Roach: What can Ariza tell Mayweather?

By Boxing News - 03/12/2015 - Comments

Freddie Roach(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach doesn’t see how former Pacquiao strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza can help Floyd Mayweather Jr prepare for his mega-fight against Pacquiao on May 2nd.

Roach feels that everything that Ariza can tell Mayweather would be useless, and Roach doesn’t see Ariza as being able to create enough of an impact to beat the aging 36-year-old Pacquiao.

Roach dumped Ariza as Pacquiao’s trainer because he felt that he was going beyond his own job scope. However, there are some boxing fans who feel that Ariza is the one who should be given the most credit for having helped Pacquiao bulk up and develop his power after he moved up from the lighter weights.

Ariza obviously played a huge part in increasing the strength of Pacquiao when he was coming up in weights, and it’s surprising that he was let go given what he helped Pacquiao accomplish. Roach fired Ariza after checking it out with Pacquiao.

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Roach then hired on Justin Fortune as Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach. However, Pacquiao still hasn’t scored a knockout since Ariza was let go, so that suggests that Ariza had to have been doing something right for Pacquiao to have been such a knockout terror while he was working with him.

“I’m really happy that Alex Ariza is in that other corner,” Roach said via the latimes.com. “What can he tell Mayweather? That Manny’s fast? Yeah. The moves that Manny makes? No. He doesn’t understand boxing like that. He’s a strength coach. And he goes over his boundaries every time.”

I think Ariza did a great job while working with Pacquiao. With the great job that Ariza did in increasing Pacquiao’s punching power, he can do the same thing with Mayweather. Even if Ariza doesn’t work the same magic with Mayweather that he did with Pacquiao, I think it’s a positive to have him on the team.

Ariza is more of a scientific guy with all the way he measures the vitamins, body fat and the strength of his fighters. He’s a modern strength trainer, and that can have nothing but a positive effect on Mayweather for this fight.

If Ariza can help increase Mayweather’s punching power and conditioning by just 10 percent, he’ll have more than worth it for Mayweather to have him on his team. I think Pacquiao made a mistake in letting Ariza go, because with the positive track record he had with Pacquiao, he was more than worth it having on his team.

Instead of Roach seeing it as a negative that Ariza was looking to help out in other areas, he should have seen it as a positive. This means that Ariza is a go getter, someone who is willing to do extra to learn and help out.

Employees like that are extremely valuable. Rather than firing Ariza, he should have been promoted and given more responsibility. That’s obviously a missed opportunity for Pacquiao, because he could have given Ariza the assistant trainer job, which is now held by Buboy Fernandez.



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