By Matthias Predonzan: A lost opportunity never comes back. I do not think we will see a Manny Pacquiao – Brandon Rios II, after the not antagonistically interesting contest we saw in Macau, China last Saturday night.
All boxing experts were expecting Pacquiao’s better boxing skill and speed to prevail on Rios youthfulness and fighting spirit but everybody who saw the fight was not positively surprised from the way the fight developed.
No attempt from Rios to fight his kind of fight. He was all the time closed in a very tight guard and his responses to Pacquiao combinations, were always made with perfectly wrong timing: when Manny was long gone, sure not to get him and not to be counter-punched by him.
It’s not the first time we have seen this kind of match but I want to try to give my personal explanation of the reason of this particular situation.
To have a boxing fight you need a few mandatory ingredients: intuitively the first ingredient been 2 fighters, then a ring, a referee and least but not last an audience.
In Macau, we had 2 fighters put together with a quite clear purpose: to give the chance to Pacquiao to revenge his bad loss by KO against Juan Manuel Marquez with a big win, possibly by KO, to erase from the collective memory the image of him unconscious on the canvas and relaunch him at the top of the pound4 pound list.
Don’t get me wrong; Pacquiao is one of the best boxers alive, no doubt about it but to build up giant future pay-per-view events, having had 2 losses in his last 2 fights that deeply affected his market image, he needed to produce a different show.
So, the mega fight that many had forecast as one of the best of 2013 did not materialize.
Pacquiao did not force the action. Happy to score points and Rios, known as one of the most fearless boxers in the business was happy to lose by points, without even trying, as he said in a post fight interview, to knock out Pacquiao, – to not incur in the risk to get knock out himself-.
Does this make sense to you?
I do not think so, unless we do not find a bug in the boxing equation above.
I do not know how was looking the Macau show on TV. If something was smelling wrong, I know what was wrong to me attending the fight live.
It was the crowd.
The most of the attending people were mainland Chinese visiting Macau for gambling, who were in the Macau Arena because on the 24rd of November was scheduled a boxing match.
The very same people, I guess, wouldn’t have mind if instead of it a fake Sampras-Federer match was scheduled.
Everybody who stepped in a ring knows the difference between a sparring session and a fight: even in a tough sparring session, you do not have to prove something to hundred or thousand who paid a ticked to see you to fight and who knows what a boxing fight is about.
Ask to Carl Froch and George Groves why they fought a hell of a fight Saturday night.
But Sunday morning in Macau, the attendance was not of the same league or the passionate and competent who was in Nottingham a few hours before.
I was sure of it when on the mega screens appeared Miguel Angel Cotto who was one of the stars attending the event. Silence. No one cheered.
Followed immediately by Ruslan Provodnicov. Embarrassed silence again and a question floating in the Cotai Arena like a ghost: – who the hell are these guys? -. Then finally the audience got the right answer on hand and grabbed it exploding in a giant ovation: Paris Hilton had appeared on the screen.
So, if the equation of Bob Arum is to make coincident the future of economy with the future of boxing. I think that, after the outcome of Pacquiao-Rios fight, he should be well aware of the risk he is taking.
Sure he made a big extra amount of money organizing the fight in Macau instead of Vegas but in long term the pay-per-view numbers will reflect the fact that one of the key ingredients for a great fight recipe was missing at the Macau’s Venetian and consciously or not, the fighters were feeling it.
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