De La Hoya: Pacquiao needs to fight with anger against Mayweather

By Boxing News - 03/03/2015 - Comments

delahoya7777By Chris Williams: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya believes that Manny Pacquiao’s best chance of beating Floyd Mayweather Jr on May 2nd is for the 36-year-old Pacquiao to fight with anger for the entire 12 round fight.

Just how Pacquiao can accomplish that for the entire 12 round fight is the big question. Fighting with anger is something you can only briefly do for a round or two at best, and unless you have huge punching power to score a quick knockout, you’re probably going to wind up tired and disappointed when your opponent is still standing there firing back.

“Pacquiao needs to fight this fight angry,” said Da La Hoya via ESPN Deportes. “He has to attack and throw a lot of punches. He can’t get tired. He has to use his feet to move laterally. He has to use his angles. If he does that, he has a good chance to win.”

It sounds like De La Hoya wants to see Pacquiao get knocked out, because that’s likely what’s going to happen if he fights with anger against Mayweather.
De La Hoya is asking the impossible of Pacquiao, because he can’t fight with anger and not get tired.

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Pacquiao tends to get tired anyway in his fights. The fatigue is a problem that Pacquiao has due to all the useless hopping up and down that he does for three minutes of every round. If you look at the way Pacquiao fights, he’s always wasting energy with all the bouncing he does on his feet. His trainer Freddie Roach should have weaned Pacquiao from this needless bouncing years ago, but instead Roach hasn’t changed it.

If Pacquiao winds up throwing a lot of punches like he did in the Joshua Clottey fight years ago, I don’t think Pacquiao will have anything left after six rounds. I don’t think Pacquiao can fight like that anymore. He did it five years ago when he was 31, but I suspect he’ll gas out quickly if he tries to throw over 1,000 punches against Mayweather on May 2nd.

If Pacquiao tries to do that while fighting with anger, I see him blowing a piston and winding up too tired to fight at some point. Mayweather would have a field day finding targets for his precise punches if Pacquiao is fighting with anger and looking to throw a mess of punches every round. In that case, I think Pacquiao could use a cooler head in the corner like Alex Ariza to calm him down and try to get him to think clearly and fight smart. Too bad Ariza is with Mayweather now and not Pacquiao.

“If Mayweather gets on his bicycle and boxes from distance using his jab, just doing enough to win the round, it could be a very boring fight,” De La Hoya said. “I think the excitement of this fight is in Pacquiao’s hands and he has to attack every second of every round.”

It might be boring to De La Hoya if Mayweather chooses to box, but a lot of boxing fans will see it as an exciting fight. Fans love to see Mayweather box his opponents instead of slugging it out with them, and I can see a lot of pleased fans if he chooses to stay on his bike for 12 rounds. Mayweather will make a lot of boxing fans happy if he fights without getting hit, because this is the style that made him famous.

“The fight really only matters financially now,” De La Hoya said. “It’s going to probably end up having 3 million pay-per-view buys. But in terms of all-time great events, it’s not Ali-Frazier. It could have been if it happened five years ago.”

I think it’s academic that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will wind up as a bigger event than the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight of 1971. There’s so much interest in the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight right now, and I see it as a much bigger event than the Ali-Frazier fight from 44 years ago.



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