Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.
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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, chemistry was everywhere, and that won’t be forgotten. Arguments that it wasn’t, explanations that rely on genetics or diets or work ethics, begin their analyses, necessarily, in recent training camps – like a biography whose first page treats this morning’s breakfast.
To see little Juan Manuel Marquez, aged 36, running in the green mountains of Mexico, jerking volcanic rocks overhead and imbibing his own amber urine before a “welterweight” match with Floyd Mayweather in 2009 allowed no doubt of Marquez’s dedication, however much his physique resembled cinnamon candlewax more than sandstone. Whence Marquez’s enhanced build, at age 39, then: new genes? a switch from beef to chickpeas? better form on the military press? The change is a chemical one. That is not the indictment of Marquez’s character it may appear; many disinterested observers believe whatever science Marquez employed in his fourth fight with Pacquiao was science employed against Marquez in at least their last three. If a natural athlete fought a chemically enhanced one on even terms then switched to a regimen of chemicals, in other words, KO-6 is exactly the result oddsmakers might predict.
A week later, Donaire unveiled in Houston, conversely, the sort of long body athletes wore a generation ago. Donaire was finely conditioned, fit, and his natural reflexes were sensational, but he did not have what bodybuilders call vascularity – crinkled veins protruding in many places but most tellingly along the center of the biceps.
How much sports fans care about the PED debate, though, is best measured by an inverse of their enthusiasm for the NFL, in which 300-pound players have improved their presence 53,200-percent since 1970.
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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, Marquez made a generation of Mexican fans hopeful again, after it’d watched its best figures undone by Pacquiao, an offensive force whose historic ferocity was belied by its happy manifestation – smiles en route to the ring, jaunty bounces during attack, gloves thrust encouragingly above the head whenever any opponent scored him.
Marquez did to Pacquiao what no one else was able: Make him ignore trainer Freddie Roach. Once Marquez felled him with that sweeping right hand in round 3, he had Pacquiao in a place of carelessness, mindlessness even, where, so long as Marquez could withstand what rage he ignited, Pacquiao was bound to make mistakes both men knew he made bounding in, mistakes Roach was powerless to forbid. Even after Pacquiao’s best round, the fifth, Roach portentously, uncharacteristically, shouted over the chaotic din of his charge’s corner: “Manny, move your head!” If instead Roach had shouted on his way up the stairs in the last second of the sixth “Juan, my guy doesn’t move his head,” it could have been no clearer to Marquez, a predator already crooking his right elbow at just the angle to stick a middle knuckle square on Pacquiao’s face.
Donaire and Arce, six days later, smiled and laughed and hugged one another through their weighin. Ethnic pedigrees assured the folks gathered before a black-canvas backdrop at PlazAmericas Mall Saturday’s fight would be violent, but there was so little contempt to display, or hide, it was one more reminder how different was the rivalry at green-and-gold MGM Grand the week before.
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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8 was a reminder, too, that Marquez traveled to the Philippines after their second fight to interrupt those islands’ celebration of their hero’s triumph and plead with Pacquiao for a rubber match. When that match did not come, Marquez made 2009’s fight of the year against Juan Diaz in Houston’s Toyota Center.
That was a reminder of the unfriendly terrain Marquez trod to become his country’s most celebrated prizefighter, what obscurity the generation’s greatest counterpuncher endured while his fellow countrymen, Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera, made their country’s most famous trilogy. The way Marquez solved Pacquiao all by himself from the seat of his white and red-striped trunks in 2004, frantically querying a database of openings and counters for some arrangement resembling the Filipino’s unorthodox attack enough to let the experimentation begin, experimentation that would evolve from hooking at the shoulder to ducking the left cross to skipping out of range to countering, finally – experimentation Marquez performed alone because, while Nacho Beristain could tell him what punch to throw and why, he could not tell Marquez when to throw it because at the championship level boxing moves too fast, with consequences too wicked, to trust any perception but one’s own.
After he retired Arce a week after Marquez left aficionados wondering if Pacquiao would fight another day, Donaire did what he could to remind folks he’d brought Filipinos solace. He had, after all, stretched a Mexican. But that Mexican was not Marquez, and he was not Pacquiao.
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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, Marquez brought vindication to himself, of course, but also to Mexican and Mexican-American fathers in the U.S. who told their kids, no matter the success of Pacquiao’s southpaw attack or the celebrity of Mayweather’s low lead hand, Marquez’s was the form they must emulate. He was not fast as those other guys, just as they weren’t, but he was perfect. His quiet mastery of a grim craft held within it, too, insights about their immigrant culture, just as what spite he showed men he combated imparted forgotten details about the conquest of New Spain.
This will be the year Nonito Donaire is remembered for escaping the long shadow of Manny Pacquiao, both for what Donaire did, and for the way Marquez shortened that shadow in Las Vegas.
For hosting our sport’s best fight and best fighter, in two different cities, the week that began Dec. 8 was 2012’s most excellent.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
