PacMan by Gary Poole

Author:Gary Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

BOTH MEN REMEMBER it well. Freddie and Manny were in a Las Vegas hospital. Pacquiao was getting his wound stitched up. They had experienced a devastating defeat. Roach was second-guessing everything. Pacquiao had become placid. Roach had never seen such a Zen-like attitude after a loss. It sort of bugged him.

Pacquiao told a disconsolate Roach, “There is a winner and a loser, and we lost tonight.” Roach didn’t like what he heard from Pacquiao. He wanted to see him breathe fire or seem more devastated, like the loss had cut him right to his soul. “I thought, ‘Maybe he doesn’t care that much,’” says Roach, “because I would never say that after I lost a fight.” It took a few minutes for Roach to realize that this very moment would become a major part of Pacquiao’s mythos. The theme? A Pacquiao defeat in anything brings a redoubling of effort. For Pacquiao, it was a turning point in the way he would now approach the sweet science. Most fighters privately make excuses. Pacquiao, a serious hypochondriac among other quirks, hadn’t been 100 percent because he had his blood drawn, but he didn’t complain about any phantom illness. The gloves were too cushiony for his tastes. The reporters had asked him about them, but he didn’t discuss that with Roach, either. He didn’t blame anyone or anything. Was he a defeated man? Roach always gives his fighters an out. (“I always say that I over-trained my fighter, or I did this or this wrong. It takes the pressure off. That is my job. To take the blame. One time I got fired because the fighter believed me, so you gotta be careful,” Roach says.) Pacquiao wasn’t looking for Roach to take the fall. As they sat there talking, it seemed like the failure was helping Pacquiao really re-examine himself. “It was a wake-up call,” says Roach. The trainer didn’t take Pacquiao back to the Wild Card; Pacquiao took Roach. He started working out right away. In closed-door sessions, they concentrated on Pacquiao’s right hand. Pacquiao was a world champion, but he was far from the fighter he knew he could be. It was tantamount to Tiger Woods changing his swing after winning major titles. Pacquiao started working more diligently than ever. He seemed to crave inventing new ways to fight. He loves playing basketball because he revels in creating new moves as he plays. The loss to Morales revitalized him and made him dig deeper into his very soul.

“It’s not a teacher-student thing as much as I show him a move, and he shows me how he’d like to execute it, and then we agree,” Roach says. “When I let him interact, he’s comfortable. He shows me the way he can adjust. When we can’t work out the move, he’ll say, ‘Okay, let’s erase that,’ and we get rid of it. That way, there’s no mistakes. With both of us working on the same goal together, he’s become as smart as I am about boxing.

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