By Chris Williams: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya is counting on the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao bout taking place on May 2nd. De La Hoya believes the fight will be great for the sport of boxing due to the huge amount of attention the fight will get from the casual fans.
With that said, De La Hoya thinks the 36-year-old Pacquiao simply has too much wear and tear for him to beat a skilled fighter like Mayweather. Because of that, De La Hoya is picking Mayweather to beat Pacquiao soundly.
De La Hoya didn’t mention the fights that aged Pacquiao, but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that his four fights with Juan Manuel Marquez probably did most of the damage. Pacquiao took a real beating in those four fights, and obviously him being knocked clean out by Marquez in their fourth fight didn’t help. Pacquiao also took a lot of punishment in his fights against Antonio Margarito and Erik Morales.
“I’m crossing my fingers that it happens, because it’ll be great for boxing and great for the sport,” De La Hoya said via esnewsreporting.com. “I would have liked to have seen that fight five years ago where most likely Pacquiao would have demolished Floyd Mayweather. I think the fact that Manny Pacquiao has been in more wars than Floyd Mayweather because obviously we know that his [Mayweather] style is more of a running, boxing style and he doesn’t get hit. Manny Pacquiao has been in a lot of wars, and it’s a given that he’s had a lot of great fights inside the ring. I think Floyd Mayweather will have an advantage over Manny because of the wear and tear,” De La Hoya said.
I don’t agree that Pacquiao would have beaten Mayweather five years ago. That was around the time that Pacquiao defeated Joshua Clottey in 2010, and he wasn’t looking so great around that time. Pacquiao was probably at his best when he defeated Miguel Cotto in 2009, but that version of Pacquiao was really sloppy and easy to hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xo1gmHnqiE
If Mayweather had fought Pacquiao back then, he would have had countless opportunities to land his pinpoint counter shots against the wild-fighting Filipino star.
It’s nice that De La Hoya is looking back in time and wanting to create a make believe scenario of what would have happened had Mayweather and Pacquiao fought each other back then, but the reality is we’ll never know what would have happened. All we can do is base the past on what happens on May 2nd.
If Pacquiao gets out-boxed by Mayweather, then there’s a reasonable chance that we would have seen the same thing happen back then, because five years isn’t that long ago. If Pacquiao doesn’t have the skills to beat Mayweather right now, then it’s likely that he didn’t have the skills to beat Mayweather back then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkyjQC8bMnk
Pacquiao is going to need to change his fighting style if he wants to have a chance at beating Mayweather, because his sloppy fighting style is going to leave him open for Mayweather’s counters all night long.
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