By Nando Di Fino, The Wall Street JournalIt’s not the fight the world was hoping for, but this Saturday’s contest between Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito still has enough storylines and potential to make the sporting world salivate.
Outside-the-ring spats over drug testing earlier this year killed a potential Floyd Mayweather-Pacquiao bout—a figurative super-fight that had been the talk of the boxing world for almost two years—but Margarito has proven to be more than an able replacement, helping to author some of the fight’s plotlines himself.
This is Pacquiao’s first fight since being elected Congressman in his native Philippines.It’s Margarito’s first fight in America since being banned in 2009 for using plaster to harden up his hand wraps before a fight against Shane Mosely.
The fight is taking place in Texas partly because Margarito was denied a license in both California and Nevada.
A couple guys weighing about 150 pounds are even taking the lion’s share of Saturday’s attention away from what used to be a marquee draw in boxing: a heavyweight championship match (in Manchester, England, between David Haye and Audley Harrison).
And as if there weren’t enough drama leading up to the fight, Margarito took things to a new low this week, mocking Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, who has Parkinson’s, in a video on FanHouse. The video actually became a controversy-within-a-controversy all by itself, as FanHouse first edited the video to make it look like they weren’t mocking Roach’s disease, then pulled the video altogether, even yanking it off YouTube and embeds across the Internet.
“Is there even a shred of class in that training camp?” asks Bad Left Hook’s Scott Christ. “If they wanted to seal Margarito as the villain of the fight, I guess this was one way to do it, but realistically it just showcases him as a first-rate moron to go along with being a fighter a lot of people already have reservations about paying to see.”
Our friends at Deadspin, naturally, have a copy of the original cut. Robert Garcia, Margarito’s trainer, has already apologized for the comments, saying his camp didn’t know Roach had Parkinson’s and thought his condition was from taking so many shots to the head as a boxer years ago. Roach told the Associated Press he wasn’t buying it, while adding that he’ll have an observer in Margarito’s dressing room to watch the entire hand-wrapping process. “I don’t trust those guys,” Roach told the AP. “He’ll do anything to win. He’s done it before. He’s a cheater.”
Manny Pacquiao, in the meantime, has done his best to remind folks that, as the best boxer on earth, he should be the centerpiece of this fight. He even sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” with Will Ferrell on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” But does he need to do this? Or is it just something to spice up a fight that already has him as the heavy, heavy favorite?
Maybe it’s because he’s not actually as ready to go as he’d like us to believe. Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated profiles a distracted Pacquiao, who has flown to Nevada to campaign for Harry Reid, back to the Philippines to meet with the President, and has been admittedly sloppy in training camp.
This is especially annoying for his handlers, because Pacquiao is yielding plenty of height and weight to Margarito, who is his biggest opponent to date. “When Pacquiao is in camp, [his trainer] Roach has had to compete for his attention,” Mannix writes. “Several times during camp Pacquiao has mentioned to Roach that he missed working in his Congressional office.”
But this all may be calculated. “I think he generates his own chaos,” Michael Koncz told the Journal’s Ted Lerner. “I honestly believe that without some kind of chaos, he can’t function properly.”
Through it all—the hand wraps, the distractions, the campaigning—there’s no denying that this Saturday’s fight is not only the most anticipated of the day (sorry, heavyweight division), but also the biggest we may see for some time. And it’s all thanks to the star power of Manny Pacquiao, who pulled himself out of poverty to become the sport’s biggest draw. “Boxing, perhaps more than any other sport, needs superstars,” Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times writes. “Anybody collecting a paycheck in the sport, from Bob Arum to the guys sweeping the floors after the fights, should be lighting candles under his picture. Boxing can’t live on the die-hards and geeks alone, and Pacquiao delivers the rest of the sporting world.”
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Every year around this time, fans of the richer baseball teams play a fun guessing game that can only be dubbed, “Where in the World is my General Manager?” Boston GM Theo Epstein brought the game to a new level in 2003 after sharing Thanksgiving dinner with Curt Schilling in Arizona. A few days later, Schilling agreed to waive his no-trade clause and accept a move to Boston.
This was, of course, a year after the Red Sox allegedly bought up all the hotel rooms in a Nicaraguan hotel where Jose Contreras was staying in order to keep the Yankees away. With that in mind, it came as no surprise that Brian Cashman was in Arkansas on Wednesday, selling the merits of pinstripes to free agent pitcher Cliff Lee. At 32 years old, Lee isn’t exactly young, but he is coming off a masterful showing in the playoffs and won the 2009 American League Cy Young Award. He is good friends with CC Sabathia from their playing days in Cleveland, and his agent is convinced that Lee’s near-perfect mechanics will keep him relatively injury-free throughout the duration of any long contract.
ESPN Stats & Information, though, throws a little cold water on Yankees fans by studying all of the free agent signings since 1990-91. Of the 52 pitchers who signed a contract of four or more years, only 14 of them averaged 20 starts a season and had an ERA that was 10 percent better than the league average. Even loosening up the standards proved disappointing. “How many times did a pitcher average 20 starts a season, and pitch to a league average or better ERA+?” The Info group asks. “Twenty-two. That’s 42 percent. That means that there are a lot of bad results from a lot of formerly good pitchers.”
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Fantasy football players, make sure your lineups are set: the NFL begins its run of Thursday night games with a doozy—the AFC North-leading Ravens (6-2) travel to Atlanta to take on the NFC South-leading Falcons, with the Falcons currently a one-point favorite. AccuScore likes Baltimore in this one, as does my fellow Fixer, David Roth. But I am going with Atlanta. And, since the game is as close as any to predict, I’m letting the tiebreaker come from a stat I heard on WFAN last week during their NFL game updates: the Falcons are 17-1 at home with Matt Ryan as the quarterback. “And truth be told,” Dawson Devitt of the Atlanta Journal Constitution writes, “the only loss could have easily been a victory if Roddy White catches the touchdown pass against the Broncos or our defensive back stops a 3rd and long bomb to Brandon Marshall at the end of the game.”
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Source: blogs.wsj.com
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