Manny Pacquiao has never been one to trash talk or disrespect his opponents, but it seems like nowadays his strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza does more than enough of it for him.

With comments like: “God could come down and help Marquez and he still couldn’t beat Manny. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t get passed the first round,” to his most recent comment, “How do you get motivated for Bradley? The guys who we’re sparring in the gym are better than Bradley.” One has to wonder: What good does it do to say things like this when preparing a world champion to defend his title?

They say that boxing is seventy five percent mental and twenty five percent physical. Part of the job of getting a fighter ready for a big fight is not only to get him in physical shape but also to get him in the right frame of mind to deal with the task at hand. It’s more than just strategy. You have to keep him focused and motivated throughout camp in order to get maximum results from the training. It’s hard to imagine that comments like these do much to motivate Manny Pacquiao. If anything you would think that they would make him complacent.

Ariza has been a target of criticism after Pacquiao’s last two performances. After both fights, Pacquiao complained about leg cramps and said that it was the reason that he didn’t perform at his best. You would think that Ariza, being the strength and conditioning coach, would have been able to figure out why this happened and have it corrected, but for it to happen in two consecutive fights raises the question: Is there something in Ariza’s training program that is causing this to happen? Ariza claimed that they may have started training camp too early for the Marquez fight and that maybe Pacquaio was over trained. This refutes his prior statements made before the fight claiming that this was Pacquiao’s best training camp ever.

There’s an old saying: “You can’t subtract from others to add to yourself.” Maybe Ariza should heed these words. Instead of trying to tear down Bradley, he may be better served to redirect his attention more on Pacquiao to make sure that he doesn’t have a recurrence of leg cramps in this fight.

Joe Habeeb