Boxing News – July 25, 2019

Pacquiao at 40

has enough

left to rip WBA

belt from

unbeaten

Thurman

★★★ MAIN EVENT

★★ UNDERCARD

★★★★★ ATMOSPHERE

16 lBOXING NEWSlJULY 25, 2019 http://www.boxingnewsonline.net

Photos: JOE CAMPOREALE/USA TODAY SPORTS

LAS VEGAS, NV

JULY 20

UT on the sunbaked

Las Vegas strip on

Saturday afternoon,

several passersby

shared in the

assumption that

Manny Pacquiao

had long retired from the pursuit of

professional boxing, and really, who

could blame them for thinking that?

In truth, the assumption made a lot

of sense. The name of arguably the era’s

most accomplished fighter had been

flittering around the mainstream for

nearly two decades, an eternity in the

breakneck continuum of pop-culture

relevancy. The mid-aughts triptych of

Barrera-Morales-Marquez, fights so

brutally honest that they beckoned belief

in violence, was not so long ago, yet at

the same time it appeared distant, faded,

encrusted in amber. Manny Pacquiao...

The name was a harbinger of yesteryear.

“Pacquiao is fighting tonight?” One

perplexed Delta airline worker asked,

when informed of the

night’s central act. “Didn’t

he retire? I’m pretty sure

I read somewhere that he

retired.”

Such thinking is

understandable. If we

didn’t exactly read about

Pacquiao’s retirement

in the news, we had at

least thought about it

at one point or another,

especially as his career

began to unravel along a predictable

path. There was the frightening knockout

in 2012, when Juan-Manuel Marquez, his

greatest rival, rendered him motionless

on the mat like the aftermath of a

Prohibition-era hit job.

There was the snoozer in 2015, when

Floyd Mayweather repeatedly snapped

his head back with counters in the

so-called Fight of the Century; and in

2017, under the Australian sun, there was

the disputed points loss to the roughneck

Jeff Horn, whose ironclad skull left the

eight-division world champion’s temples

oozing blood.

So if there was an

expectation that the hard-

hitting Keith Thurman,

the 30-year-old WBA

welterweight champion

from Clearwater, Florida,

would add another

painful chapter to the

growing body of evidence

pointing to Pacquiao’s

decline, it was a well-

founded one, backed by

countless instances in boxing history of

young fighters mercilessly wresting the

baton from their elders.

Never mind that Thurman had been

out of the ring for close to two years

on account of injuries or that when he

finally reappeared in the spring, ➤

O

WHO COULD

BLAME FANS

FOR THINKING

PACQUIAO

HAD

RETIRED?

REBORN:

Pacquiao takes the

fight to Thurman

HOLD REALITY

ACTION

Sean

Nam

RINGSIDE