Freddie Roach: Manny Pacquiao's ferocity will return vs. Timothy Bradley

LAS VEGAS – Manny Pacquiao walked back to his corner after the fourth round of his heralded bout with Floyd Mayweather last May and had a simple message for his close friend, trainer Freddie Roach:

I’m done.

Pacquiao was surprisingly cautious in the first three rounds of the bout, fighting at a measured pace and trying to box with the man widely regarded as the finest boxer of his generation. Pacquiao’s game plan, it seemed, was simple: Use his extraordinarily fast hands and pressure Mayweather relentlessly and force him into a mistake.

In the fourth, Pacquiao landed a hard shot and seemed to, albeit briefly, have Mayweather reeling. But when he returned to the corner, his shoulder was hurting him, he told Roach.

“He came back to the corner and he said to me, ‘I’m done,’ ” Roach said, only days before Pacquiao’s return to the ring on Saturday when he fights Timothy Bradley at the MGM Grand Garden in what could be the final bout of his epic career.

“I told him to do the best he could and he said he would. I asked him if he wanted me to stop the fight and he said no.”

Pacquiao said he felt good going into the bout but that he aggravated an injury he first suffered, in his words, “before 2009.”

He had requested, and was granted, permission from the United States Anti-Doping Agency to take pain-killing shots during camp, as a precaution. But the Nevada Athletic Commission denied him the opportunity to do that on the night of the fight.

Pacquiao said he was OK with that because he felt fine when the fight began.

“[It was] 100 percent," Pacquiao said of his shoulder. "It just happened in the fourth round. I felt good, but the doctor advised me [to take a shot] to be sure the injury I had since before 2009 would not bother me in the middle of the fight.

“It just happened in the middle of the fight [that the shoulder acted up].”

Roach hasn’t been able to bring himself to watch the fight again because it’s too painful for him.

A member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame and a seven-time Trainer of the Year, Roach for years told everyone who would listen that if they should meet, Pacquiao would defeat Mayweather.

In the locker room, Pacquiao was hitting the mitts as he warmed up and solidified Roach’s belief that all was well.

“He was great on the mitts that night,” Roach said. “He was hitting hard. I mean, really, really hard.”

Roach has had difficulty getting Pacquiao to go for the kill in the stretch run of the Filipino superstar’s career, but he never thought it would be an issue against Mayweather, his long-time nemesis.

Roach saw Pacquiao pressuring Mayweather as no one had previously,  forcing Mayweather to fight outside of his comfort zone.

“My plan to win that fight was to be exciting and in the exchanges, out-throw him 10-1,” Roach said. “Mayweather doesn’t throw a lot of punches. Manny is fast with those flurries, so I told him every time he got into range, to throw that 10-punch combination.”

He didn’t do that, except for a brief stretch in the fourth, and Mayweather won a unanimous decision.

A few days after the bout, Pacquiao had surgery to repair the rotator cuff in his right shoulder while dealing with the crushing disappointment of the defeat.

Pacquiao said he had dreamed a month before the fight that he would lose, and he certainly did.

Saturday’s bout will be Pacquiao’s first since the surgery, and he insisted the layoff helped rejuvenate him.

“It’s made me hungry and fresh in the ring,” Pacquiao said of his 11-month hiatus. “I feel fresh and new.”

Roach, though, said that while Pacquiao worked extraordinarily hard on his conditioning, it took him a while to find his aggressiveness again. When he sparred, Roach said, Pacquiao wouldn’t follow up on openings when he hurt his training partners. He’d ease off, following a habit he picked up somewhere around 2011.

“The sparring I was watching, I was really worried because he was just going too easy on the sparring partners,” Roach said. “I said, ‘Manny, you have to pick it up. You have to fire some hard shots.’ The last two days of sparring it finally showed up. I was so happy. He was the old Manny and I was satisfied that he is where we need him.”

Roach said he believes that when Pacquiao, who was baptized a Roman Catholic, became a born-again Christian sometime in 2011, it changed his style of fighting.

Pacquiao was one of the game’s best finishers, aggressively going after his opponents with blistering flurries.

Suddenly, he backed off and wasn’t the same guy.

“The conditioning part with Manny has always been easy, and the hardest part is getting him to slow down,” Roach said. “But after he changed religions, it made him a better person, a better husband and a better father. He was just a better person overall and that was a good thing for him.

“But it did take away from his ferocity in the ring. I can’t tell you how many times he’d say to me, ‘Freddie, I don’t really have to knock anyone out. Winning by decision is fine. I don’t need to hurt anyone.’ And I really think that was kind of a turning point and that when he had an opening, he might pull back and not throw that last couple of shots like he had done before.”

Roach believes he’ll bring back that ferocity against Bradley. For one, he has the motivation to make up for the loss against Mayweather. He also wants to definitively prove he’s the better boxer even though he has split his first two fights with Bradley.

And then there’s the little matter of Saturday’s bout being his finale. All week, he’s equivocated and said he’s not sure. At the dais at Wednesday’s news conference, he said specifically it would be his last fight.

Whether it is or isn’t – and a wise bettor would gamble that this isn’t his last bout – one gets the sense he wants to remind everyone of who he is and what he has done.

This is a guy who has won world titles in an astonishing eight weight classes.

His family would like to see him retire, and so he might, but he doesn’t believe he needs to retire because his skills are in decline.

“Oh no, not at all,” he said, laughing. “When I give the people a good fight, everyone will see.”