Pacman delays his ring return

[WelshDevilRob]

Manny Pacquiao's ring return has been delayed by three weeks, his adviser has confirmed.

 

The Filipino idol was due to fight on November 10 but will now box on December 1 due to issues surrounding his re-election campaign for he congressional seat he holds in his home country.

 

"Manny has to be in the Philippines for the filing of his candidacy in October, and I don't want to interrupt his training, nor does Manny," Michael Koncz told ESPN.

 

"If he fights on November 10, it would interrupt his training because he would have to go back to the Philippines. You lose two days going there, and it's a long trip in the middle of camp. We don't want to have any excuses when he fights.

 

"I believe if he fought on November 10 but made a trip at that time to the Philippines, we'd lose a week of physical training, and I don't want there to be any excuses. So we can't go on November 10, and we have told that to our promoter Top Rank."

 

Normally Pacquiao's training camps are split between his gym in Baguio, Philippines and Freddie Roach's Wild Card gym in Hollywood, but Koncz had revealed that for this next fight all of the boxer's training will be conducted in the United States.

 

"Once he starts training, we're doing it all in America," Koncz said.

 

"The first time we trained in the Philippines for part of the time it was done for taxation reasons. So we started to do that, and Manny enjoyed it. But it's becoming a chore. He felt the training camp would be sufficient to do it all in L.A."

 

No opponent has been confirmed as yet but rematches with Timothy Bradley, Juan Manual Marquez and Miguel Cotto have all been mentioned.

 

Source:

http://www.hattonboxing.com/tv/news/2012/08/pacman-delays-his-ring-return

[davemurphy]

As always, Koncz, who I've always suspected was just a plant working for Top Rank so that Arum can maintain control over Manny, proves to be either deceptively manipulative or totally incompetent. It's not like this election filing date wasn't an issue when they set the November 10th fight date. My guess is that he did it to broach the issue of doing all the training in L.A. rather than splitting it, which leaves Manny exposed to other voices. If the opponent is Cotto or Marquez with judges like we've had for their first three fights, then as far as I'm concerned, they can just go ahead and delay the fight permanently.