Manny Pacquiao is set to fight Shane Mosley this Saturday, but only a few days ago Pacquiao and Top Rank floated an offer to Juan Manuel Marquez for a rubber match later this year. Conventional wisdom deems Mosley too old and too slow to compete with the speedy hurricane from the Philippines, and this website unanimously picks the Pacman to win. However, I know I wrote my brief prediction of how the Pacquaio vs. Mosley fight will go before the offer to Marquez was floated. Looking past your opponent is one of the true cardinal sins of an established, confident champion. It breeds complacency and has embarrassed and felled many of the great names of the sport. If Pacquaio is looking past Mosley, he is doing so at his own peril.
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Shane Mosley is past his best, and that is a universally agreed-upon fact. However, being past your prime is not the same things as being shopworn, being a spent force. Mosley was befuddled by Floyd Mayweather, but everyone seems to be mesmerized by the current defense grand master’s prowess. The Sweet One was stymied by fringe contender Sergio Mora, but throughout his career Mosley has had trouble with taller, defensively awkward opponents (as I pointed out in my own prediction of the Mora fight, and Scott Levinson recently pointed out as well). As any seasoned observer should know, styles make fights and nothing seen in either fight points to Mosley being “done,” and he would indeed need to be washed up to justify looking past him.
Pacquiao is a thorough professional, but so was ever other champion from Ray Leonard to Muhammad Ali to Lennox Lewis who showed up for a fight looking past the guy in front of them to the next guy in line. To discount the possibility that Pacman has gone through the motions in his training camp, is in shape but perhaps not his best shape, and is a little less than focused is to ignore both the history of boxing and the sport’s very human element. No matter what his die-hard fans think, Pacquiao is no demi-god. He is very, very human.
This isn’t a prediction that Pacquiao will show up unprepared and ripe for an upset on Saturday. As I pointed out, the man is a thorough professional and he always comes to a fight in fantastic physical condition. Saturday will be no different. However, if he is looking past Mosley, Pacman will be in for a shock. Being in shape is only half of beating a top opponent; the other half is having a well-prepared, practiced game plan. As Levinson has ably pointed out, Pacquiao’s style is very well-suited to Shane Mosley’s approach to boxing. If Pacquiao were getting in the ring with the Sugar Shane who defeated Oscar de la Hoya in 2000, I would give the Sugarman good odds against Pacman. So, if Pacman is thinking he has Mosley in the bag and can look forward to thumping his longtime rival Juan Manuel Marquez a few months from now, things might not go as rosily as he planned.
