BERT SUGAR'S POST-FIGHT BREAKDOWN

December 9, 2008 - by Bert Sugar

In the strangest case of free association since Professor Rohrshack toppled over his inkwell, those bargain-basement guess-your-weight merchants in the writing dodge had worn down their pencils to the nubs calling the Oscar De La Hoya-Manny Pacquiao fight a "sham" and a "fraud." In their Delphic opinions this was the biggest mismatch since little David challenged the giant Goliath. How could a fighter who had started as a 106-pound junior flyweight and fought only once as a lightweight now jump up to the welterweight level and fight a man who had been fighting as a middleweight and junior middleweight, giving away height, weight, and reach? To them it was more than a leap of weight, it was a leap of faith.

For particulars on both matches we refer you to A. Lincoln's sonnet on "Fooling all the people..." For what they had done was examine the bottle, not its contents and the value of the package called Manny Pacquiao far exceeded its contents.

From the git-go "little" Manny--who, ironically, weighed more that the supposedly "bigger" Oscar, coming into the ring weighing 148 to Oscar's 147-plus--fought in total control of himself and of Oscar, threading the needle's eye with his straight left and moving out of arms and harm's way of Oscar's jab. By the second round, now more than moderately belligerent, Manny had set off the parameters of the ring, keeping the fight in the center of the ring where he could outmaneuver Oscar, frescoing him with straight lefts and an equal number of rights rather than merely lacing him gingerly.

As the fight wore on, so too did Manny's unceasing attack as he continued to shift De La Hoya's center of gravity with body punches coming from all angles. If you were keeping score, you could have written "ditto" after every round--which, not incidentally, the three judges did, the three giving Pacquiao every round except one of three giving Oscar the first. It had become a blowout, complimentary and alimentary as many of Oscar's fans and those in the press section began to wonder if their faith in Gibraltar had been misplaced.

By the seventh it was all Pacquiao as he drove De La Hoya to the ropes and, with Oscar bivouacked there, brutalized him, folding him into three like a carpenter's rule with body shots sounding like surf striking shore and forcing De La Hoya to grab the ropes to keep himself up.

Defenseless, offenseless and just plain ol' fence-less, the sand in his hourglass now quickly flowing to the bottom, De La Hoya wearily made it to his feet for the eighth round almost as if he had to just because he had paid two weeks' rent on the ring. But it was only to prolong the agony as Pacquiao continued to land a tsunami of punches, first lefts and then last rites, now a human litter bearer.

At the end of the eighth, as a beaten De La Hoya sat slumped on his stool, his left eye wearing a giant plum of a welt, his shoulders slumped, his face bearing a look of resignation and a did-you-get-the-license-plate-of-that-truck-that-just-ran-over me? his trainer Nacho Beristain had enough even if Oscar hadn't and waved it off.

Manny Pacquiao had done it! He had not only pulled off an upset that few had foreseen, but done it in a manner unforeseen by any. And, in the process, had placed his name in the record books alongside that of Henry Armstrong, the original copyright holder of leap-frogging from division-to-division to win multiple championships along the way. No tonic, no matter how well advertised, has the invigorating effect on the boxing public as a new superstar. And Manny Pacquiao is now that new superstar, despite those before-the-fight prophesies by foreboding soothsayers who now can go back to just saying "sooth.".