MANNY PACQUIAO KO9 DAVID DIAZ

Just minutes after a boxer who in reality stopped his opponent got shockingly disqualified, Manny Pacquiao and David Diaz restored some sanity to boxing, Pacquiao with his exhibition of blazing speed and skill, Diaz for his heart and dogged determination against overwhelming odds.

Pacquiao was superb in capturing the WBC lightweight title to become a four-weight world champion, having previously won belts at flyweight, junior featherweight and junior lightweight.

Diaz fought like a true Mexican warrior, always coming forward, always trying his best. Bloodied and battered, he was still trying to find a way to win when Pacquiao dropped him face down for the spectacular ninth-round finish.

Pacquiao answered questions about the move to 135 pounds. He looked just as fast and just as strong as he had been at 130, and his punching was sharp, speedy and accurate.

All respect to Diaz, who I like very much as a person, but his style was made for Pacquiao — somewhat slow, straight ahead, not too much imagination in his approach to things.

Pacquiao was made to look sensational in this fight, and maybe he was sensational at that. At 29, he just seemed to have taken his boxing to another level. His right jab from the southpaw stance is a much-improved weapon. At one point the jab slammed Diaz’s head right back, as if he had been hit by a pole. The combinations were extremely impressive, up and down, around the sides, the right uppercut through the middle — that was something I don’t recall seeing before.

Diaz kept his gloves up but he couldn’t block them all. His defences were being overrun. As he told his cornerman, Jim Strickland, he could handle the punches, not the speed.

At first, I thought that Diaz would be able to keep coming forward all night and that the only way he would get stopped would be if the cut over his right eye became too severe for the doctor to allow him to continue.

Gradually, though, a subtle change came over this stubborn fighter’s demeanour. The accumulative effect of the punches was adding up. In the eighth round Diaz was, for want of a better way to put it, reacting badly to Pacquiao’s blows. Instead of walking through them he looked as if the punches were beginning to affect him, his expression registering shock in a “That hurt” kind of way.

There was a point where Pacquiao looked as if he didn’t want to continue hitting his outclassed opponent and I thought I saw him cast a glance at referee Vic Drakulich as if to say: “Do I have to keep doing this to David?” But, as Jim Lampley noted in the HBO PPV commentary, Pacquiao is a professional and he has to take care of business, and so he went right on dishing out the punishment.

Fellow-southpaw Diaz managed to land a punch here and there — some body blows, an occasional left hand to the head, some chopping right hooks in the clinches — but he was receiving so much more than he was able to deliver.

By the ninth his left eye was swelling and his nose was bloody in addition to the cut over his right eye, and the HBO commentators were wondering whether the fight should be stopped when, from out of the blue, Pacquiao brought over his big left hand and a worn down and weakened Diaz went out of the fight, brave to the bitter end.

It had been quite a performance by Pacquiao, who is surely the world’s top fighter, weight-for-weight. He dominated and ultimately destroyed Diaz. On this night, Pacquiao looked the perfect fighting machine.

Also on the show, Tye Fields was exposed as today’s version of Lamar Clark (readers of a certain age will recall the Utah novice with the built-up record). Monte Barrett, a veteran who can fight, had easy pickings as his well-placed right hands blasted the big fellow to the floor in a 57-second fiasco. And to think that trainer Jesse Reid wanted Fields to be matched with Wladimir Klitschko. Yes, really. I have a lot of respect for Jesse and when he has told me things about his fighters, how they would perform in certain fights, he has usually been spot-on. However, I think that in this instance Reid’s hopes for Fields triumphed over his experience — he saw something in the mountainous Montanan that just wasn’t there.

And what a good fight it was between featherweights Steven Luevano and Mario Santiago, whose all-southpaw 12-rounder was absorbing from start to finish, including a dramatic second round in which each went down.

Luevano earned the draw on guts, willpower and experience but he took far too many left hands. I thought that Luevano, after shaky spells in the middle rounds, might be able to pull out a win as he pressed ahead in the later stages but he just couldn’t quite get enough punches on target to swing the verdict his way. Each man thought he had won: the draw seemed a fair and fitting conclusion to this excellent contest.