By Chris Williams: Freddie Roach says he’s going to be paid well for training Manny Pacquiao for the Floyd Mayweather Jr fight on May 2nd. Roach and Pacquiao met at the start of the training camp to discuss what Roach should be paid for the fight.
Apparently the negotiations, which only involved Roach and Pacquiao, went really well for Roach and it ended with a handshake. Roach, 55, isn’t saying what he’ll be getting paid to train Pacquiao for the fight, but he does say it’ll be the most money that he’s ever received before for any fight.
Pacquiao is making $100 million, possibly even more than that for the fight depending on how many pay-per-view buys are sold.
It’s unclear how much of a factor Roach is as the trainer for Pacquiao. If you look at Pacquiao’s old fights before Roach was his trainer, Pacquiao looks pretty much the same to me. If anything, I think Pacquiao was a lot better before he was being trained by Roach. Other than teaching Pacquiao to use his right hand, I don’t see much of a footprint from Roach in changing his fighting style.
“We were in the locker room and the subject [of my pay for the fight] came up,” Roach said via Yahoo Sports. “He wanted to know what I wanted. I said, ‘What do you want to give me?’ He just kept saying, ‘Tell me what you want.’ So I told him to go work it out with [his agent]. And Manny said, ‘No. No. I want to do it with you. And so we spent 20 seconds in the locker room and he said, ‘What if I pay you this much?’ And I shook his hand and said, ‘Deal. Thank you.’ It’s more money than I’ve ever seen in my life and it was very, very fair. Way more than fair, honestly.
If Pacquiao loses to Mayweather by a lopsided decision or a knockout, then there might be some fingers pointed at Roach. The guy that trains a fighter tends to be in the hot seat if things don’t go as they should, and I think Roach is going to be second-guessed by a lot of boxing fans if Pacquiao gets beaten especially bad in this fight.
In Pacquiao’s loss to Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012, some boxing fans put the loss on Roach’s shoulders, because he was the one who was repeatedly pushing Pacquiao to be more aggressive for the fight. That’s not the right approach you want to take for an aging fighter who is facing an expert counter puncher.
Telling Pacquiao to be more aggressive made it easier for Marquez to land his counter shots, because Pacquiao was literally running into shots all night long in that fight. In hindsight, Roach could have done a better job of having Pacquiao be more cautious in the fight instead of having him fight aggressively.
This is why I think we could see Roach wind up looking really bad if Pacquiao gets dominated by the counter-punching Mayweather on May 2nd. If Pacquiao doesn’t fight in a smart manner, the blame has to be put on the trainer’s shoulders.
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