By Raj Parmar: If there was one thing Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KO’s) learned about pound for pound king Floyd Mayweather (46-0, 26 KO’s) after their clash back in May of this year, it’s that Floyd really is extremely hard to hit.
Mayweather and Maidana will go at it again in a couple of weeks and both fighters are anxious to show they are the superior man after what was a close fight in the first encounter. Maidana especially is fired up as he feels he was not able to connect cleanly on Mayweather the first go-around and is eager to see the results once his punches land with full force on the welterweight king.
“The first fight I think that my attack, the pressure, was very good, but I didn’t do well with my distance control. I think I smothered a lot of my punches” Maidana stated on a media conference call a few days ago, “I wasn’t able to really catch him with good solid shots, being able to extend my punches, and that’s one of the things that I’m working on. I don’t really think I ever hurt him, but this time around if I get him with good solid shots I think I can hurt him.”
Marcos was able to pin Floyd against the ropes many times in the early rounds and his strength and constant aggression was clearly making Floyd very uncomfortable. A lot of Maidana’s shots however bounced off Floyd’s shoulders, arms or just outright missed. Out of the 858 punches thrown by Maidana he was able to land 221 of them, which is about 26%. Maidana plans to increase these figures by breaking through Mayweather’s legendary shoulder roll defense.
“The way to counter that, his defensive moves with the shoulder roll and the arms and all that, I’m going to hit him there. I’m going to hit him in the shoulder,” Maidana vowed, “I’m going to hit him in the arms, and come eighth, ninth round he’s going to be so tired from all the punches that he’s not going to be able to defend himself anymore.”
This tactic of hitting the arms to disable a fighter from defending himself is similar to what heavyweight great Rocky Marciano did to heavyweight contender Roland La Starza in September of 1953. After a close fight which Rocky won a couple years earlier over La Starza, they engaged in a rematch in which La Starza was using his defensive abilities to frustrate Marciano. Rocky’s trainer told him to bang La Starza’s arms until he could no longer defend himself.
Rocky then mercilessly attacked the arms and upper body of La Starza over the course of the fight and by the tenth round, La Starza was struggling to even lift his gloves to protect his face. Mariano then proceeded to knock La Starza out in the eleventh round and it was revealed post fight that La Starza has chipped bones in his elbows and damaged blood vessels in his arms.
Maidana will be hoping for similar results as it will take a herculean effort to bring down one of the best defensive fighters the sport has seen. However as Rocky showed that night in September of 1953, punches thrown at the arms and elbows of an opponent does not always necessarily mean those punches are being wasted.
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