BY JAMES BRADY, SBNation.com
MANNY Pacquiao is a technician with unbelievable speed, a blur of fists coming at his opponents from every angle. Or at least he was that person in his prime. He’s slower now, though personally, I don’t believe you can write off his win against Lucas Matthysse as beating a “shot” fighter. He went in, he looked much closer to his old self than anybody predicted, and now he wants to fight again.
The 39-year-old is 60-7-2 with 39 knockouts to his name, and any fight is going to result in a big payday for him and his promoters, regardless of opponent. The problem is figuring out who he should fight next. Some have suggested welterweight titleholders Terence Crawford, Errol Spence or Keith Thurman, while others (including Pacquiao) are hoping Floyd Mayweather Jr. comes out of retirement for a rematch.
The biggest issue with determining who he should fight is that it kind of doesn’t matter, at least as far as fans of boxing are concerned. Pacquiao can take care of himself and it’s not up to me to tell him he can’t fight Spence or somebody else who’s likely to handle him at this stage of his career.
Even if he fought one of those guys and took a title, we’d still be looking at a likely retirement in the near future, and not that much would change in the welterweight division. If Mayweather came out of retirement, it would once again be hyped as one of the biggest fights in boxing history, and it’s nearly guaranteed to underwhelm from a spectator’s point of view, just as the first fight did.
Then you have a sideshow act like Conor McGregor, who has been floated as a potential opponent despite an 0-1 record in boxing, an uncertain combat sports future and ongoing legal troubles. If Pacquiao fought him, the result would probably look a lot like the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight did.
That doesn’t sound so bad, really, because I’ll always enjoy watching McGregor get a beatdown. But that matchup also wouldn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, aside from making a boatload of cash.
A rematch with Jeff Horn isn’t appealing for a number of reasons: the first fight was lackluster and nothing Pacquiao showed against Matthysse makes me believe he can handle Horn’s aggressive style any better than he did the first time out.
Then there’s some other guys who are just outside the pound-for-pound picture, like Danny Garcia, Amir Khan, Mikey Garcia, Shawn Porter, and Adrien Broner. I’d probably take Pacquiao over a couple of them, especially Broner. But most of the others are simply too fast and skilled enough to handle the current version of Pacquiao.
So again, I have no idea who he should fight. He wants Mayweather, and whether that’s due to the large payday or the actual belief he can get revenge doesn’t matter much. The McGregor thing is such a ridiculous circus act that it lines up nicely with where boxing is at right now anyway.
There are some great, young champions and champions-to-be out there, and Pacquiao probably shouldn’t be fighting any of them. It feels like it’s time to embrace that his next fights are just going to be big ol’ shrugs from a matchmaking standpoint – but they just might be fun, as the Matthysse match was./PN
