before Ariza started working on his conditioning. But it was sad to see Pacquiao wasting valuable time on the various exercises that Ariza was putting him through. I don’t see any of this helping Pacquiao’s hand speed, which is his best asset. Too much time was spent on showing Ariza and his flashy car. That needed to go. I don’t care what kind of car Ariza drives and he’s not someone boxing fans need to be focusing on. Pacquiao is where the camera needed to be pointed.

And all the video of Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, needed to go as well. If you’ve seen one video of Roach gloating about Pacquiao’s success you’ve seen him all. It’s all so redundant and forlorn.

The footage of Marquez in Mexico was a lot better, as we saw him sparring and working out on the track. I thought the video of Marquez eating dinner with his wife and kids really didn’t serve any purpose. I would have cut that video out. It was boring and not relevant.

My grade on Pacquiao-Marquez episode 1 is a ‘D’. It wasn’t as bad as some of the other HBO 24/7 series episodes, but it was still a very bad episode crammed full of pointless video. I got the impression that it was just some guy with a camera making it up on the fly without any real thought of direction.

With Pacquiao you’ve got to get emotion out of him to make it interesting. It’s not good when he’s staring looking wooden. We have to put him situations where he succeed by showing him showing anger, sadness or some kind of real emotion other than glee or an emotionless stare. I thought HBO blew it with this episode. Marquez was perfect just as we was. He’s a natural and has natural charisma, but the restaurant footage, as well as the emphasis on his trainer Nacho Beristain was a waste. I’d have cut that out of the video.

33 Responses to “Pacquiao-Marquez 24/7 episode one = A lot of wasted video by HBO”