There comes a time in any sports fans life when he sees his hero slowly come face to face with his mortality. Time passes and the body ages and while high level athletes do have that innate ability to slow down father time, inevitably it catches up to them. When it comes to boxing, a fighters window of peakness is shorter than that of other sports. For the mere fact of the day to day in and out of the gym, compounded with the truama of sparring and mixed in with the damage taken in the ring, these modern day warriors run on fixed time clocks.
Now there are a few exceptions as we saw Bernard Hopkins define logic once more last weekend, but for the most part ever fighter has that once performance which signals signs of decline. Whether or not Manny Pacquiao’s KO loss to Juan Manuel Marquez is just that or the product of having faced one of the most gifted counter punchers of the last fifty years, his trainer Freddie Roach feels the end is near.
In this interview with Marcos Villegas he is asked if regardless of wins or losses if 2013 will be Pacquiao’s final year, “umm yes, close. You know it depends if we fight once this year or twice this year. He is getting close to the end though and I hope he ends up becoming president of the Phillipines.”
Regardless of what happens to Pacquiao in 2013, his legacy is already secured and if he does seek office in his native country we have a pretty cool story to tell our grand-kids decades from now.
