Manny Pacquiao: The Early Years in L.A.

Published

11 years ago

November 21, 2013

Light speed best describes how quickly the years pass in a prizefighter’s career.

A mere 12 years ago the upstairs boxing gym was in full throttle when a few of us zigzagged our way through the maze of boxers, trainers, groupies and journalists at the Wild Card Boxing gym.

Headmaster Freddie Roach smiled and ambled his way toward us. He seemed a little more peppy as he stuck his hand out to greet us.

“I’ve got a new fighter you should see,” said Roach. “He’s a Filipino kid and he’s been knocking out everyone here.”

Today, everyone knows Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao (seen in above Chris Farina-Top Rank photo, ahead of Roach, as they arrive in Macao), but back in 2001, just those regulars at the Hollywood boxing haven knew about the quicksilver southpaw. Other than the regular boxing beat writers, there were no several hundred boxing fans waiting outside. In those days James Toney was the marquee fighter in that gym and others like Israel Vazquez, Roger “Speedy” Gonzalez, Ian MacKillop and a few others trained there.

Roach was anxious to show off Pacquiao and itching to grab a fight for his newest protégé. When IBF junior featherweight titlist Lehlo Ledwaba’s opponent fell through they called Roach and he immediately took the fight. It was one of those unique breaks that seem to come at the right time.

A few of us had watched Pacquiao spar and he worked like a human buzz saw inside the ring. It didn’t matter who sparred, they all ate a lot of punches as Pacquiao darted in and out and fired blurring combinations. So when the contract was finalized, those few of us who knew about Pacquiao made sure to mention this fight to our readers and friends.

Pacquiao’s television debut took place on June 23, 2001, at the MGM Grand. The main event was Oscar De La Hoya facing Spain’s Javier Castillejo. Few gave the Spaniard a chance against De La Hoya. And even fewer realized about the coming of Pacquiao.

What I remember is HBO’s television boxing crew crowing about the talent of Ledwaba. They hyped the South African who was making his sixth title defense and mentioned little about Pacquiao. It’s one of their failings. They rarely bother to watch preliminary fights, let alone visit boxing gyms. So when Pacman made his entrance they were completely surprised.

A handful of Southern California journalists knew what was going to happen. We had seen his exploits in the gym and were confident about Pacquiao being able to transfer that to the prize ring. It was an eager moment for this writer because I had promised many of my friends that Pacquiao would run over Ledwaba.

Poor Ledwaba. Pacquiao was a replacement just two weeks before the fight date. There was no reason to believe that a former flyweight world champion would give much trouble. But that night Ledwaba was massacred from the first round until the sixth when he no longer could continue. Just like that Pacquiao was a world champion again.

Five months later Pacquiao would be defending that title against Agapito Sanchez in San Francisco. Sadly, Sanchez was murdered in 2005 in a dancing ballroom in his native country. The diminutive Dominican southpaw trained at the old L.A. Boxing Club located behind the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was a clever boxer who was very familiar with Pacquiao’s style. When he met Pacquiao at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium it was already pre-determined what needed to be done.

Pacquiao was butted and held and frustrated by Sanchez’s tactics. Cuts flowed from the champion’s face and though he tried to fight his way through the constant butts and clinches, it was just not possible. Sanchez used every trick in his arsenal to keep the champion from utilizing his power. The fight ended in a technical draw after ringside physicians ruled that Pacquiao could not continue.

It proved to be a good learning experience for Pacquiao.

After a two-round demolition of Jorge Eliecer Julio in Memphis, the U.S. did not see Pacquiao in the ring for another year. The champion fought twice in the Philippines and brought along his trainer Roach to the islands for the first time.

Pacquiao’s L.A. fight debut finally took place in the summer of 2003 at the Olympic Auditorium. It would be his first and only appearance in the historic boxing venue. The historic boxing structure where every great fighter like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali to Salvador Sanchez showed their skills would shutter its doors for good two years later.

A few of us arrived early and were talking outside on the parking lot when trainer Roach arrived with his boxing gear over his shoulder. He had just returned from the Philippines and was anxious to tell us about his experience.

“The people are very friendly but the place is very poor,” said Roach, adding that amenities like tissue paper and other small items were not readily available. “I learned a lot. Next time I go I’m bringing stuff with me.”

Pacman’s next opponent would be undefeated Emmanuel Lucero of New York. Though he was living in the Big Apple he was actually born in Mexico City. Not many boxing journalists knew much about Lucero except that he was Mexican.

It was a good fight card that night. Fernando Vargas had recently lost against rival Oscar De La Hoya and chose to fight Fitz Vanderpool. Others fighting and winning were Sergio Mora, BJ Flores and Malik Scott. A large boxing crowd showed up that night to see the solid fight card.

Filipino prizefighters had been showcased in the Olympic Auditorium for many decades. Guys like Speedy Dado and Pablo Dano were great Filipino boxers and attractions at the L.A. boxing venue from the 1930s on. Pacquiao was yet another link to great Filipino fighters of the past.

Lucero entered the ring with an unorthodox low crouch and ducked under Pacquiao’s immediate attacks. But the Mexican from New York couldn’t touch Pacquiao who would dart back a few feet before resuming the attack. Then came those uppercuts. When Pacman zipped in to deliver one of those left-hand uppercuts, Lucero seemed to walk into the punch and down he went like a sniper had shot him from one of those seats in the rafters. It was over in a mere three rounds and the crowd was in awe.

Next would be the real awe-inspiring fight when he met Mexico’s Marco Antonio Barrera.

First Mexican challenge

A triumvirate of Mexican prizefighters ruled the boxing landscape in the junior featherweight and featherweight divisions in 2003. Barrera, Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez conquered most of the best fighters from 122 to 126 pounds and their followers debated who was superior.

Roach was not sure what to expect.

“We’ll see what happens,” said Roach before the fight. “Barrera is a good fighter and very smart, but he’s never faced anyone like Manny.”

Little was expected of Pacquiao when he signed to face Barrera on November 2003. Barrera had humiliated United Kingdom’s Prince Hamed and defeated Morales in a rematch a year earlier. He had also run over former world champions Johnny Tapia, Enrique Sanchez and Kevin Kelley. Plus, he had just signed a contract with the new promotion company Golden Boy Promotions. But everything went wrong for the Mexican fighter from day one.

When he left his former promoter it caused bad feelings including an announcement from them that Barrera had suffered a head injury and had a metal plate place in his head. Then a major fire at his Big Bear Lake location forced his training camp to move. Plus, he simply did not take Pacquiao seriously.

Bad idea.

Pacquiao floored Barrera several times and never allowed the Mexican champion to regain footing. If anything, Barrera could only look to survive the onslaught but even in survival mode, Pacquiao stormed past the barricades of Barrera’s defense. It ended in round 11.

“What I do remember is fighting a guy I knew nothing about and a very explosive fighter. What I remember about other than losing the fight was he really beat me with the body shots,” said Barrera in a recent telephone press conference.“He was an extremely quick fighter that I was not prepared for.”

Most of the boxing world was unprepared for Pacquiao but soon would appreciate his talent. Crowds began to gather outside the Wild Card Boxing Gym and soon even the boxing reporters doubled and tripled on the doorsteps. From this point on Pacquiao’s journey would never be overlooked again.

End of part one.

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David A. Avila

Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

14 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-322-Super-Welter-Week-in-SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

TSS-Salutes-Thomas-Hauser-and-his-Bernie-Award-Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

Published

4 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Mekhrubon-Sanginov-whose-Heroism-Nearly-Proved-Fatal-Returns-on-Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.

He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.

Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.

“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.

“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)

Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.

During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”

He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.

He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.

On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.

Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.

If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.

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