‘Until the wheels fall off’: Manny Pacquiao and the trouble with growing old in a young man’s

When they say that the last thing to go is a boxer’s punch, it gives hope to just about any boxer who can still form a fist. It is therefore not only an adage but cruel, for it suggests that where there is a punch there is always a way. It suggests that punching power will come to a boxer’s rescue in their time of need and that it will be there long after their speed, timing, reflexes and resistance have all gone.

The problem is, a boxer’s ability to punch — hard, soft or otherwise — is often dependent on those very things, and seldom is throwing a punch ever just a case of throwing a punch. To do it right, and generate power, the punch must, A) be thrown correctly, and, B) land.

Ideally, when we talk of power being the last thing to go, we should be more honest. We should emphasize that it is star power, not punch power, we are talking about. For it is that, more than anything else, a promoter will aim to exploit when offering an aging boxer a route back, and it is that an aging boxer can usually rely upon, more so than their punch, when in need of either money or attention. Unlike a punch, you see, it always works and never lets them down. It may fade or become tarnished over time, but there is still no longevity like that of a big name.

Mike Tyson’s, for example, has outlasted even his ability to punch hard. We saw evidence of this last year when Tyson, at the age of 58, attracted 60 million eyeballs to Netflix on the power of his name yet struggled to then throw six power punches during a fight against Jake Paul. You also have Manny Pacquiao’s name. His name continues to open doors and secure rankings at the age of 46, with a WBC welterweight title shot against Mario Barrios recently announced for July 19 in Las Vegas. Not only will that be Pacquiao’s first fight in four years, but it follows a defeat against Yordenis Ugas and indicates that what is fair and right is immaterial when your name has value. If, like Pacquiao’s, it carries significant value, a retired fighter is welcomed back with open arms. They are ranked. They are fast-tracked. They are indulged. They can then delay the drift toward civilian life all retired fighters fear and conclude that the risk of one day forgetting their name is worth the perks of today exploiting it.

It is for that reason some fighters need the decision taken out of their hands. They need to be told they cannot box rather than have someone mutter to them that perhaps their time is up. After all, for most boxers, their time is never up. Until the day they die, they will still be able to punch, and that is all that matters. The punch, remember, is the last thing to go.

“Man, it’s hard,” said Shane Mosley, a former lightweight, welterweight and super welterweight world champion of retirement. “If I hadn’t hurt my arm, and if I hadn’t had surgery and the doctor messed up my arm, I would probably have gone on boxing a lot longer. Since my arm got hurt, I had to retire at 45. I can’t be like Bernard [Hopkins, who was still active in his 50s]. That could have been a goal of mine had it not been for the injury.”

That Mosley somehow considered retirement at 45 to be premature tells you everything about the mentality of the world champion boxer afraid of irrelevance. For Mosley was no fool, nor was he deluded enough to think he was as good at 45 as he was at 35, much less 25. In fact, he knew, having lost his final fight against David Avanesyan, that he could no longer do most of the things he once took for granted and made look so easy.

“I felt good but I was frustrated the whole damn fight,” Mosley said of his swan song. “I was almost knocking him out a couple of times but I couldn’t knock him out. ‘How come I’m hitting him with these shots but I can’t knock him out?’ I was frustrated. Also, ‘How come he’s hitting me with these stupid shots and I know he’s getting ready to do it, and I know they’re coming, but I’m still getting hit? Why?’ Those thoughts shouldn’t be going through your head when you’re fighting. But they were that night. He would turn southpaw and throw a stupid right hook and catch me with it. I knew exactly what he was going to do but couldn’t do nothing about it.”

The date of Mosley’s realization was May 28, 2016, and the result of the fight was a unanimous decision loss. Five years prior to that, he had boxed Manny Pacquiao and was knocked down in Round 3 and been unable to win a single round or seemingly pull the trigger. It led to one of four defeats Mosley suffered in a three-year period, which included a draw against Sergio Mora and a stoppage loss against Anthony Mundine, two men well below the normal level at which Mosley flourished.

Yet still, despite the signs, Mosley carried on. He kept punching, he kept hurting, and he kept taking the opportunities promoters were willing to give him in exchange for his name and his brain.

“I couldn’t believe it was going to go the way it did, or for as long as it did, but I have always been obsessed with boxing,” Mosley said. “I started doing it at 8 and eventually I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to box until the wheels fall off and I can’t do it no more.’ I just loved boxing. I was in love with it.”

Like any toxic relationship, what starts as infatuation can later sour, and the very thing you once loved can in the end be the same thing that destroys you. This is true of the relationship most boxers have with boxing, a sport designed to cause damage, and no amount of distance or clarity prevents them being drawn back together when the time comes. Even though they accept that most reunions will end in tears, the outcome itself is never the point. All a tempted fighter needs to know is whether it can be done or not. They have no interest in whether it can be done well, or indeed whether it should be done. They just want to know if it is possible.

That’s why even injuries — bad ones — are no longer a deterrent in the eyes of some retired fighters. They can be healed with time, like any trauma, and after a while a retired fighter will either compartmentalize or simply forget the pain of old.

Take Sergio Martinez, for instance. He was forced to retire in 2014 due to a series of knee surgeries and was before that seen wearing a knee brace and struggling to stand, let alone move, as Miguel Cotto put him out of his misery in Round 10 of a WBC middleweight title fight. If ever a fighter looked done, it was Martinez that night. Patched up and stitched together, his body had already bailed on him and all he required from Cotto was some help out the door. By the time he then got it, there was not only a look of resignation on the Argentine’s face, but on Cotto’s a look of sadness, for he knew the fight had ceased to be a fight and was now closer to an intervention.

Martinez, that night, was 39 years of age; a good age to call it quits, irrespective of all the injuries. However, because he started boxing late, at 20, the two-weight world champion refused to see age as an accurate gauge. Nor did he see injuries, no matter their severity, as the thing that would ultimately stop him doing what he loved to do.

And so, at the age of 45, Martinez inevitably returned to the ring. Tentative at first, he elected to have four routine fights in Spain, the last of which involved England’s Macaulay McGowan, a boxer who had lost his two previous fights. “He’s actually my mum’s age,” McGowan, 19 years Martinez’s junior, said at the time. “I’m in two minds about it. When I see old fighters come back, I sometimes think, ‘Screw them, what the hell are they doing? It’s a joke.’ Then other times I think, ‘Fair play to them. Why the hell not?’

“I used to have a little crappy dongle [USB stick] stuffed into the side of my computer and all weekend I’d be watching different boxers. One day it would [Marco Antonio] Barrera and the next it would be [Erik] Morales or [Arturo] Gatti. Martinez was also one of my favorites to watch, and after watching him, I’d go to the gym on the Monday as a southpaw with my hands down, jumping around, throwing big one-twos.”

Whether it’s fans or opponents, there remains a market and a captive audience for the retired, big-name fighter, and therefore an incentive for them to return. “He’s not the man he was by any stretch, Martinez, but I want that Martinez win on my record,” said McGowan, knowing the power of names. “All these great British fighters have lost to Martinez over the years, but soon you’ll see on Boxrec: Macaulay McGowan beat Sergio Martinez.”

The fact that this result cannot be found on Boxrec.com has less to do with Sergio Martinez’s form as a man in his mid-40s and more to do with his ability to pick the right fights and opponents to mitigate the things he was unable to do as a man in his mid-40s. Indeed, after comfortably beating McGowan in 2022, Martinez continued to box at the same sort of level, winning twice more, and few took exception to him operating this way, with the danger effectively minimized.

Often it’s about knowing your place and your limitations. Just as a 45-year-old man will, or should, feel less inclined to prowl nightclubs on a Saturday night, so too should a 45-year-old pro boxer know better than to think he can still mix it with young world champions on a Saturday night. In other words, grow old gracefully, or at least safely, and nobody appears to have a problem. Why else, for example, would someone like Oliver McCall still be allowed to box in 2025? He is, after all, now 60 years of age, yet he fights for the 78th time on June 3, this Tuesday, in Nashville. His first pro fight was all the way back in 1985 and his recent ones, all of which have taken place in Nashville, have been of a similar ilk: Soft touches to protect…