With Pacquiao’s TKO win, I was as relieved as Gabriel

By Al S. Mendoza

I SAID third round. By knockout.

Almost, but not quite.

I also said, it could happen in the sixth. By knockout.

Again, almost, but not quite.

Miguel Cotto fell in the third.

But it was only a knockdown.  Not a knockout.

Cotto was dropped anew in the fourth.

But again, it was only a knockdown.  Not a knockout.

After the fight, Gabriel Cornel immediately sent me a text-message: “No torture for you, thank God.”

That was by way of reminding me of my column here last Sunday, wherein I said I’d punish myself if Manny Pacquiao would not  knock Cotto out.

The knockout came in 55 seconds of the 12th and final round.

It was actually a technical knockout win for Pacquiao for his 37th victory by stoppage, improving his win-loss-draw record to 50-3-2.

The truth is, referee Kenny Bayless halted the fight to prevent Pacquiao, 30, from inflicting more harm on Cotto, 29.

It was that dangerous at that stage.

Cotto’s face had been virtually rearranged by a rain of punches that his blood was splattered all over the ring.

So battered and bewildered was Cotto that his wife, hurt and her heart pounding hard, hurried out of ringside, her face flooded with her own tears, her child bawling by her side.

Good for her she decided to leave early.

She might have witnessed the grisly sight of Pacquiao finally unleashing the killer shot at Cotto when Bayless stepped in.

A minute of delay on the part of Bayless in that fateful 12th and Pacquiao might have sent Cotto to dreamland – never to maybe see the break of dawn anymore.

After the terrible beating Cotto had absorbed, people asked: How come he didn’t fall for good?

Why was he able to rise from those knockdowns in Rounds 3 & 4?

What made him withstand all that Pacquiao bombardment from all angles?

Pacquiao’s shots were terribly, crippling blows, likened to bombs that leveled Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that the likes of even a Mike Tyson might not have been able to survive them.

I think Cotto is really as tough as a Parthenon pillar, if not a Coliseum boulder of old Rome, that only a ten-wheeler truck can flatten him to the ground.

Now I believe: His one and only defeat prior to Sunday – a knockout by Antonio Margarito last year – was the result of Margarito’s fists wrapped in Plaster of Paris.

I also believe that Cotto’s three-month training gave him that superb condition, that extra Spartan strength, to save him from total annihilation.

Yes, I conclude: The TKO loss to Pacquiao was Cotto’s first legitimate defeat in 36 fights.

Only a legitimate champ like Pacquiao can administer such genuine feat.

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