HERE’S a friendly reminder to Chris Algieri. He should avoid mixing it up with Manny Pacquiao in their November 23 fight in Macau.
But then, as the saying goes, Algieri can run but he cannot hide.
I say this again because Pacquiao seems bent on achieving a big bang in their world welterweight title fight at a catch weight 144 lbs.
That’s because Pacquiao is out to prove that, at 35, he can still hack it, that he can still win fights, big time. Algieri could be the door for that. Look, Pacquiao’s last four fights were not only practically garbage stuff, they were also fights very un-Pacquiao-like.
He lost the first two of those four in 2012, the second defeat ending in a horrific sixth-round knockout loss to archrival Juan Manuel Marquez in December of that year after earlier losing on points to nondescript Timothy Bradley.
Then he won his two fights in 2013 for a 2-2 record the last two years, but the comeback wins were hardly glorious and auspicious. They were but inauspicious points victories and were, therefore, better forgotten than remembered.
Thus, if Pacquiao has sanity left in-between his ears, he should knock Algieri out in a manner reminiscent of his spectacular victories punctuated by smashing knockouts—as in his classic stoppages of Erik Morales, Ricky Hatton, Oscar de la Hoya and Miguel Cotto, to name but a few.
In the first place, Algieri is considered a patsy despite his seemingly handsome 20-0, win-loss record, with eight knockouts. That’s because no one among his victims appears to be top caliber, save perhaps for Ruslan Provodnikov. Provodnikov was Algieri’s last foe—a tough Russian brawler who knocked down Algieri twice only to lose narrowly to the New Yorker on points.
In the second place, Algieri might serve as a tune-up fight for Pacquiao, whose much-delayed dream clash with Floyd Mayweather Jr. may yet finally happen next year. Thus, no less than a masterpiece of a win—like a devastating knockout—is what Pacquiao must accomplish against Algieri for a fitting aperitif to a Pacquiao-Mayweather encounter. This early, the fight being billed “The Fight of the Century” is being targeted to amass $300 million, with both protagonists assured of stashing away at least $50 million each.
So that if Pacquiao fails to make Algieri his 39th knockout victim in trying to score his third straight victory in his last five fights, I think it would jeopardize his bid to face Mayweather next year.
But then, on second thought, the Pacquiao-Mayweather bout could still happen because in boxing, as in politics, nothing is impossible.
It is only in this sport that suckers abound, remember? And, yes, aren’t suckers born every minute?
Like everybody else, Pacquiao knows that by heart, too.
THAT’S IT. A foreigner or a Filipino as coach of the next national men’s basketball team? All things being equal, let’s go Filipino. A Filipino has coached us four straight times to victory in the Asian Games in 1951, 1954, 1958 and 1962. A Filipino coach has just sent us to the Fiba Worlds in Spain. It’d be supreme irony again if we appoint a foreigner as coach in a sport that is supposed to be our national passion. Basketball being our No. 1 sport, no less than a Filipino should coach the national quintet. There shouldn’t be any quarrel there at all. Does the country’s No. 1 citizen that is P-Noy have an American to fly the presidential plane? Of course not, for that would not only be idiotically ironic but absolutely absurd, as well.