By Chris Williams: WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) is reportedly looking for sparring partners and ready to start his training camp for his May 2nd fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr (47-0, 26 KOs) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to esnewsreporting.com.
Earlier, Pacquiao said that he believes that announcement for the Mayweather fight could come next week, and he’s very confident that the fight will happen now.
Pacquiao is going to find it next to impossible for him to get sparring partners that can mimic what Mayweather does in the ring.
I’m sorry but Steve Forbes isn’t going to get Pacquiao ready for a fight against Mayweather, and neither is Shawn Porter or Ruslan Provodnikov. If those are the guys that Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is going to drag to the Philippines and the Wildcard gym in Los Angeles to help him get ready for the fight, then I see Pacquiao getting clowned on May 2nd when he gets inside the ring with Mayweather.
It won’t be close, because none of those guys are anything like Mayweather. I think Mayweather will find it easier to find guys that can mimic Pacquiao’s fighting style than vice versa.
Pacquiao, 36, is getting a little ahead of himself right now as far as the training camp goes, because there’s no chance of him beginning an eight week training camp right now, because that would mean that the training camp would end around this time in April and that would leave a little over three weeks still remaining before the fight.
What Pacquiao needs to start right now isn’t training camp; it’s a long 11 to 15 city world tour that includes the United States. If they stretch the tour out to a full two weeks instead of 11 days, they can definitely squeeze in all 15 of the major cities before the formal training camp begins at the end of February.
I think a long world tour is more important right now for Mayweather and Pacquiao than it would be for Pacquiao to start training so soon and end up overtraining for the fight.
For the world tour to take place, Pacquiao will need to ignore the advice of his adviser Michael Koncz, who has been talking recently about Pacquiao and Mayweather not needing a world tour, a lengthy U.S tour or even the HBO 24/7 and Showtime All Access programs.
Koncz thinks the fighters should instead keep their money and not spend it on marketing the fight. It’s unclear if Koncz is now calling the shots with Pacquiao, but it’s quite possible that Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum and Mayweather have something to say about how they want to market the fight.
It seems like a bad time for Pacquiao to go cheap and just hope and pray that enough boxing fans find out by word of mouth. I think that’s a lousy way of marketing a fight, and I would be very surprised and disappointed if Pacquiao follows behind Koncz’s thinking in a lock step fashion.
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