Training camp knockdowns a preview of Marquez bout, says Pacquiao

Las Vegas - In the sparring sessions in preparation for his fight against Juan Manuel Marquez, eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao turned back the pages of time and reverted to his old relentless self by scoring four knockdowns over the duration of his training camp. According to Pacquiao, this is just a taste of things to come.

"I’m just trying to make a bit of example, just a little preview,” Pacquiao said, after breaking camp at the Wild Card Gym in LA.

To raise the level of competition in sparring, Pacquiao’s head trainer Freddie Roach offers 1,000 dollars to anyone who can score a knockdown against Pacquiao. However, for this training camp, he gave Pacquiao the same incentive.

At the start of this camp, Pacquiao said that he wants to have the same aggressiveness he had when he was 25 years old. Back then, Pacquiao was a punching dynamo, who willingly took three punches just so he could unleash a couple of his own. He defeated legends such as Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera at that stage of his career mostly because he would not stop punching until the fight was stopped.

Since then, Pacquiao has turned into a more cerebral fighter, relying more on ring smarts rather than sheer aggression. Pacquiao also turned into a better overall boxer. However, there’s one thing that Pacquiao was not able to do in that stretch and that is to beat Marquez convincingly.

The solution, according to Pacquiao’s gameplan, is to mix the improvements he has accumulated throughout the years and add these to the old relentless version of Manny Pacquiao. Suffering a shocking loss to Timothy Bradley in his last fight along with wanting to score a definitive result over Marquez are what give Pacquiao extra motivation, and it's shown in his training.

“This training camp is really different compared to my last training camps, said Pacquiao. “There were no distractions in this training camp and I’m more inspired because I have a lot of friends coming from other places specially the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She visited me here and it gave me more inspiration to do my best in the fight.”

Pacquiao says that he feels like his old self again. Marquez on the other hand has improved physically since their last fight. This only means that another classic battle will be witnessed by the boxing world this Saturday (Sunday, PHL time) at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. - AMD, GMA News