Brandon Rios still in awe of Manny Pacquiao

By Boxing News - 04/05/2015 - Comments

rios78787By Chris Williams: After taking a one-sided beating at the hands of Manny Pacquiao in an arguably underserved fight with the Filipino star in November of 2013, former WBA lightweight champion Brandon Rios (33-2-1, 24 KOs) is still impressed with the skills that Pacquiao showed him in that fight.

Rios was especially impressed with the hand speed and the various punching angles that Pacquiao used to hit him in their fight in Macau, China.

Despite Rios being impressed with Pacquiao’s boxing skills, Rios still feels that unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. (47-0, 26 KOs) is going to get the better of Pacquiao in their fight next month on May 2nd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. This probably isn’t news that Pacquiao’s fans are going to like, but Rios just sees Mayweather as too smart and too talented a fighter for Pacquiao to beat him.

“Well when I fought Manny, that [expletive] was fast. He was so fast he makes super-fast people look not-fast,” Rios said via esnewsreporting.com.

One would hope that Rios isn’t including himself as being a “super-fast” fighter, because he’s clearly super slow and not even close to being fast. Pacquiao appears to have lost hand speed in the last six years, so you can’t really call him super-fast anymore. There are faster welterweights than him now, including Mayweather, who arguably always faster than him.

“Well when I fought Manny, that [expletive] was fast. He was so fast he makes super-fast people look not-fast.”

“And he was just awkward, bro,” Rios said. “I had some sparring guys, using lefties I thought I was doing good. I was doing great with them; then I got in the ring with Manny Pacquiao it was just a different story man. Different animal. He throws at different angles.”

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Pacquiao wasn’t awkward in the Rios fight. He pretty much used his same old in and out style of fighting that he always uses. The problem is that Rios was just too slow to handle the attacks that Pacquiao was making on him. There was no awkwardness from Pacquiao. It just looked like Rios was just too slow and limited to handle what Pacquiao was doing in the fight. That shouldn’t be all that surprising though because Rios had been handled by guys like Diego Chaves and Richard Abril in fights that Rios was given very, very controversial victories in those fights.

Rios was given the Pacquiao fight off the back of a loss to Mike Alvarado. It’s unclear why Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum thought it would be a good idea to put Rios in with him, but one thing is clear it was a super bad decision for him to have done that. The Pacquiao-Rios fight reportedly only brought in a little over 400,000 pay-per-view buys, making it the lowest selling fight for Pacquiao in many years. In hindsight, I’m sure Arum probably wished he could do that over and pick someone else to match Pacquiao up against rather than Rios because it was a bad idea.



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