By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Filipino former world champion and current senator Manny Pacquiao matches himself with American welterweight Jessie Vargas in a pay-per-view fight televised by promoter Top Rank. Pacquiao retired in April after decisioning Timothy Bradley in their third match but returns seven months later because that was always the plan. Vargas lost to Bradley a month after Pacquiao lost to Mayweather in 2015 but recently stopped Sadam Ali and got chosen for Saturday’s fight because that flash of power in March is expected to prove anomalous – if Pacquiao or Top Rank thought there were any way Vargas’d stretch Pacquiao this fight would not happen.
There isn’t much to be done but write about this spectacle however undeserving. In bygone years the hungerstrike we experienced these last howsoever many months would induce an appetite coiled as a spring and ready to leap towards a million buys after a month of promotional coverage under the auspices of reportage, but no more. There are but two types of boxing coverage that survive today in the United States: the financially selfinterested and the quixotic.
They’re easily identified. Positive coverage of Pacquiao-Vargas is financially selfinterested, the line between publicist and reporter gone to the publicists, and quixotic coverage, those who cover the sport from habit or nostalgia, is not positive. No American without financial selfinterest understood Pacquiao’s retirement and even less his comeback from that faux retirement – since declaring Pacquiao’s third match with Timothy Bradley in April the last time Pacquiao would fight did little to promote the match and according to Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum did not begin to offset the damage done the fight’s marketing by Pacquiao’s strongly worded reiteration of his strongly held beliefs about others’ sexual orientations or the lasting damage done the sport by Pacquiao’s terrible 2015 match with Floyd Mayweather.
Yes, the shoulder match. No one has forgiven Pacquiao for that halfassed performance, nor should he, but most of us have forgotten it – until Pacquiao decides to promote his match with Vargas by telling us he’s healed and ready for a second serving of Money. It’s the wrong message because it makes some of what few consumers remain interested enough in our sport to purchase a match from a promoter’s website reconsider that purchase for fear their support might launch another yearslong buildup to another terrible superfight no one asks for anymore, and Richard Schaefer just began a comeback of his own, too, in case more nostalgic dissonance were craved (incredibly he says fans approached him at fights and told him the sport needs him).
*
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Boxing’s only eight-time world champion and sitting senator returns Saturday in a match you can purchase through his promoter’s website because, in a historic show of ungratefulness, HBO and Showtime and all the terrestrial networks on which Pacquiao was possibly rumored potentially to fight for the last eight years declined to pay retail prices for what worn and defective merchandise they’re now offered.
Camera-phone footage indicates the Senator is in the best shape of his life.
“Manny’s in the best shape of his life,” reported Coach Freddie from training camp. “I know I’ve said this each of his last 12 fights, or more, but this time? The best. Unbelievable.”
*
Pacquiao looked quite good against Timothy Bradley seven months ago, better than Jessie Vargas did, but just because Vargas lost the Pacquiao sweepstakes 19 months ago does not mean Vargas lost the Pacquiao sweepstakes. Vargas did after all clip Bradley at the end of their match and may very well have . . . if only the referee . . . in an unprecedented act of interference . . . the very integrity of the sport . . . and probably deserved to win by knockout, something Vargas’ promoter was not at liberty to disclose while selling Pacquiao-Bradley 3, but now after a closer look thinks all aficionados should revisit.
Talk of Pacquiao’s milling with someone who might beat him like Terence Crawford and make Pacquiao actually retire succumbed this summer to sobriety and brought us limping to Saturday’s spectacle, possibly a tuneup for Pacquiao’s future match with middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, a rich promotional subplot given how much press Golovkin’s trainer receives for threatening the world’s best light heavyweights while trashtalking a junior middleweight and actually fighting a welterweight.
Pacquiao press releases now include airlines and flight numbers in the hopes of materializing an enormous crowd at LAX, something worthy of promotional footage on SportsCenter, alas. The American fight scene to which Pacquiao returns for Saturday’s fight is worse than the one he visited in the spring but more apparently awful to Pacquiao because, one assumes, Pacquiao’s previous purse guarantees were voided by his retirement and the dearth of interest the Pacquiao brand now generates among cable-network executives – before one considers what American consumers now know of politics in the Philippines complemented by our own fatigue with domestic politics. One begins to wonder if promoting Pacquiao as a successful Filipino politician still is the sage tact it once appeared.
Or perhaps all this is superfluous because nobody is about to discover Manny Pacquiao; those of us interested in Pacquiao enough to purchase Saturday’s fight, or heaven help us travel to it, know Pacquiao well enough to know how steadily his capacities have eroded since that 2012 encounter with the Marquez spearchisel and aren’t any longer candidates for a Pacman conversion. We know with Pacquiao we are either at the beginning or the middle part of the embarrassing stage many great prizefighters end their careers with. However extraordinary Pacquiao was in ascent, his descent is all too ordinary.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry