In Search of a Happy Ending to Boxing Career, Manny Pacquiao Is Following a Familiar, Sad Trajectory

Quickly Manny Pacquiao doesn't need this fight against Lucas Matthysse, as the risks simply outweigh the rewards at this stage of his boxing career. By Greg Bishop July 12, 2018  When people ask me for my favorite athlete I’ve ever covered, I sometimes answer Manny Pacquiao. I’ve said that less in recent years, because it’s harder to embrace this version of Pacquiao, with his homophobic rants and his political alignment with Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines and a perpetual abuser of human rights.  But Pacquiao, before he became a full-time politician, was something else. Magic, mostly. Unlike anything I’ve seen in almost two decades writing about sports. That Pacquiao climbed divisions the way most people climb stairs, winning titles at featherweight and lightweight and welterweight, collecting belts in eight weight classes. That Pacquiao bloodied Oscar De La Hoya, savaged Ricky Hatton and all but reconfigured Miguel Cotto’s face. He won fighter of the decade in the 2000s as much for how he fought—his style bloody, unorthodox and unrelenting—and who he fought (everybody), rather than his record, which now stands at 59-7-2.   Pacquiao will add to that mark on Sunday in Malaysia, when he faces another past-his-prime power puncher in Lucas Matthysse. The fight could be exciting. Pacquiao might win. But all that misses the larger, more important point, which is that Pacquiao doesn’t need this fight and shouldn’t have taken it. There’s nothing more for him to win in boxing and so much more, exponentially more, that he could still lose. Like his long-term health, for starters.  In 2009, I spent six hours in Pacquiao’s apartment in Los Angeles with his publicist Fred Sternburg. We waited that long for Pacquiao to come downstairs. He never did. His acolytes cooked food and did laundry and cut his meat and competed for the most coveted space in Pacquiao’s orbit—the foot of his bed, where the person most in Pacquiao’s good graces slept each night.   I had just started to cover boxing for The New York Times, and yet it was obvious, even then, that the people closest to Pacquiao were worried about him. They were worried about the bouts he had fought and the punches he had taken—and that was before Juan Manuel Marquez knocked him out cold in 2012—and the people who used him and the money he gave away. At the height of his career, one of his closest advisors, Michael Koncz, told me that Pacquiao’s downfall, if there was one, “will be his kindness and generosity.”  Boxing Mauro Ranallo Aims to Reach an Important Audience With Documentary on His Bipolar Disorder  “At some point, it’s going to catch up to him,” Koncz said then.   And it has. Right about … now. It has been nine years since Pacquiao won a bout by stoppage. It has been almost a decade since he won fighter of the decade. It has been a year since he stepped into a ring in Australia to fight Jeff Horn, losing a horrendous decision that only masked the real takeawa