DALLAS – It seems that Team Clottey knows exactly what to do.
“We’ll hit him right, knock him out, and win the fight,” said Joshua Clottey’s chief trainer for Saturday’s big fight, dubbed “The Event,” at the Cowboys Stadium which should fill close to 45,000 people on Saturday.
Lenny de Jesus, who worked as Pacquiao’s cutman in a couple of fights, including the Erik Morales fights, landed the job as Clottey’s chief trainer after the original ones failed to secure US visas and make it here. (Related stories on A-26)
De Jesus sounded so confident of a victory over Pacquiao for him to declare they’re going to knock Pacquiao out.
Pacquiao has won his last 11 fights, and in the process has become the first and only fighter in history to win seven world championships in seven different weight divisions.
He’s never been knocked out since he failed to make weight and took a body blow that led to a third-round loss to Medgoen Singsurat in Thailand on Sept. 17, 1999.
The last fighter to knock Pacquiao down was Serikzhan Yeshmagambetov in March 15, 2003 at the Luneta. He went down in the fourth round but knocked his opponent out in the next round.
Clottey thinks he’ll be the next to put Pacquiao out.
“Mannny Pacquiao is very fast. But the only thing is he hasn’t fought me before. I will prove him wrong,” said Clottey, quite bothered by Freddie Roach’s prediction that he’d be gone inside nine rounds.
He said he will prove a lot of people wrong by knocking out Pacquiao. And not the other way around.
“I have a good chin. We (African fighters) take a lot of punches, but I have a good chin! I never expect myself to get in the ring to get knocked out, I never expect that, no,” Clottey told fightnews.com. – Abac Cordero
Notes: Star Flight, which handled Manny Pacquiao’s trip from LA to Dallas Monday, is the same outfit that handles the travel needs of the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Bulls and Denver Nuggets whenever they’re in town. Star Flight president Rob Lyons told Filipino scribes in a brief chat at the departure area that having Pacquiao on board is a great privilege simply because he’s being counted as among the great athletes of this generation. “The Boston Celtics had wanted to have some time with Pacquiao but due to constraints had decided to just award him with the team’s No. 1 jersey. The Celtics have only done it once when they presented the No. 1 jersey to the US President,” said Lyons, who remembered his airline outfit also servicing the 1992 US Dream Team to the Barcelona Olympics. He said they serviced Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant just a few hours before Team Pacquiao came in after Bryant took a helicopter ride home to Orange County after a practice session at El Segundo.