Pacquiao ‘won’t beg’ Marquez for rematch

HOLLYWOOD—Despite his harrowing knockout defeat Saturday night, Manny Pacquiao won’t be chasing after and begging Juan Manuel Marquez for an immediate rematch.

Instead, Pacquiao will be waiting for a reasonable offer, according to his adviser Michael Koncz.

“There’s no rush to decide on anything,” Koncz told Manila-based sportswriters Monday (Tuesday in Manila). “If they come to us with a reasonable offer, we can always entertain Marquez—as long as Marquez’s team doesn’t get a swollen head just because he knocked us out.”

Koncz said everyone should consider the totality of the bout, not the one-punch knockout.

“I don’t think that losing is a key ingredient,” he said. “It’s how you lost. We were winning every round of the fight. So if they come back to us now and say ‘We knocked you out, so we deserve the lion’s share,’ another fight will never happen again.”

And Pacquiao will be able to live with that.

He still holds a 2-1-1 (win-loss-draw) edge over Marquez in their first four fights. The first one ended in a draw despite three first-round knockdowns scored by Pacquiao.

Counting his third-round knockdown of Marquez in the second fight and his fifth-round knockdown in the fourth encounter, Pacquiao has floored Marquez five times.

What he failed to do in the first 36 rounds, Marquez finally accomplished in the 39th round of their ring saga. Pacquiao responded with a knockdown of his own, broke Marquez’s nose and was firing away when he got careless and ran smack into that devastating right with only a second left in the sixth round.

“We were dominating the fight but we give Marquez credit, he got Manny with a good punch,” said Koncz.

The ideal situation, according to Koncz, is for the Marquez camp to be magnanimous.

“If they want to do the fight under the same terms, we might entertain it,” the adviser said.

Pacquiao proved he is boxing’s biggest draw in the fourth fight, which drew a sold-out attendance of 16,348 and gate receipts of $10.5 million. As well, the fight is sure to break the $1-million mark in pay-per-view hits.

Among the leading candidates for a big-money fight against Pacquiao is Brandon Rios, who stopped Mike Alvarado in the 11th round.

Promoter Bob Arum floated Rios’ name in the press conference of Pacquiao-Marquez 4.