By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will have his work cut out for him in selling the third fight between Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley on 4/9 on HBO pay-per-view. Since many boxing fans have already seen Pacquiao face Bradley twice before, Arum is going to be working a different angle for their first fight so that they don’t see the fight as another win for Pacquiao.
Arum reportedly will be working the angle of Bradley having improved as a fighter under the helm of trainer Teddy Atlas, who has worked with Bradley for all of one fight against an overweight Brandon Rios last November.
Arum feels that the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight shouldn’t be criticized because of Bradley being with a different trainer now. Bradley left trainer Joel Diaz recently and signed Atlas. Arum thinks that means all the difference because he believes Bradley is a completely different fighter now compared to before when he was with Diaz.
Arum is going to market the fight with the idea of the 32-year-old Bradley being a better fighter than he was in his two previous fights with Pacquiao in 2012 and 2014. If you happened to see Bradley’s fight against Rios recently, Bradley really did not look any different than he was in previous fight against Jessie Vargas. It was more of a case of Rios just looking so incredibly bad that you have to wonder why Arum did not cut his losses and let him go from his Top Rank stable two years ago after his one-sided loss to Pacquiao in 2012.
“So we’re going to promote this as the fight with a different Timothy Bradley,” Arum said to Yahoo Sports. “Bradley was a different fighter in the fight with Rios. He had a different style, a different game plan and he performed differently. If he’d have stayed with Joel Diaz and we’d put him in with Pacquiao a third time, the criticism of this fight would no doubt be justified. But he’s a different guy under Atlas. Does being with Atlas change him enough to make him more competitive with Pacqiuao? I think yes, but we’ll have to see.”
Bradley didn’t look much different to me in the Rios fight compared to his past fights. Bradley circled the ring a few times, but other than that, it was the same Bradley. I don’t know who Arum is trying to kid here by saying Bradley is different with Atlas as his trainer.
We saw the same Bradley against Rios as we did in any of his other fights. If you take away the three times Bradley circled the ring in the fight, it was the same Bradley. He came forward, threw punches, moved out of range, and then would repeat the process.
It was so obvious what Bradley was doing, and any decent level welterweight would have had no problems getting to him and lighting him up. It was a good thing that Arum matched Bradley against a poor fighter like Rios, because if he put him in with someone that is actually good like Amir Khan, Errol Spence Jr, Danny Garcia, Keith Thurman or Shawn Porter, Bradley would have lost to those guys.
“We haven’t seen this fight already, because this is a new Bradley,” Arum said via latimes.com. “I don’t know that Manny has to prove anything other than he’s better than the current Bradley and his new coach. The Bradley who beat Rios was better than the Bradley I’ve seen of the last five years. Can that Bradley beat Manny Pacquiao? I don’t know, but I think it’s a close fight and he’s still coming off an injury.”
The 5’6” Bradley is too small and weak to beat the quality fighters in my view. Bradley has obviously done well in being in Arum’s guidance and facing some of his Top Rank stable fighters like Rios and Jessie Vargas recently. I think those are mediocre fighters at 147. Bradley only did good against them because they’re not very good, and arguably neither of them belong at 147.
We saw what happened to Bradley in 2014, when Arum made the mistake of matching him up against a fringe level welterweight with a good punch in Diego Chaves. Bradley almost lost the fight and was held to a 12 round draw. If Chaves was able to punish Bradley badly, just imagine what the good welterweights would have done to Bradley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUqjc5VPrU
Why hasn’t Arum matched Bradley against Kell Brook, Garcia, Khan, Porter, Marcos Maidana, Thurman and Spence? Obviously, many of those guys are with Al Haymon, but that shouldn’t have stopped Arum from trying to make those fights. Nevertheless, in hindsight, it is good for Bradley that Arum did not make those fights, because I think he would have lost them all.
Comments are closed.