By Matthias Predonzan: I hate to admit it but Nico was right. I mean, he was wrong when he saw Manny Pacquiao defeating Floyd Mayweather Jr., but he was right on something else, honestly much more important.
We watched the fight together, as we do since probably 1983, every time a great fight is on the line and we kept our scorecards.
I had a point for Floyd, he got one for Manny.
The day after, I checked out Boxingnews24 for news; there was an article, reporting the Compubox numbers of the fight.
Mayweather didn’t win the fight; he dominated it, accordingly with the statistics.
I asked to myself? How can be that? But then I decided to use this great discovery to tease my friend Nico and I called him, telling him the harsh truth.
Then I looked at a few post fight interviews.
It was really true, everybody that counts, in the world of boxing, agreed with the fact that Mayweather dominated and schooled Pacquiao.
Only the great Evander Holyfield candidly stated that he thought Pacquiao won.
When I visited Nico some days after, he was waiting for me with his laptop open; we watched the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in slow motion and counted any single punch that landed.
The result was nothing close to the Compubox numbers. The fight was extremely close and we had 2 rounds of advantage for Mayweather; he won a few rounds with the very narrow margin of one or two more punches landed.
So why everybody saw Mayweather dominating Pacquiao if OBJECTIVELY it was not true?
Nico called it the Money factor.
Mayweather is the incarnation of the most important thing in the world. His name means Money, literally and this is so strong that everybody believes that nothing can be stronger than the Money.
In nowadays boxing, as in the rest of human activities, only money matters. A world title worth nothing. What counts is only the capacity of generating PPV numbers.
When was last time Mayweather (or Pacquiao, Miguel Cotto, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez) fought a mandatory contender?
Going back to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, there is a kind of psychological subjection that afflicts the mainstream boxing commentators and the fact that almost all of them are on the same line made possible that the objective reality was overthrown.
So when Mayweather received, many times, punches on the face from Pacquiao, not many punches, not too strong ones but punches on the face and then he shook his head that nothing happened, we believe that.
When any other boxer forced to the ropes get hit and shake his head, we know that he is not honest, because we saw the punches to land. But with Mayweather is different, we religiously believe him and think that we must have been wrong.
We believe that Pacquiao is finished, that he was schooled by Mayweather but this is not objectively true.
There is a simple way to know if what Nico said is real or not: take 72 minutes of your time, a piece of paper and a pen, and you will see that I was right, Floyd won the fight, but just a very close one and we are all victims of a great disguise.
Ring generalship was at Floyd’s side but effective aggressiveness was for Pacquiao and even if I’m a great admirer of the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., it makes me sad to read all the statements that are now diminishing the greatness of Pacquiao.
It is funny and paradoxical: it looks like we are all victims of the Money factor but when Floyd says that Pacquiao is now the best P4P fighter, we pretend not having understood.