Rocky Pacquiao

5:09 AM // 0 comments // Ian Purugganan // Category: Pacquiao //

[Dan Wetzel | Yahoo! Sports] Every boxer thinks he’s Rocky Balboa, at least the Rocky who’s beating on a side of frozen beef, climbing a Siberian mountain or running after a grease-lightning-fast chicken. The one who makes primitive training seem wise and heroic.

On the most recent edition of HBO’s “24/7,” at least one member of Manny Pacquiao’s camp brought up a different kind of Rocky Balboa – the one who had grown rich and famous and distracted at the start of “Rocky III.” That Rocky Balboa joked with reporters at training camp, posed for pictures with celebrities and didn’t fully commit to his training.

“Sylvester Stallone was training in a hotel and media was all around and cameras,” Alex Ariza, Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning trainer, said. “He was fighting Clubber Lang and he went in there and got destroyed.”

You don’t normally see a team joke about its own fighter, but then again, the parallels to Pacquiao’s training for his Nov. 13 fight against Antonio Margarito were obvious.

He skipped a training session to meet with the president of the Philippines, sang “Imagine” with Will Ferrell on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (“Will Ferrell is a funny guy,” Pacquiao said) and even jetted to Nevada to campaign for Sen. Harry Reid.

Meanwhile, in humble Oxnard, Calif., playing the controversial and driven role of Mr. T’s Clubber Lang, was Margarito, who routinely has a trainer smack his abs with a stick in some sort of medieval toughening test.

Pacquiao is Pacquiao, world’s greatest pound-for-pound fighter and as much as a 6-to-1 favorite over Margarito. Just about everyone who has seen the two men fight thinks Pacquiao’s superior hand speed will carry the day when the two clash in Arlington, Texas.

Except what happens if Pacquiao isn’t fully prepared? Does Margarito then stand a chance? On HBO, Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, played the voice-of-caution Mickey Goldmill character perfectly, even declaring that the Philippine portion of fight prep “was probably our worst training camp ever.”

Wednesday, Roach was singing a different tune. Maybe he just wants to psych Margarito out. Or maybe once Pacquiao got to the Wild Card Boxing Club in California, he was able to settle down. Or maybe for a fighter who seems to thrive in chaos, no amount of distractions matter. After all, Pacquiao is the guy who once had so many friends crashing in his fight-week hotel room, he wound up sleeping on the floor.

“Believe me, we haven’t taken this fight lightly,” Roach said. “Manny is a professional. He’s always known how to get into shape. Manny is always a multitasker. There’s no way [Margarito has] trained harder than us, and it will show on the 13th.”

As for that “worst training camp ever” line and all of the general concern coming from Roach, the trainer said he would grade this camp as a B. It was the “worst” because all the other camps graded out as A’s.

“Nothing to worry about,” Pacquiao added. “Tell the fans there’s nothing to worry about.”

The mere suggestion that Pacquiao hasn’t trained at his typical relentless level isn’t a real good way to convince fans to plop down their pay-per-view money. Then again, a less-than-100 percent Pacman might be susceptible to an upset.

No one wants to see another complete domination like the one Joshua Clottey suffered at the hands of Pacquiao last March. Clottey was so outclassed he hardly bothered to fight, preferring to avoid punishment and go the distance.

“It’ll be a lot better than the Clottey fight because everyone knows Margarito throws punches,” Roach said.

The trainer sounded supremely confident. He brushed off Margarito’s size advantage, saying speed would be the deciding factor. He dismissed Margarito’s punching power as a non-threat.

“I don’t see this as being a difficult fight at all,” Roach said.

Almost everyone else has heard the stories and watched the fighters’ concentration levels during the respective training camps and at least paused to wonder what was up. Even promoter Bob Arum thought Pacquiao looked like a big underdog, not the overwhelming favorite, the first time he saw him in the Philippines.

Around the game of boxing, Manny’s commitment level is the topic of discussion.

“I think Pacquiao will be slower and I think Margarito will be quicker because of the mitt work and the combination punching he’s been doing with [trainer] Robert Garcia,” veteran trainer Joe Goossen told Yahoo! Sports’ Kevin Iole. “The pendulum swings both ways. Margarito is hungry, motivated; he’s in great shape and he’s a big guy.

“On the other side, you have a guy who is now a congressman, whose trainer has been complaining that he hasn’t been putting the work in the way he has in the past. He’s got a lot of things on his mind other than Margarito – and with Margarito as hungry as he is, that’s not a good thing when you look at it from Manny’s standpoint.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps Pacquiao is playing coy and will be as indestructible as ever. Underestimate Manny at your own risk. He didn’t get to be the best by accident.

Wednesday, Team Pacquiao expressed an air of confidence and brushed aside all criticism and concern. That’s what favorites do; it’s straight out of the prefight handbook of trying to crush the confidence of the underdog.

It’s what Rocky Balboa did before fighting Clubber Lang, too.