By Chris Williams: Ring veteran Bernard Hopkins sees the May 2nd fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao as being a competitive match-up for the first 5-6 rounds while Mayweather slowly figures the 36-year-old Pacquiao out.
Once Mayweather understands what Pacquiao’s doing, he’ll then adapt in the second half of the fight and quickly pick Pacquiao apart and have an easy time of it. In other words, you can see it as a similar type of situation as Mayweather’s fights against Miguel Cotto, Zab Judah, Oscar De La Hoya and Marcos Maidana.
In those fights, it was fairly competitive for the first 5 to 6 rounds, but in the second half of the fight, Mayweather made adjustments and he pulled away in winning 12 round decisions.
“The first 5 or 6 rounds, it’s going to be a back and forth fight because of Pacquiao’s aggression. But Pacquiao is not the best defensive fighter,” Hopkins said via Fighthype.com. “Mayweather is going to sharp shoot, and not only is Mayweather going to fight back when he needs to, but after that 6th round, it’s done.”
It’s probable that we’re going to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight playout just as Hopkins says, with Mayweather and Pacquiao being a competitive bout for the first five to six rounds, and then it becoming totally one-sided in the second half of the bout. But I also think there’s an equally high probability that the fight will be one-sided from the start of the fight just as the second fight between Mayweather and Maidana was.
Mayweather wasn’t going to play around in that fight and give Maidana a handicap like he’d done in their first fight in May of 2014. Mayweather used his jab and a lot of movement around the ring to speak Maidana and keep him from landing his shots.
Movement is a real killer for Pacquiao, as he’s only 5’6”, and he doesn’t have the height or reach to land his shots against a fighter like Mayweather when he’s fighting on the move. Mayweather can make this fight very one-sided from the get go if he chooses to use his jab and stay out of range of the 36-year-old Pacquiao.
I don’t see Mayweather wanting to give rounds to Pacquiao in the first half of the fight, because with the way the wacky scoring we’ve seen in Las Vegas fights, Mayweather would wind up losing the fight still even if he totally clowns Pacquiao in the last six rounds.
If you saw Pacquiao’s first three fights against Juan Manuel Marquez, it could be tough for Mayweather to win a decision with Pacquiao if he only dominates the last six rounds of the fight and not the entire fight. That’s why I think we’ll see Mayweather getting down to business straight from the start on May 2nd, and not letting Pacquiao get any rounds in the bank, and not letting him get his confidence up.
If the fight gets really out of hand after the 6th, we could see an increasingly more desperate Pacquiao taking chances and getting really sloppy with his fighting style. If Pacquiao becomes totally reckless like he was in his last fight against Marquez, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mayweather knocks him completely out cold.
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