Pacquiao’s hands were far too quick and, despite the fact that he was moving up from lightweight, his punches were much too hard for the Golden Boy to handle.
It was clear by the third round that De La Hoya was going to need a miracle to reverse the pummeling he was taking.
Pacquiao displayed every punch in the arsenal, raking the Golden Boy with straight lefts that nearly closed De La Hoya’s left eye and stunning him with hooks, jabs and uppercuts.
It was so savage of a beating that it was hard not to feel sorry for De La Hoya. At the end of the bout, a thoroughly beaten De La Hoya trudged across the ring and met his one-time trainer, Freddie Roach.
“You’re right,” De La Hoya said to Roach, who had prepared Pacquiao brilliantly. “I don’t have it any more.”
Pacquiao was a 2-1 underdog, largely because he was challenging a man who had fought at super welterweight or middleweight exclusively for the last seven-and-a-half years. Pacquiao had only fought once as high as lightweight and had fought 75 percent of his bouts before Saturday at super bantamweight or lower.
But Pacquiao unofficially weighed a pound-and-a-half more than De La Hoya – 148½ to 147 – and was clearly stronger and better Saturday.
“The media, the press is never wrong,” Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum said. “You all said it was a mismatch and it was a mismatch.”
De La Hoya didn’t officially announce his retirement, but his business partners, Bernard Hopkins and Shane Mosley, spoke of his career in the past tense. In his brilliant career, De La Hoya took on most of the greatest fighters of his generation, but never before was he beaten as cleanly and decisively as he was by Pacquiao.
Not when he was knocked out by a brutal shot to the liver by Hopkins in 2004, not when he dropped a split decision to then-pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. last year and not when a tactical mistake cost him a victory against Felix Trinidad.
