SPORTS
Page 8 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
July 17, 2017
Pacquiao loses contentious WBO title fight to Jeff Horn
By John Pye
AP Sports Writer
RISBANE, Australia — It went all
the way and ended in a con-
tentiously bitter loss, the opposite
of what Manny Pacquiao’s handlers
predicted for his World Boxing Organi-
zation (WBO) welterweight world title
fight against Jeff Horn.
Pacquiao’s long-time trainer, Freddie
Roach, tipped a “short and sweet”
knockout win for the 11-time world
champion in the so-called ‘Battle of
Brisbane,’ but Horn got a unanimous
points decision in his first world title fight
— delighting the 51,052-strong crowd.
The 38-year-old Philippines senator
arrived in Brisbane a week ahead of the
fight with a chartered plane carrying more
than a hundred supporters and as the hot
favorite to beat Horn. He left without the
WBO belt.
All three judges awarded it to Horn, with
Waleska Roldan scoring it 117-111 and
both Chris Flores and Ramon Cerdan
scoring it 115-113.
Some critics slammed it as a hometown
decision, saying the statistics had
Pacquiao landing twice the number of
power punches as Horn.
“That’s the decision of the judges. I
respect that,” Pacquiao was quoted as
saying by broadcaster ESPN. “We have a
rematch clause, so no problem.”
But Pacquiao’s conditioning trainer, the
Los Angeles-based former Australian
heavyweight, Justin Fortune, was critical
of the referee and the judging.
“Manny lost the fight, but Jeff Horn
looks like a pumpkin. Those scores, that
card?” he said. “It should be the other way.”
Fortune said Pacquiao should have
taken any risk out of the equation.
“When you come into someone’s back-
yard, you need to really do a number on
them or knock them out,” he said. “That’s
boxing. You get given a gift sometimes, you
get (swindled) sometimes. But when you
come to someone’s house, you’re supposed
to mess them up, make a statement. Never
leave it in the judge’s hands.”
B
Horn started strongly and won at least
three of the first five rounds on all three of
the judge’s cards. But Pacquiao, after
twice needing treatment for a cut on top of
his head in the 6th and 7th rounds,
appeared to dominate most of the rounds
from the eighth.
He was close to finishing it in the 9th
when he relentlessly pounded Horn and
had him wobbling — to the point where
referee Mark Nelson asked the 29-year-old
former schoolteacher if he could continue
— and could also have come out with the
win.
Pacquiao didn’t attend the formal
post-fight news conference, sending a
spokesman to say he was getting treated
for the cuts. He also declined to do any
interviews in the dressing room.
Horn was confident he was always
ahead on points, and was startled after the
9th when the referee asked if he was OK to
continue.
“I felt buzzed for sure, but I’m the Hornet
— I’ve got to come back,” Horn said. “I’m
not a quitter. Australians aren’t quitters to
start with. We’ve showed we’re winners.
“It was the battle of Brisbane, that’s for
sure. Absolutely unbelievable.”
Co-promoter Bob Arum said it was a
“close fight. It could have gone either way.”
“A couple of close rounds, but you can’t
argue with the result,” he said. “I scored a
lot of the early rounds for Jeff. Then I had
Manny coming back in the middle. The
12th round, Jeff really won. If you give
Manny the 11th, you have it a draw. You
give Jeff the 11th, it’s 7-5.”
Roach had said earlier in the week that
he’d think about advising Pacquiao to
retire if he lost the fight, but they’re
already considering a rematch.
Horn can’t see Pacquiao retiring any
time soon.
“I’m sure he’ll want to come back. It was
a close decision and I’m sure he’ll want to
come back and prove himself,” he said.
Arum said there was a clause for a
rematch, but he’d give it time before
talking to Pacquiao about it.
“I don’t know Manny’s future position. Is
he going to stay in politics and not continue
in boxing? I don’t know, and he doesn’t
know,” Arum said. “It’s unfair to ask him
now.”
Pacquiao’s camp had talked about a
rematch with Mayweather if he got past
Horn, hoping to avenge his loss on points
in the 2015 megafight. That seems to be a
long shot now.
BATTLE OF BRISBANE. Manny Pacquiao of
the Philippines, right, and Jeff Horn of Australia, fight
during their World Boxing Organization (WBO) welter-
weight title fight in Brisbane, Australia. Pacquiao lost
to Horn in a stunning, unanimous-points decision in
a the bout that was billed as the “Battle of Brisbane.”
(AP Photo/Tertius Pickard)
Pacquiao entered the fight with a record
of 59-6-2, but the last of his 38 wins by
knockout was in 2009. Horn hadn’t lost
any of his previous 17 professional fights,
but had never encountered anybody with
Pacquiao’s credentials.
“I take massive confidence from this
fight,” Horn said. “I believed in myself
before, now I’ve climbed the Pacquiao
mountain.”
Roach said the quietly spoken Horn was
“a little bit rougher than I thought he was.
Maybe a little bit more physical.”
“Like every time you come, you come out
of a clinch in a headlock, something is
wrong there,” he said. “I don’t know if the
referee couldn’t control that or what it was.
“But, I thought it was a pretty close
fight. I thought Manny had a real good
round in the ninth — I thought it was
maybe a two-point round — and I just told
Manny, ‘give me one more of those and the
fight’s over,’ but he just couldn’t do it. We
lost the decision.”
Roach said he couldn’t judge the fight,
given how close he was.
“I hear there’s a lot of people think it’s
controversial, think Manny won, but it
went the other way and we have to live
with that.”
At Marawi City in the southern Philip-
pines, where local officials organized a free
public viewing to give some respite from
the disastrous siege by militants, hun-
dreds of people gathered to cheer for
Pacquiao.
“Many couldn’t accept the result
initially, but the entertainment side of it
provided a respite,” Marawi crisis
committee spokesman Zia Alonto Adiong
told The Associated Press. “The message of
courage and resiliency, I think Manny
Pacquiao provided that today.”
Associated Press Writer Jim Gomez
contributed from Manila, the Philippines.
Kim’s North Korea gains a little economically, a lot militarily
Continued from page 16
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his nuclear bombs will deter U.S. involve-
ment in the event of another war on the
Korean Peninsula. “If North Korea demon-
strates its ability to strike Washington and
New York ... and threatens to turn them
into a sea of fire, the U.S. couldn’t easily
enter a war,” Cheong said.
After perfecting a functioning ICBM,
which could take a couple of years, Kim
could push for talks to win big outside
concessions in return for imposing a
moratorium on nuclear and missile
activities. Even so, he won’t likely give up
his already-developed weapons.
In the event of such talks, Kim would
likely want big aid packages, the suspen-
sion of annual U.S.-South Korean military
drills that North Korea views as an
invasion rehearsal, and the signing of a
peace treaty officially ending the 1950-
1953 Korean War, which would allow him
to push for the withdrawal of the 28,500
American troops stationed in South Korea.
What stands in his way
Kim’s dogged quest for nuclear weapons
may also relate to his hunger to be seen by
his people as a strong leader and to
establish the same absolute power held by
his father and his grandfather, national
founder Kim Il Sung.
This would make it hard for him to back
off.
“He cannot give up nukes because they
are the core of his power,” said Cho Han
Bum, an analyst at South Korea’s Korea
Institute for National Unification.
The North Korean ICBM could be
capable of reaching Alaska, but weapons
experts say the North still needs to master
several more technologies before the
missile will work perfectly.
When that happens, the United States
might reconsider military strikes so as not
to allow other rogue states think they
could get their own nuclear programs if
they simply hold out, Cho said.
Aside from a U.S. attack, the most
painful measure against North Korea
could be a Chinese suspension or drastic
scaling back of its oil shipments to the
North.
China sends about 500,000 tons of crude
oil to North Korea, mostly for free, every
year. That accounts for 80 percent to 90
percent of the North’s domestic
consumption, according to Cho Bong-hyun
of Seoul’s IBK Economic Research
Institute.
It’s not clear if China would suspend the
shipments even if North Korea’s nuclear
threat becomes more dangerous. But if a
suspension happened, the North’s
military, the backbone of Kim’s rule, would
suffer because it cannot effectively fly
warplanes and operate tanks without oil.
That will lead to Kim’s grip on power
loosening, Cheong predicts.
“We can see he’s so far run North Korea
in a smarter way than his father because
the economic conditions have improved
and the military power has been
bolstered,” Cheong said. “But there is a
high possibility that his adventurous,
uncompromising attitude will eventually
make things turn out badly.”