Nacho Beristáin said it before: stepping into the ring with Manny Pacquiao was stepping in with the devil himself. Decades later, Juan Manuel Márquez repeats it with the same certainty.
On the podcast ‘Posscass De Compass’, alongside Cuauhtémoc Blanco, the Mexican was unequivocal: Pacquiao was tougher for him than Floyd Mayweather. He explained the difference precisely.
Mayweather waited, retreated, measured distances. Pacquiao didn’t. Pacquiao came at him with more speed and more power than any opponent he had faced.
And although he was the one who knocked him unconscious in the sixth round on December 8, 2012, in Las Vegas, Márquez admitted something few champions confess: he felt fear.
A knockout that he himself insists was not luck, but the result of studying every feint of his personal executioner.