Cleverly-devised riddles nag anyone’s psyche like your mother did when you were seven. And to many boxing fans, there can be no greater riddle as to who is currently the top pound-for-pound king of this generation.
Does Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao retain that mythical — and largely debatable — title?
Or does former boxing champion Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. has stake to that claim?
For the last 20 or so months, the world bestowed Pacquiao its acknowledgement of the best fighter in the world, as Floyd tried to fade into the limelight convinced of his undying parting legacies to boxing. Ever humble as he is, the Filipino spitfire stepped up and received that title like a holy gift from God, cloaked in the proverbial mantle.
Unfortunately for Pacquiao, that riddle resurfaced when the Michigan Pretty Boy reemerged from his semi-”retirement” cocoon to beat the man widely considered to be the second best boxer in the world, Juan Manuel Marquez.
“El Dinamita” from Mexico gave Manny the fits in their last two fights, narrowly losing to the Pacman. You could consider him as Pacquiao’s kryptonite. Yet, as we witnessed last Sept. 19 at the Las Vegas MGM Grand, the Number One toyed with the Numero Uno, exactly what a cat does with its catch of mouse. Vitaliy Shaposhnikov of Diamond Boxing overheard someone in the crowd, “Mayweather, don’t play with your food!”
But enough of the fight. Now that you have two active, legitimate pound-for-pound title holders straddling a single peak, who gets to stand atop the summit?
It would be absurd to let the tension stay there, given the international boxing community’s adoration for the east Asian bomber, and Money’s super-bloated ego (probably as large as the Philippine population). There’s the demand for the fight too. A potential Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, as it seems to a large majority of fans and experts, would be boxing’s biggest draw since Ali and Frasier gave fans thrillas in Manila in 1975.
Forgive me if I have to give a flimsy analogy on why the riddle should be solved. In philosophy and metaphysics, the concept of an ultimate authority rests on the fact that there cannot be a higher authority than the perceived ultimate authority itself. (It’s okay, you can read that sentence again.)
With that said, it follows that there cannot be two or more ultimate authorities coexisting with one another.
These concepts are regularly and discreetly applied to arguments of governmental/organizational hierarchies, or to the concept of a Supreme Being itself. Two distinctly different entities that assert equal authority and power are contradictory and are bound to conflict each other. Think of all the national wars that have been waged just because two or more rulers thought they were ultimate authorities in a single territory.
Both fistic champions carry authority in the boxing world (not in the political sense of course, although Pacquiao would like to contest that). As improbable the circumstances are in creating that match in the first place, ardent boxing fans everywhere are acutely aware that these two opposing planets will someday collide.
The riddle cannot be solved by boxing pundits and fans alike in the forums, in websites, and in who-knows-where, by posting their own pound-for-pound lists, which is subject to a million subjective opinions and contested by hordes of biased followers.
Similarly, Shane Mosley was correct in saying that Mayweather cannot be the best just by saying “I am the best.” To be prove that beyond a doubt means he has to conclusively beat Mosley, Cotto, Pacquiao, and whoever else is trying to claim “ultimate authority” in boxing glory, so to speak.
The riddle demands to be answered, and it has to be solved in a boxing ring.
