Boxing: Manny Pacquiao and the Encroachment of Age

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The encroachment of age is something no boxer can stave off indefinitely. At first, it approaches even the finest practitioners of the pugilistic arts almost imperceptibly, on little cat’s feet, but the sound eventually becomes noisy enough that it can no longer be disregarded.

As the days count down to his pay-per-view rubber match with Timothy Bradley on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, one has to wonder if the sound of those little cat’s feet in the mind of 37-year-old Manny Pacquiao has been replaced by the clamor of a snarling, charging tiger. No fighter wants to entertain doubts about his athletic mortality, and that is especially so for those who know the giddy feeling of having been touched by greatness. The best of the best are almost always adherents to the message of resistance authored by British poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Two and a half months ago, at a New York City press conference to announce his third matchup with Bradley, Pacquiao did not so much rage against the dying of his boxing light as to grudgingly acquiesce to it. The only man ever to have won world championships in eight weight classes said, with some finality, that win, lose or draw, he would be permanently taking his leave from the sport that had made him fabulously rich and famous.

“Sad to say that this is my last fight,” he told the assembled media. “After this, I’m going to retire and hang up my gloves to focus on my other big responsibility in life [as a congressman and senatorial candidate in the Philippines], to help my people.”

He said it with such insistence that there appeared to be little or no chance he might change his mind. However, boxing retirements are usually written in wet sand, not fast-drying concrete. For every Rocky Marciano, Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Lennox Lewis who says he is stepping away from the ring and does so forever, there are a dozens of good-to-exceptional fighters who continue to hear the siren call of a once-glorious past they are hesitant to trade for the uncertainty of a future without boxing.

Just two weeks ago, Pacquiao’s longtime promoter, Top Rank founder and CEO Bob Arum, expressed doubts that the Filipino national hero would stick to his retirement announcement, especially if he won and looked good doing so against the very capable Bradley.

“He says this is his last fight,” said Arum, 84, who only last week celebrated his 50th anniversary in boxing and also is raging, raging against the dying of his light as a promoter. “You can take that with a grain of salt, though. I think he believes it’s going to be his last fight, but I’m not saying it’s his last fight. This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve had a lot of fighters tell me this is their last fight, and six months later, they’re back in the ring. These top fighters have a hard time giving it up, and if Manny’s performance is an outstanding one against Bradley, he’ll want to continue.”

It is a reasonable supposition and one that Pacquiao himself seems willing to consider. He now says that the third go-round with Bradley “might” be his fistic farewell. Then again, maybe not. The decision that he once deemed irrevocable, etched in stone as it were, now appears to be open to revision. All of which leads some of his staunchest supporters -- like, for instance, me -- to wonder if “Pac-Man” would possibly be doing himself a disservice by hanging around past the career expiration date that even recalcitrant boxing legends are eventually obliged to acknowledge.

It just might be that the Pacquiao of our fondest memories -- the one who destroyed, among others, such special fighters as Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto -- has already left the building. Pacquiao is just 3-3 in his last six bouts, and the southpaw wrecking machine of yore now has gone 10 straight fights without winning inside the distance. His last knockout victory came on Nov. 14, 2009, against Cotto, and even then one of the most emphatic finishers in boxing history had to wait until the 12th and final round to put an exclamation point to a bout that seemed headed to the scorecards.

Forget Thomas. Perhaps a more appropriate take on the relative brevity of any boxer’s prime comes from Jimmy Cannon, who wrote these words in the Jan. 20, 1955, edition of the New York Journal American after he witnessed the pound-for-pound best fighter of all-time, Sugar Ray Robinson, lose a one-sided decision to Ralph “Tiger” Jones: “There is no language, spoken on the face of the earth in which you can be kind when you tell a man he is old and should stop pretending to be young … Old fighters, who go beyond the limits of their age, resent it when you tell them they’re through … what he had is gone. The pride isn’t. The gameness isn’t. The insolent faith in himself is still there … But the pride and the gameness and that insolent faith get in his way. He was marvelous, but he isn’t anymore.”

The incomparable Robinson was 34 when Cannon penned that figurative obituary. However, three of Robinson’s five middleweight title reigns came after Cannon advised him in print that he was through. So the fighter had the last laugh, right? Well, not quite. Robinson was a shadow of his former self in the latter stages of a 25-year, 202-bout career that ended in 1965, fighting in tank towns for short money and losing to journeymen who in another time would have counted themselves fortunate to carry Robinson’s spit bucket.

Will Bradley assume the role of Tiger Jones to Pacquiao’s aging and increasingly vulnerable Sugar Ray Robinson? Will Saturday mark the Fab Filipino’s last hurrah or just another step toward the dying of his boxing light? How the script plays out remains to be seen, but no matter what happens, it has been a 15-year thrill ride for American fight fans who will always remember their first glimpse of Pacquiao and what it felt like to be hit by the thunderbolt of instant fascination.

For me, that giddy feeling came on June 23, 2001 at the MGM Grand. The 22-year-old Pacquiao, whose 32 previous professional bouts had all been staged in the Philippines or Japan, was making his U.S. debut as the virtually anonymous challenger to South Africa’s Lehlo Ledwaba, the IBF super bantamweight titlist. They met on the undercard of a show headlined by De La Hoya’s dethronement of WBC super welterweight champ Javier Castillejo.

The arena, which would have an announced attendance of 12,480 for the main event, had maybe a third that many spectators in their seats when the opening bell rang for Ledwaba-Pacquiao. Even the media section was mostly empty. From the jump, it was obvious that the dark-haired Pacquiao was destined for a higher purpose. For my story in the Philadelphia Daily News, I wrote that he had “electrified the crowd,” what little there was of it, while “flooring Ledwaba three times and beating him bloody.” However, Pacquiao had made a more lasting impression on me than could be expressed in a few lines of complimentary copy. I remember thinking, “Geez, this guy is really, really good. He could be something special.”

Every now and then a fighter comes along, almost out of nowhere, who seizes the public’s imagination and refuses to let go. It was like that for a lot of people when the young Mike Tyson burst upon the scene in the early 1980s, and so it was when a stylistic predecessor to Pacquiao introduced himself to U.S. audiences in 1971. Ed Schuyler Jr., who retired from The Associated Press in April 2002 after covering boxing for nearly 32 years, recalled what it was like to catch his first glimpse of a young Panamanian fighter. He would soon be fighting in the U.S. for the first time on the undercard of an event headlined by WBA lightweight champion Ken Buchanan against another Panamanian, Ismael Laguna, in Madison Square Garden.

“We went up to Grossinger’s in the Catskills to watch Buchanan train,” Schuyler told me. “Buchanan wasn’t in the gym yet, but in the ring was this dusky, dark-haired guy, Roberto Duran. He was so … so … I don’t know, like an animal -- a panther. I just had this sense that this kid (Duran was 20 at the time) was born to fight.”

Schuyler’s intrigue with Duran ramped up even higher on Sept. 13, 1971, when Duran demolished Benny Huertas as if he were a flimsy shack in the path of a tornado.

“Duran blew through Huertas in less than a round, and Benny could fight,” Schuyler said. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to have to watch this guy.’ It was like a revelation.”

A couple of decades later, Schuyler’s initial impression of the “Hands of Stone” proved to be not only correct but indelible.

“He’s the best fighter I’ve ever written about,” Schuyler said. “In the ’70s, he was absolutely unbelievable. He could slip a punch, he could block a punch, he could attack. Just a great, great fighter.”

Pacquiao, in many ways, was to me what Duran had been to Fast Eddie. Brought up in abject poverty, as Duran had been, he was a similar force of nature, a whirling dervish, a study in the sort of controlled brutality that makes boxing so compelling and exhilarating. Some years ago, when Pacquiao was steamrolling through opponents and weight classes like a juggernaut, I enlisted Craig Sirulnik, creator of Compufight, to use the computer program to pair an in-his-prime Duran against an in-his-prime Pacquiao at both lightweight and welterweight. The results were inconclusive; Duran won a split decision at 135 pounds, Pacquiao a split decision at 147.

However, Duran isn’t the only fighter against whom the best of Pacquiao should be gauged. Naazim Richardson, best known as the trainer of Bernard Hopkins, in 2011 said Pacquiao reminded him of another hall of famer who fought as if his hair were on fire.

“The last fighter I saw who fought like Pacquiao was Aaron Pryor,” Richardson said. “Pryor was an all-action fighter. He had a decent punch, but he was all-action. His energy level was just extraordinary. Pacquiao brings the same level of energy into the ring.”

Well, he did for a significant chunk of a career that should be cherished as might any item of wonderment. With that said, boxing is a sport, like any other, that adheres to the natural laws of diminishing returns and evidence is mounting that even Pacquiao can’t ride the high surf forever.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.