By Chris Williams: In trying to figure out why Manny Pacquiao was blasted out so viciously by Juan Manuel Marquez last month I’m kind of torn between wondering whether the 39-year-old Marquez was hitting harder in this fight than he had in the three prior fights the Filipino star or if Pacquiao simply can’t take hard shots anymore.
Pacquiao was hit by two hard punches from Marquez last December and both shots put Pacquiao down flat on the canvas. We hadn’t seen that in the last 8 years in their previous fights. Pacquiao had always been able to take Marquez’s best shots without getting close to falling down from the impact. Marquez didn’t hit Pacquiao any more than he had in the previous three fights. The only difference I could see is that Pacquiao couldn’t take the shots.
It’s easy to say that the knockouts were the result of Marquez’s new muscled physique and that because of the extra muscle he put on with the help of his strength and conditioning coach Angel Heredia that he was punching harder. It’s difficult to say this was the actual cause of Pacquiao’s demise because there’s no way of measuring Marquez’s punching power from before to compare it to how hard he was punching last month.
I have a feeling that Marquez would have knocked Pacquiao down with the same punches if he landed them at any point in their previous fights. Pacquiao took those shots flush without seeing them coming. That’s a sign of a fighters’ reaction time not being quick enough to see the punches coming. It’s not as if Marquez threw the two knockdown punches with a lot of speed. They looked no faster than the punches he’d thrown in their other fights. The difference here is that Pacquiao was too slow to react to them and was knocked down each time.
Part of being susceptible to getting hurt is being too slow to react to punches in flight or too slow to see them coming. That’s all part of aging. When you’re reaction times deteriorates with age you find yourself getting hit with shots that you never would have when you were younger. I think this is what’s happening with Pacquiao. He’s getting hit with shots that he’s too slow to react to and he’s getting hurt.
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