Arum: Pacquiao will beat Mayweather decisively

By Boxing News - 03/21/2015 - Comments

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By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says he’s noticed that Floyd Mayweather Jr doesn’t have the same ability to move around the ring like he did five years ago when Arum first attempted to put together a fight between Mayweather and his top money fighter Manny Pacquiao.

Arum believes that the foot speed that Mayweather has lost will hurt him a lot more than the speed that Pacquiao has lost in the past five years. Arum sees the loss of speed as being more of a problem for Mayweather, because his main asset is his defense rather than his offense.

Arum acknowledges that Pacquiao has lost speed, but he doesn’t see that as a problem due to Pacquiao is an offensive fighter. As such, Arum feels that Pacquiao will beat Mayweather by a decisive victory on May 2nd in their historical fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Manny is an offensive fighter. So whatever type of speed he’s lost is not as relevant as a guy who’s a defensive fighter,” said Arum via sports.inquirer.net. “I think Manny has been playing this fight over in his mind for five years. I think his game plan is terrific. I think he wins the fight decisively.”

I think losing speed is a problem no matter what kind of a fighter you are. If you lose hand speed it’s going to negatively impact your offense, because your shots will be seen and picked off by other fighters. If you lose speed it can definitely hurt your defense, especially if you’re unable to move like you did before. But in this case, I think is way off with his thoughts about Mayweather having lost his foot speed.

If you watch Mayweather’s last fight against Marcos Maidana last September, you can’t say that he’s lost his legs, because he moved almost as good as he did in his prime in the early 2000s.

I can see how it would potentially benefit Arum, trainer Freddie Roach and Pacquiao if they all keep talking about how Mayweather can’t move like he used to. If they can get Mayweather fooled into believing that he can’t move like he used to, then maybe he’ll become stationary so that Pacquiao will have a chance to win the fight. But if Mayweather ingoreds what seems like a ploy on their part then Pacquiao is likely going to get a boxing lesson when he gets in the ring with Mayweather on 5/2.

“There’s no question that Floyd’s legs have slowed up,” Arum said. “It’s very significant with Floyd, because his leg movement was part of his great defensive arsenal. And he doesn’t have that anymore. The legs are five years older than they were then. People who don’t follow boxing too much don’t understand how important legs are.”

Legs definitely are important, but I don’t think for a second that Mayweather has lost enough of his leg speed for Pacquiao to benefit in any way. If anything, I think Mayweather may have lost 10 percent of his leg speed from how he used to be able to move 15 years ago, but I think the 90 percent that Mayweather has left is more than enough for him to get the victory over Pacquiao.

I honestly believe that Pacquiao has lost a lot more of his leg speed than Mayweather has. I don’t see it even close. All you need to do is look at Pacquiao’s earlier fights before he moved up to the welterweight division. Pacquiao used to be able to move side to side and get in and get out without getting hit. But now he’s very slow and flat footed when he attacks his opponents.

Sure, Pacquiao hops around on the outside in between attacks, but it is useless movement without any real objective. Roach seemingly hasn’t done enough to help Pacquiao conserve energy by having him not hop around like a kangaroo in between his attacks. He’s now so slow that he gets hit frequently, and really no point in Pacquiao jumping in and out anymore. He would be far better off jumping in and staying in the pocket to throw his nonstop punches. But he’s not being told the right things obviously, because he’s still wasting time with his old style of fighting, which was suited for a guy 10 years younger than his current age.

Pacquiao is a clear example of a fighter who has aged, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he needs to change his fighting style to adapt to his aging. I know Pacquiao is into music. If you look at older musicians, they change their singing and guitar style to accommodate their aging. If they can no longer hit the high notes, they’ll get background singers who will take over at the exact moment in songs where they used to hit those high notes.

With a guitar player, they’ll tone down their playing and just strum as they get older, partly because they no longer have the finger dexterity that they had when they were younger, and partly because they’ve forgotten the how to play the song like they did when they were younger. With Pacquiao, he’s still trying to fight the same way he did years ago, and it’s not working for him. He looks slow, and he can no longer move in quickly. He tries to do it like he did before, but now he’s moving in flat-footed and is easy to hit. Pacquiao is going to be picked off all night long by Mayweather on May 2nd unless he changes his fighting style to accommodate for his age.



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