While never quite securing the opportunity to do so, a former world champion has claimed that he would have “1000%” knocked out Manny Pacquiao.
The Filipino icon was only stopped three times in his 73-fight Hall of Fame career, with the first two occasions arriving when he was competing down at flyweight.
After suffering a third-round stoppage defeat to Rustico Torrecampo in 1996, when he was just 17 years old, the eventual all-time great encountered the same fate in his WBC title challenge against Boonsai Sangsurat around four years later.
More notably, Pacquiao would eventually get knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012, by which time he had already become an eight-division world champion.
But while ‘Pac Man’ was a typically durable customer throughout his career, Terence Crawford believes he would have become one of the very few to stop him.
The pair were actually in talks to collide in 2020, back when ‘Bud’ held the WBO welterweight title and Pacquiao was the WBA 147lb champion.
As it happened, though, Pacquiao was subsequently scheduled to face Errol Spence Jr in another unification match, only to lose his title to late replacement Yordenis Ugas after ‘The Truth’ pulled out with an injury.
Crawford has therefore told Above The Rim that, had their showdown come to fruition, it would have been him standing triumphant in the opposite corner, but still maintains that the Pacquiao team ‘didn’t want it.’
“That’s the only person I wish I would’ve got the opportunity to fight. [I would’ve] 1000% [knocked him out]. Numerous times, we were lined up to fight each other. They didn’t want it.”
Interestingly enough, Pacquiao has previously said that, while he would have loved to fight Crawford, it always felt as though Top Rank promoter Bob Arum was ‘preserving’ him.
