Think Floyd
Manny Pacquiao has reached a point at which greatness is not enough. It's not enough for him to deliver career-ending beatings to Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton in consecutive fights. It's not enough for him to brutalize opponents, as he did in carving up Miguel Cotto's face with surgical precision in November. And it's not enough for Pacquiao to dominate from wire to wire, as he did in defending his WBO welterweight title against Joshua Clottey last Saturday night in Arlington, Texas. In front of a crowd of 50,994 at Cowboys Stadium, Pacquiao overwhelmed Clottey, himself a former welterweight champion, throwing 1,231 punches to Clottey's 399. Though few of Pacquiao's punches landed cleanly—according to CompuBox, fewer than 3% of his jabs (14 of 549) connected—his furious work rate was enough to assure victory. Of the 36 rounds on the three judges' cards, Clottey was awarded two. Asked what he would have done differently, Clottey smiled, shrugged and said, "I did my best." Yet all of Pacquiao's brilliance doesn't seem to matter if his opponent isn't Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Pacquiao, 31, doesn't need Mayweather, whom the Filipino supplanted as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. The 33-year-old Mayweather's insistence on prefight blood testing, and Pacquiao's refusal to go along, scrapped a proposed bout between the two boxers earlier this year. In Mayweather's absence Pacquiao's promoter, Bob Arum, serves him up members of his own stable for eight-figure paydays. You don't want Yuri Foreman, Manny? O.K., here's Clottey.
Pacquiao, in fact, doesn't need anyone. He is seeking election to the Philippine Congress in May, a campaign into which he has sunk $5 million. With considerable revenue flowing in from endorsements and real estate holdings—a source inside Team Pacquiao estimates the fighter's annual out-of-the ring income at $10 million—and with his trainer, Freddie Roach, whispering retirement in his ear, Congressman Pacquiao could make politics a full-time job.
Nevertheless, if Pacquiao's life won't suffer without a Mayweather fight, his legacy will. Rarely do boxing's two best fighters reside in the same weight class. Should Pacquiao and Mayweather never meet—a possibility that grows ever larger with all the bad blood flowing between Arum and Mayweather's copromoter, Richard Schaefer—their careers will be linked by massive asterisks.
And it's the sport that will suffer the most. "People like to talk about how MMA is overtaking boxing," says Roach. "If fights like Pacquiao-Mayweather don't happen, it might." Roach thinks like the rest of us: Pacquiao can continue to be great. Greatness, however, just isn't enough.
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Pavlik's Ready
Middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik says the hand problems that plagued him in 2009 have been resolved. Pavlik (below), who will defend his WBC and WBO middleweight titles against 35-year-old Sergio Martinez of Argentina on April 17 in Atlantic City, was forced to postpone and eventually cancel a fight with Paul Williams because of a lingering staph infection in one of the knuckles of his left hand. Now that the infection has cleared up, he's getting regular massages on the hand and strengthening it by squeezing his fist in a rice barrel.... Former heavyweight champ Sam Peter became a mandatory challenger for IBF titleholder Wladimir Klitschko thanks to his second-round knockout of Nagy Aguilera last Friday in Texas.
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Photograph by Howard Schatz
ONSLAUGHT Pacquiao (far left) threw three times as many punches as the helpless Clottey.
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SIMON BRUTY (PAVLIK)