By Chris Williams: WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) hit the lottery in getting picked out by Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) to be his next opponent on May 3rd, but Maidana is already being dismissed as little more than the next sacrificial lamb by boxing fans due to his slow hands and feet. But Maidana’s strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza, who built a name as being the one that turned Manny Pacquiao into a powerful welterweight, believes that Maidana is going to shock the world by beating Mayweather on May 3rd.
Ariza is going to be buildig up Maidana’s body and making him the same powerful fighter that he did in transforming Pacquiao from a lightweight to a welterweight.
“I have to make my guy [Maidana] into a physical machine,” Ariza said to Fighthype. “I’m preparing my guy to go in there and win and I think we have a great shot to win if we get to him. Nobody thought we could beat [Adrien] Broner, but we did. Probably nobody is going to think we can beat Mayweather, but we will. He gets tired like everybody else. He gets hurt like anybody else.”
Ariza plans on upping the conditioning for Maidana to a whole new level for this fight, because he realizes that unless Maidana is at his best in terms of being in shape and throwing with better hand speed than in his previous fights, he’ll stand no chance. But Ariza feels that Maidana has a chance to beat Mayweather now because he tends to stay stand in front of his opponents now compared to earlier in his career when he was purely defensive and not giving his opponents any chance of landing anything at all. Ariza feels that Mayweather gives opportunities to his opponents now compared to in the past, and that’s where he thinks Maidana can take advantage of the 37-year-old Mayweather by nailing him with a big shot that can hurt him.
It’s going to be awfully difficult for Maidana to have any chance of beating Mayweather in this fight unless Ariza can get him in the best shape he’s ever been before. It’s also going to take a great game plan by Maidana’s trainer Robert Garcia to come up with something that hasn’t been used before by any of Mayweather’s opponents. There probably isn’t anything that Garcia can come up with that hasn’t been tried before against Mayweather, so it might come down to Maidana going out there and trying his hardest to land a big power shot to stun Mayweather.
Being able to fight Adrien Broner last December was the perfect warmup fight for Maidana to get ready for the Mayweather fight. You couldn’t pick the more perfect opponent in the welterweight division to get Maidana ready to face Mayweather. The problem is Mayweather is a much superior fighter than Broner, and he’s not someone that will stand in front of Maidana with his feet cemented to the floor for 12 rounds. Mayweather will use movement with his legs and not just with his upper body the way that Broner did.
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