With the moth-balled pretender to the throne renewing his unsubstantiated insinuations about drug abuse, Manny Pacquiao’s master trainer has decided to shed light on the real secret. It’s called hard work.
So hard that the redoubtable Sugar Shane Mosley was knocked down for only the third time in his venerable career and overwhelmingly out-pointed even though the PacMan was way below his best in successfully defending his world welterweight title on Saturday night.
So hard that Floyd Mayweather Jnr, solid professional though he is when active, may never fancy trying to match all the sweat, strain and effort which would be required to challenge the ruler of the modern ring.
As Mayweather the self-styled Money Man retreated into his mutterings about blood tests on the vampire scale, the PacMan’s human genius of a mentor offered an explanation that was more down to earth than unearthly.
Freddie Roach, circus-master at the Wild Card gym in Hollywood, said: 'Manny is one of those rare athletes with an astonishingly high energy level, which enables him to keep exercising over and over again. He begins the day with a long hill run on which only his dog can keep up with him. That is followed by hours of gruelling callilsthenics, after which he often repeats his minimum abdominal routine of 2,000 sit ups.
'Then he goes into 15-rounds hitting the pads with me – also doing exercises in the 60 second intervals between rounds. It’s crazy.'
As for the sparring, which is always fierce under Roach, his conditioning coach and dietician Alex Ariza reports: ‘On days when an especially heavy sparring session is scheduled we ask him to skip running but he always says no and goes out on his own if we won’t go with him.’
Ariza – the specialist who was sacked by Amir Khan but may be re-appointed following the British world light-welterweight champion’s scrappy win over Paul McCloskey – adds: 'Manny is one of the most highly conditioned athletes in the world.
'His mental intensity makes him virtually oblivious to pain. He’s a phenomenon. He has a resting pulse rate of 42 beats per minute which rises to 205 under extreme physical pressure and which he can maintain for long periods.'
The hyper-activity which has established Pacquiao as the first and only world champion in eight different weight divisions – from flyweight to light-middleweight – also fuels his multi-tasking as a Congressman in his native Philippines, a singer and an action movie actor.
The constant intensity also drives the frequency and the power of the punches to which vanquished opponents across all those championship poundages ruefully attest.
Bear in mind that in the three rounds which history considers the most thunderous of all time, Marvin Hagler and Leonard Hearns were throwing about 50 punches every three minutes.
Pacquiao, despite a lower out-put against the runaway Mosley, is currently averaging nigh-on a hundred and thereby hurling more than a thousand punches over the 12-round distance in most of his title fights.
If his challengers last that long.
Given those extraordinary physical properties with which to work, Roach has developed this one-time one-punch pony into the all-round boxing machine. Once a basic south-paw with a killer left hook, Pacquaio is now a multi-combination head and body puncher with an equally concussive right hand.
In the process, not unlike Muhammad Ali, he has transcended his sport to become an iconic figure in many parts of the world. Not only that, but given the tens of millions of his countrymen who throng the streets and squares back home to marvel at his exploits in the ring, a potential Phillipines president.
All this appears to be too much to bear for Mayweather, especially since a third criminal charge – this one for threatening to have security guards shot – has been added to his arraignments for assault, battery and larceny.
Mayweather, having just been dropped by The Ring world rankings after a year inactivity, declined to watch from ringside as Pacquiao even though he lives in Las Vegas, also on his way to an overwhelming points decision, did what Mayweather failed to do by decking Mosley.
Nor, I suspect, will he want to hear or read all this about the PacMan being Superman.
His only possible remedy, however, is the one currently resting in his own hands.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
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