By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach has finally arrived in the Philippines to join Manny Pacquiao’s training, which has already started without Roach. The plan is to possibly get the 35-year-old Pacquiao sparring this week with his sparring partner Lydell Rhodes. He’s got a fighting style similar to WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley, and he should do most of the sparring with Pacquiao unless something unforeseen happens, like Rhodes being dismissed from the camp for one reason or another.
Pacquiao has been training with his assistant trainer/helper Buboy Fernandez for weeks already, and he’s now ready for Roach to start the main portion of the training. Roach is now going to work on trying to somehow bring out the lost aggression in Pacquiao. How he’s going to do that is anyone’s guess. You expect Roach to give Pacquiao a lot of whispering pep talks to try and get into his mind to bring out the killer instinct that was lost 5 years ago after Pacquiao’s last knockout win over Miguel Cotto.
Pacquiao went from being a strong finisher after that fight to a frequently tired-looking fighter who would touch gloves with his opponents and let them hang around for the full 12 rounds. Not surprisingly, Roach doesn’t like that kind of thing from Pacquiao, but what he can do about it? Pacquiao is his own person, and if he can’t go after his opponents like he used to in his youth, then Roach can try as hard as he wants to persuade his aging fighter to go for a knockout but it’s probably not going to happen.
Besides Rhodes, Pacquiao will also have former WBO light welterweight champion Kendall Holt as one of his sparring partners in camp. Holt doesn’t fight much like Bradley, but he’s got quick hands and decent power. I rate Holt’s power as better than Bradley’s, but he doesn’t ram heads with his opponents the way that Bradley frequently does and his punches are straighter. Bradley charges forward with his head lowered and he throws a lot of looping shots.
Next month, Pacquiao and Roach will be traveling to the United States to finish out the training at the Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles, California. Pacquiao will likely get some additional sparring partners at this point to help him put the finishing touches in the camp.
This is a make or break fight for Pacquiao. He’s got to beat Bradley this time for him to stay on top as a pay-per-view fighter. A loss to Bradley will likely result in Pacquiao’s future PPV numbers to continue to drop like his last fight against Brandon Rios, which drew only 475,000 PPV buys on HBO.
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