Earlier this month, the boxing world celebrated the anniversary of one of the most consequential battles of the century so far, the fourth and final clash between two great champions, Manny Pacquiao vs Juan Manuel Márquez IV. What a fight it was, and what a knockout, certainly one of the best one-punch KOs of all time. And perhaps no memory of that unforgettable night is as appropriate or as fun to read as this one, when the author and his crazy, drunk friends witnessed the exciting battle in a strip bar along the Rio Grande. Check it out:
“Hard right hand from Márquez and for the first time in four fights Manny Pacquiao has been knocked down!”
“Are you kidding ?!” So I yelled at the huge screen about twenty feet away from me, and so did a hundred other guys, all of them high on testosterone and beer and oblivious to the festival of lingerie, high heels, and glitter adorning the sexy beauties seducing the metal posts around us. Almost no one paid attention to them.
It was the third round of Pacquiao vs. Márquez IV, and the Mexican maestro had just knocked down the Filipino fighting machine with a powerful right hand. It was the first knockdown Marquez had scored in thirty-nine rounds of fighting against Pacquiao and everyone with a dick between their legs was on their feet and losing their minds. Rightly so too; That punch alone raised the stakes to entirely new heights in the Pacquiao-Marquez rivalry, while also setting the table for the action-fest that was yet to come.
“Little girl, get your tits out of my face!” bellowed a mustachioed hunk a few tables away, probably for the first and only time in his life. “Ten seconds left!” she said as she looked at the screen, the blonde walking away from her, pursing her lips like an eight year old who just realized she wouldn’t be getting cotton candy at the fair tonight.
Next to me, José Luis was going crazy. “I told you so, bitch!” he shouted, “I told you Marquez still had it!” José Luis had that annoying tendency to call everyone a whore when he got excited and in this case, the slow motion repetition of Márquez’s right hand made him lose his mind. On the screen, Pacquiao fell, eyes half-closed, and as he landed his flesh slowly reverberated and cascaded as if his body were about to dissolve into the fifth dimension.
“Yes, there is something about it,” I remember saying. “Look at those fucking biceps,” and I stared in awe at the bound arm muscles on the screen. You had the feeling that if the camera got close enough, at the right angle, you wouldn’t know if you were looking at a boxer’s bloody arm or a throbbing erection. “All natural, no doubt,” I murmured.
Although José Luis and I came to this place alone, you are never alone watching a Juan Manuel Márquez fight in a tit bar overlooking the Rio Grande. Most of the customers that night were supportive of the Mexican legend, except for a handful of Filipino-looking guys, probably students from the local university, sitting in a far corner, too shy to mingle with the bustling Latino contingent. I couldn’t blame them. We were going crazy.
There is nothing like sport to make strangers unite in a single will. Most of us were Mexican, yes, but at the beginning of the night we were strangers, no more likely to buy each other drinks than two random people passing each other on the New York City subway. But since Pacquiao vs. Márquez IV was turning into an incredible fight, and since our compatriot was winning, well, let’s just say there was more than enough icebreaker material for everyone.
After that fall, everyone was ready to let loose. I saw guys who didn’t know each other hugging, toasting beers, and having drinking contests, while others yelled at girls and paid for their neighbors’ lap dances. I saw one guy stand up, thrust his pelvis forward as he grabbed his package, and yell “Suck this one, motherfucker!” while a boy at another table laughed and pointed at the Filipinos before making fun of the first boy.
But all that madness calmed down very quickly just a few minutes later, in the fifth round. It was then that, in a worthy tribute to Nigel Tufnel, the Filipino showed that he could still “make it to eleven.” “Chino Cabrón is coming!” shouted José Luis, making it clear that my friend’s handling of nationalities was confusing at best, and also that I wasn’t the only one who felt the tide was turning. And this was before Manny sent Marquez to the canvas. If at the end of the round you weren’t sure if Pacquiao was in beast mode, all you had to do was look at the hideous crimson mess he’d left where Marquez’s nose used to be. Things were not looking good for “Dinamita”.
I admit that at the end of that infamous fifth round I feared for Márquez. A shiver ran down my spine every time Manny fired that cannon from his left hand, and the same shiver did a U-turn and rose again when I watched Marquez withstand Pacquiao’s punches while he counterattacked with his own. The guy was being taken down in fast motion and still refused to give ground.
That may or may not be true, but at the time I certainly felt like Marquez would rather die on his feet than let Pacquiao knock him out, and looking back, I’m still pretty sure that’s how he felt. After all, anyone who takes three rematches from the Filipino and then gets abused like “Dinamita” was in that fifth round, only to then return to his corner calm as a Hindu cow, must have some pretty solid convictions. But if he was calm and collected and still focused on the task at hand, some of his fans were on the verge of panicking at the beginning of the sixth round.
“They’re going to take it! Poor Marquez! José Luis shouted when the bell rang, which in Spanish means “Márquez’s condition is precarious.” I had to agree with him, and after counting all the worried looks on the faces around us, I knew we all felt that way. Marquez’s mentality might have been as strong as ever when he started the sixth, but it was difficult for any of us to see how that would help him withstand Pacman’s attack. Of course, in the end we only had to wait two minutes and fifty-nine seconds for Marquez to prove us wrong.
In fact, there was a way to stop Pacquiao and Marquez had discovered it. Later everyone called it “a perfect shot,” and some added the word “luck,” but that last part is about as far from the truth as you can get. In fact, Márquez’s right missile execution was all about meticulous preparation and ruthless execution, the logical solution to a perplexing enigma, just as it was for Einstein E-equal-MC-square. Over thirty-six rounds and four training camps, Márquez had had the opportunity to study his enemy, to learn the cadence of Pacquiao’s ticks and tocks, and one imagines Márquez running up and down volcanoes. close to their training ground, those surrounding their hometown. Mexico City, muttering to himself over and over again, no longer like an athlete doing road work but like a mystic in a trance reciting a mantra: “Pretend, hit with your right; I go out, boom! With my right!
And that’s how he did it, causing every last Mexican in that Rio Grande bar to go into a mad frenzy. It was incredible. José Luis’s chair became a catapult that propelled him to stand up; He looked at me with crazy eyes, as if he were lost in a place of horrible ecstasy that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be rescued from, while the people around us began to sing: He’s not going to get up, Jim! Don’t get up, Jim! I felt bad for the scared, half-naked girls running around like chickens, trying to balance on their light heels, while the boys jumped, taunted, screamed, and drank their beers. José Luis just continued to stare at me, eyes and mouth wide open, and we only joined the chaos around us after I poured the last of my beer over his head and screamed in his face.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try that trick on myself now. More than ten years have passed since that unforgettable night, but a part of me can’t let it go, I can’t shake the feeling that although that was the climax of the “Dinamita” vs “Pacman” rivalry, something was left unfinished. But, in a way, Márquez didn’t get over it either. He inexplicably refused to cash in and give Manny a fifth fight, even when Bob Arum offered to do it in Mexico City. And then he lost to Timothy Bradley.
And since then, has Pacquiao even come close to being the ruthless, deadly man on a berserker mission he was that night, pummeling Marquez with those ferocious left hands? He certainly deserves major praise for going ahead and beating Bradley, Rios, Broner and Thurman, but none of that can overshadow the huge egg he laid when he finally got Floyd Mayweather in the ring. It’s hard to shake the feeling that something vital about Pacman was left behind on that crazy night a decade ago.
But it’s also hard not to shake the conviction that he would have gotten it back if he and Márquez had locked up one last time. We will never know for sure why my Mexican brother refused to face him again. Maybe, like he said, he was proud and legacy and walking away on the terms of it. But then again, maybe it had to do with how he felt in the minutes before landing that huge final right hand, as he struggled to breathe through his squashed nose and knew he was maybe just one more left hand away from defeat. Who can say for sure?
Either way, it almost doesn’t matter anymore. Even when you’re stuck in time, the world keeps turning and moving forward, and eventually the old must give way to the new. But no matter what happens, both Marquez and Pacquiao can be sure that their epic battles will forever be enshrined in the memories of passionate fight fans, of the people who lived to see these two born warriors do their thing, people They couldn’t wait to see them. “Dinamita” and “El Pacman” resonate. People like José Luis and me, and the rest of that crazy mob at the strip club by the Rio Grande. —Carlos Ramírez H.
