A little over a week after Freddie Roach claimed Manny Pacquiao has lost his killer instinct, there came a report to the contrary from his training assistant.
Left to handle Pacquiao while Roach was desperately pushing Chinese golden boy Zou Shiming, a two-time Olympic champion, toward a fiery knockout performance in Macau, Buboy Fernandez swore the eight-division Filipino world title winner has become doubly vicious.
There’s evident contradiction here, but not to worry.
There’s this bigger report from inside the ring at the Wild Card facility in Hollywood which says Pacquiao will show up for the super bout in Las Vegas on May 2 wielding commendable defense.
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“He’s matured,” Fernandez told the Agence France Press, stressing there definitely will be no replay of careless moments, like what had led to his lights-out stoppage by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012.
Pacquiao dropped his guard in a suicidal attack late in the sixth round, and was speared dead with a perfect shot to the chin from Marquez.
Maybe Buboy Fernandez had tried to mimic the Marquez perfect counter shot, in the absence of Roach, while working with the mitts with Pacquiao.
Maybe it was also in that session when Fernandez suffered a cut in his mouth courtesy of a Pacquiao left upper cut.
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Anyway, in that same AFP report, Pacquiao had been quoted as saying Mayweather could go try and run “but he can’t hide.”
That was a very reassuring point.
At the same time though, it would be proper to ask what has made the Pacquiao camp believe Mayweather would try to run and grab for most of the rounds come super fight time proper.
Truth is that Pacquiao had been hit smack to the head and was wobbled in the fifth round of his rematch with Tim Bradley last year.
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Pacquiao also failed to come up with a perfect defense against the inept and over-decorated kick boxer Chris Algieri in a tasteless mismatch, also in Macau, last November.
Meanwhile, the latest report from Ben Thompson of FightHype says Mayweather has started knocking out sparmates on the fourth day of training.
This is not to say the Fernandez report on Pacquiao’s overnight maturity, which the Filipino trainer found tangible, could be a little exaggerated.
The intriguing point here is the report on Mayweather’s explosive form, which had hardly been explored in the recent past.
The Thompson report on Mayweather’s power-packed sharpness was quite reliable.
It was the exclusive core of an objective eyewitness account.