By Andrew Hall
Over the last decade I have watched with rapt attention the saga between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao! Recently, the two combatants attempted to settle things in the ring with Floyd Mayweather winning via unanimous decision after the fight, I argued with great vigor that Manny Pacquiao should have won and that he should have been given the shot he so desperately needed for his rotator cuff injury!I found myself even more perplexed when I learned that Floyd Mayweather was allowed to have injections to help numb his hands for the big event. Why on earth was Floyd Mayweather treated so much better in decisions having such great impact on the outcome of the fight? I was soon to find out!
Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather have been the two biggest stars in boxing over the last decade. It became a sort of yearly thing to watch both of them fight various opponents and then at the end of the contest to be asked when they would fight each other. Pacquiao always seemed ready to fight but Floyd Mayweather took such questions as occasion to level accusations of PED (Performance Enhancement Drugs) use at his would be opponent. This inevitably lead to a defamation lawsuit!
Floyd Mayweather has set himself up as an icon of pugilistic purity, a clean practitioner of the manly art of self defense. On the other hand, he has made Manny Pacquiao appear to be a man who has climbed the ladder of fistic greatness only by means of performance enhancing drugs! Of course, recent events have raised serious questions about Floyd Mayweather and in the remainder of this article I want to show that it was Mayweather all along who deserved closer scrutiny!
There is great wisdom in the notion that the person railing accusations at another is usually guilty of the thing he/she is accusing the other person of! How many times have husbands accused wives of infidelity while being the one doing the cheating? How many wives have done the exact same thing? Well, Floyd Mayweather has been accusing Manny Pacquiao of PED use for the past 5 or 6 years!
The argument that Floyd has used to back up his PED assertion is Manny Pacquiao’s tremendous ascent through the higher weight classes in boxing. It is his ability to knock out bigger and stronger men, and even more so to absorb punishment from guys much bigger than himself! This argument is bogus on two fronts: first, Manny Pacquiao’s knockout ratio hasn’t gone up much and I see no proof that his punching power or punch resistance has improved while moving up the weight classes! If you look at the knockouts Pacquiao has scored you see a guy who is scoring knockouts because he is able to hit with great frequency men who are slightly bigger and less quick and nimble than the usual opponents he faces. Look at how easily he hit guys like Antonio Margarito yet he was unable to knock him out! He gave Miguel Cotto a good ass kicking but if the referee had not intervened it would most likely have gone to the score cards. The Ricky Hatton knockout was a great one punch knockout (arguably the greatest one punch knockout of his career) but Floyd has done the same thing against a bigger fighter in Victor Ortiz. Plus, Mayweather himself knocked out Ricky Hatton a few years earlier! Also, consider the fact that despite moving up and supposedly using PED’s he was still unable to knock out Juan Manuel Marquez who also came up from the lower weight classes to fight not only Pacquiao but Floyd Mayweather too!
What will be the result of all of this? Will the Mayweather vs Pacquiao fight be null and void and rendered a no decision? Will Mayweathers purse be taken back? I doubt it! Most likely this will simply lead to public demand for a rematch. In the end, Floyd and Pacquaio will be the winners as both men stand to make a bodacious payday before riding off into the sunset! The truth of the matter is that all the elite athletes in this world are on PED’s. Keep in mind, my dear reader, that it only takes one athlete to take steroids to mess it up for everybody else. For if one person takes steroids all the rest of the contestants have to as well to even have a chance of winning. I won’t go into it here but taking PED’s is such an advantage that a non PED user vs a PED user would simply be no contest. The person on PED’s has such an advantage that the match would not even be worth watching. Thus, in order to be an elite athlete one must take PED’s like steroids! Without it the average pugilist would simply be unable to compete with the big boys!
In closing, I would just like to say that the world of boxing and the world of sports has a huge decision to make! Do we really want to watch sports where no PED’s are in use? If everybody simply admitted that PED’s were being used couldn’t this whole thing be resolved? Most people dislike the idea of performance enhancement drug use because it infers cheating but it wouldn’t be cheating if everybody admitted to doing it! I think a human being has the right to use PED’s in order to excel at a sport! I think its that person’s body and they have a right to do with that body whatever they want. It’s not for you and I to tell another human being if they should or shouldn’t take steroids or other PED’s!
