Mayweather read Pacquiao’s eyes and saw shock

By Boxing News - 04/25/2015 - Comments

floyd5551By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. says that when he met Manny Pacquiao last January at the Miami Heat game, he saw a look of shock in the eyes of the 36-year-old Filipino that he read as a look of surprise at how much bigger Mayweather was than him. Mayweather says he can read people’s body language and clearly read Pacquiao’s during that meeting.

It’s unknown if Pacquiao was expecting Mayweather to be smaller, but after meeting him, he now knows what he’s up against on May 2nd in their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Perhaps for this reason Pacquiao has bulked up to a reported 150 pounds for the fight.

This is more than Pacquiao normally weighs, and it’s a pretty good sign that there’s some concern on his part about his size that he needs to be as big as possible for him to be able to compete against Mayweather.

“You can read a guy’s body language. When Pacquiao first saw me in Miami, he didn’t expect to see me over there at the basketball game,” Mayweather said via espn.co.uk. “He looked shocked, like – ‘damn, he’s taller than me. He’s bigger than what I thought he was’. Just by being in the sport for so long, you’re able to read body language and to read a fighter’s eyes. Normally when I face an opponent, they outweigh me by 17 to 20 pounds on fight nights. This has been going on for a good while now.”

Having a smaller Pacquiao to fight on May 2nd could work out really well for Mayweather because it would put him in the same situation he was in when he faced a smaller Juan Manuel Marquez in 2009. Like Pacquiao, Marquez tried to bulk up for the fight in order to compete against the bigger Mayweather, but all it really accomplished was making Marquez slower, easier to hit and less effective as a fighter.

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With Pacquiao weighing more for this fight than he’s weighed in the past, it could very well slow him down too, and put him in a situation where he’ll be easy pickings for Mayweather on May 2nd. The one thing that Pacquiao has going for him in this fight is his ability to move around the ring.

If you take that away from him due to him putting on extra muscle weight for this fight then he’s going to struggle by being slower and less agile than he normally is. This is the wrong fight for Pacquiao to be experimenting with his weight by bulking up. Pacquiao is too old to be adding this kind of bulk to his frame because it’s only going to put a lot of stress on his tiny legs and possibly lead to him getting cramps like the ones that he experienced earlier in this training camp for the Mayweather fight.

If Pacquiao is showing fear against Mayweather then we could see some of that reflected in the fight by him not thinking clearly and making smart decisions. A fighter who is afraid frequently is too cautious in the ring. Some frightened fighters also react in the opposite way by fighting recklessly in taking wild chances due to them being so desperate. This might be what we’ll see from Pacquiao on May 2nd.



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