THE great world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, reminiscing about the legendary “Thrilla in Manila” in 1974 years later, told the writer Mark Kram: “We went to Manila as champions, Joe [Frazier] and me, and we came back as old men.”
Jessie Vargas, who wore the World Boxing Organization (WBO) world welterweight belt like it was a badge of courage for a young champion, surely has never read this line. But it was what happened to him on Saturday night in Las Vegas.
Manny Pacquiao, with thunderbolts of jabs and hooks that bloodied the champion’s eyebrows, floored him once, and pursued him relentlessly from the seventh round on, sent Vargas home feeling like an old, stricken man in the ring.
Vargas trainer Dewey Cooper had boasted the night before the fight at the Thomas and Mack Center, a 16,000-plus-seat arena, “You know we have [a big punch awaiting Pacquiao], of course. And when it lands, good night!”
Vargas did slip in some punches, of which I counted, perhaps, half-a-dozen heavy ones that landed on the jaw and head of Pacquiao. But his best punch, a right straight uncoiled as a counterpunch, was not wicked and venomous. It sure could hurt—but not stop dead on his tracks an opponent who was quicker throwing his left jabs. While easily the punch could make a dent on a punching bag, on the jaw of Manny, it landed like a million other punches that have tattooed the legendary boxer in a 67-fight career but could not floor him.
When he was in his prime, in exactly Vargas’s age at the moment, Pacquiao could drill his opponents, who were some of the best boxers of this generation (de la Hoya, Cotto and Marquez, to name a few), with heavier blows and more savage jabs.
Remember how he sent Ricky Hatton sprawling helplessly on the canvas in May 2009? Well, Pacquiao had been spectacular against Oscar de la Hoya in an earlier bout, but against Hatton he was utterly devastating with a vicious left hand.
“I didn’t have to count,” said the ring’s third man, Kenny Bayless. Hatton lay on the canvas while doctors tended on him for several minutes before he got up and left the ring with a wry smile.
Vargas had that smile too in the early rounds even after Pacquiao had sent him on all fours in the second round. He wore that forced smile still in the middle rounds every time Pacquiao stung him or shook him up or rocked his head. But that smile looked to me so much like a fragile psychological shield meant to mask his inner doubts and anxieties.
But after the eighth round, as Pacquiao drew blood from Vargas’s right eyebrow with a vicious combination that backed the champion against the ropes, that smile was wiped out. The champion was in a panic mode. He knew it with every jab that peppered his nearly closed right eye or sent him spinning and slipping. In the 10th round, Pacquiao rocked the champion again with a combination, and Vargas was about to kiss his title good-bye.
“I still have the speed, power and hunger,” he said in a prefight interview.
“Manny is the old Manny now,” his trainer Freddie Roach insisted. “I like this Manny a lot.”
Most fight fans and critics did. One of the ring commentators who observed a reenergized Pacquiao, who had trained for more than one month in Manila, said, “Manny is like a shark who smells blood.”
The analogy seemed apt, but I had the urge to call Pacquiao the way I remembered him best from the old days—as the Pacman who never knew how to pause, who was always running after his target, gunning at him at full speed.
By the time Pacquiao walked into the middle of the ring in the 12th round, the fight was all over but the shouting. He bathed in the adulation and chanting of a rabid Filipino crowd in the Las Vegas night, and then closed the fight with the look of a champion.
Pacquiao climbed into the ring focused on the piece of history he was chasing. More than the prize money, more than the chance to be himself again—the warrior on the arena enjoying what he does best, which is to destroy opponents—his greatest motivation was to be a senator and world boxing champion simultaneously, something no one else has attempted, or done, before.
“What I’m trying to do—being a senator and fighting for a world title—is history,” he told fans before the fight.
He owns that piece of history now, he holds a piece of the world welterweight title, and he is richer by $4 million simply by being the Manny Pacquiao of old, relentless and not plodding, extremely well conditioned and, above all, still hungry for ring glory very much like the unheralded fighter who had descended on a Las Vegas gambling town that was not yet ready to place all its bets on him.
It was not Pacquiao’s best fight. But I liked what I saw in him, the boxer who was thoroughly methodical but could still flash a grin, maybe a savage one, in the middle of such clinical destruction of his opponent.
He has never let defeat and age stand in the way of more conquests.
Hail to the senator-world champion!