I SAID all Manny Pacquiao needed was a kitchen knife or, for class, a Swiss Knife, to win it.
Wrong.
Even with a toothpick, he could have still won it. Easily.
A sewing needle would have made Pacquiao already armed to the teeth, too, like Rambo gone berserk.
And why not?
Joshua Clottey was only there because he promised to be there.
This day of days, Joshua Clottey wasn’t fighting.
Joshua Clottey was only blocking.
He was so adept at it that I guess if you start calling him Just Clotting, nobody would mind.
Clottey came not to box but to clot his face with hands appearing like slabs freshly plucked out of the Great Wall of China.
His was a defense as impregnable as the Pentagon.
So fool-proof was Clottey’s defensive phalanx that even if Pacquiao had a sledgehammer for it, it would have been of no use, either.
You can never tear down one hell-bent on exercising his freedom of choice: Clottey wanted to defend, not defang Pacquiao.
As a result, Clottey lost for the fourth time on points for a 35-4, win-loss mark.
To Clottey, that was something to be proud about: Indeed, losing on points is his greatest legacy to his grandkids.
But where is honor in that?
A saying: Those who are afraid to die are not fit to live.
And Clottey’s motto: Losing on points is the most honorable thing in boxing.
The sweet science has lost all its sweetness at the Cowboy Stadium, Texas’s bastion of bigness, all because of Clottey.
Call the fight a battle between a turtle and a lion and I will submit whole-heartedly.
The turtle was a pawikan, though – so huge and with a shell as hard as granite no lion from Asia aka Pacquiao could ever penetrate it, tear it apart.
Or, did Pacquiao disguise as a bird – a vulture, maybe?
Yes. But he was actually a woeful woodpecker pecking away at a treetrunk reinforced by quick-drying cement.
Desperately frustrated, Pacquiao even tried to transform from a boxer to a bank robber.
Same result.
His whirring fists of a chainsaw could not even dent the bank vault that even his acytylene-powered punches were of no match to Clottey’s covert covenant with coagulation.
Ah, boxing. Where art thou headed to?