Jack Slack describes Manny Pacquiao as the man who reinvented boxing — or, perhaps, Freddie Roach is:
Manny Pacquiao is something special. A southpaw volume puncher with the footwork and angling of an orthodox fighter who has had to learn every trick in the book. Why is that so strange?
Well, southpaw fighters are born into the fight game with a natural advantage. Their left hand—the one which is easiest to sneak through the guard of an orthodox fighter—is their power hand. All they need do is step their lead foot outside of the opponent’s lead foot, bring their left shoulder in line between their opponent’s shoulders, and throw a left speed ball at the opponent’s chin, chest or guts.
An orthodox fighter spends his entire career fighting and training with other orthodox fighters. He is accustomed to stopping shorter, weaker left jabs with his glove, and circling towards the opponent’s left hand to mitigate the threat of their right. Everything that an orthodox fighter is most practised in only serves to make him an easier mark for the southpaw left straight.
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Pacquiao was the epitome of a one handed southpaw. He was awkward to deal with, had a shotgun left straight, and knocked a lot of people out. But he was still just another one trick pony.
Once he started to fight the calibre of fighter who could actually deal with that, Pacquiao started having trouble. Enter Freddie Roach and the so called Manila Ice.
This was the name that Roach gave to Pacquiao’s lead hook… after he taught Pacquiao to use it of course. Roach had an excellent lead hook during his time as a boxer, and had learned under Eddie Futch who trained dozens of great hookers (Joe Frazier being the most glaringly obvious example). The mechanics of the lead hook are exactly the same on a southpaw but the important point in transposing the hook is its context.
Roach taught Pacquiao to look for opportunities to land his right hook, not just to use it in flurries as a space filler between left hands. Against Erik Morales, particularly in the third fight of their trilogy, Pacquiao’s right hand looked sublime. As Morales circled repeatedly away from Pacquiao’s well publicised left hand, he ate an unexpectedly stiff right time and time again.
But what really changed Pacquiao was that he and Roach didn’t keep his new power right in reserve for when his opponent was fleeing from the left. They built a game around setting it up, placing it and creating opportunities to land it as he would for his left straight. And this is where we start to talk geometry…