By Chris Williams: 37-year-old former two division world champion Zab Judah (42-9, 29 KOs) will be spending some time in the camp of Floyd Mayweather Jr (47-0, 26 KOs) to help him get ready for his May 2nd fight against Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Judah will be sparring with Mayweather to help him prepare for the southpaw stance and the hand speed of the 36-year-old Pacquiao.
Judah obviously isn’t the same fighter that he once was back in the early 2000s, but he’s still plenty fast of hand, and he’s got the southpaw stance that Mayweather needs to take a look at to get ready for the Filipino star.
Judah has used his experience and knowledge of the fight game to analyze the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, and he sees Mayweather winning this fight due to his superior defense. While Judah thinks Pacquiao has very fast hands and good power, he doesn’t see him being able to penetrate Mayweather’s defense to land his shots.
Judah sees Mayweather’s defense as being too much for Pacquiao in this fight.
“I’ll be working with Floyd,” Judah said via esnewsreporting.com. “Defense is the key. I think the defense Floyd has is going to be the key to this fight. I think the barrage of punches he [Pacquiao] thinks he’s going to land on Floyd, I don’t think Floyd’s going to get hit with them,” Judah said.
Judah will do a good job of mimicking Pacquiao’s fighting style in order to give Mayweather good preparation for the Pacquiao fight. Judah’s speed, power and southpaw stance will give Mayweather all the preparation he needs to get ready for Pacquiao.
It’s definitely going to be a real problem for Pacquiao to try and land his power shots against Mayweather if Floyd decides he doesn’t want to get hit in this fight. If Mayweather makes that his choice that he’s not going to be getting hit on May 2nd, then Pacquiao is going to be stuck trying to beat Mayweather in a defensive battle.
Unfortunately, Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach has never taught him how to be a defensive fighter. Roach’s total focus with Pacquiao all these years has been to train him as an all-out slugger, who forgets about his defense and just charges ahead, oftentimes straight into punches, as we saw in Pacquiao’s knockout loss to Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012.
Pacquiao’s problem is he seems to be training with the thought of him looking to overwhelm Mayweather’s Philly shell defense. Pacquiao thinks he’s going to be fighting a stationary Mayweather on May 2nd, and that he’ll be able to overwhelm him by throwing over 100 punches per round in the same way Pacquiao overwhelmed Miguel Cotto and Joshua Clottey many moons ago. But Mayweather probably isn’t going to fight in a stationary manner on 5/2, because he’s got to know that if he does that, he’ll be put in a situation where he’ll need to try and match Pacquiao’s punch volume for the full 12 rounds.
Mayweather knows it’s useless to try and match Pacquiao’s punch output, so don’t expect him to even try.
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