GOOD MANNY STEWARD INTERVIEW

From Eastside Boxing

http://www.eastsideboxing.com/news.php?p=25534&more=1

Some interesting snippets:

On Naseem Hamed and MAB-Very much what happened is what I had thought...I knew at the same time that Barrera was training up at Big Bear, and I was getting my reports that he was training very hard and very focused. Naz was totally lax in his training...It was a different crowd that he had never been exposed to, so emotionally and spiritually he was totally unorganized. That was the one fight I don’t even think he leaped over the ropes like he normally did. He was unorganized from the beginning, and Marco Antonio Barrera came out and just really gave him a boxing lesson. Thank God he was not too aggressive in that fight, because it would have been very difficult to stop him from scoring a TKO probably if he had opened up.

On Hamed, Erik Morales and JMM-“Well I’ll be very honest with, Naz was great excitement. None of those guys still have really got to the level where he did in terms of crowd appeal, but I think they would have beat him. They were fundamentally too sound, and they were basically too sound for him as boxers. So they would have been a big problem for him.”

On MAB-In Barrera’s case, he’s one of the few fighters that I ever saw who made a complete transition from his early career, from being a ‘baby-faced assassin’ or whatever, where we looked at him with McKinney and those type of fights with ‘Fight of the Year’, ‘Round of the Year’. It was mainly from tough aggressive fighting and a typical Mexican style of fighting. It seemed like he just transformed everything. He maybe even changed the whole culture of the Mexican boxers with Morales and all of them. He just changed and became a technical boxer, and at the end of his career he was known as more of a I call him ‘boxing machine’. It’s very seldom you could have someone do that, especially when they’ve had like twenty or thirty fights completed.

On Freddie Roach and Manny-“I think Freddie did what words won’t be able to describe what he did with him. He definitely transformed him from being one-dimensional, and that’s why I wasn’t that super high on him to a certain degree, because he would move around, move around, and throw a long straight left hand with his full power, but there was no other balance or combinations or anything. It was mainly just a strong straight left hand punch...The chemistry worked perfect for them, and he’s became a balanced fighter with a right hand now that’s just as deadly as his left. He boxes well with his right jab, his right hook, he’s a tremendous counter-puncher, and what is really unusual about him also and special, he’s the type of guy you have to be careful with when you go into an exchange. A lot of his knockouts and knockdowns come when people are in the middle of exchanges. He has unbelievable cat-like reflexes

On the Pac-Margarito fight-“Originally when the fight was made, I thought with Margarito being a tough big, big man who’s big even for any welterweight. Don’t forget, he drowned down big guys like Cintron, and guys who are 5’11”. To put him in with a guy who is about 5’6”, and in my opinion Manny is still nothing but a little over the lightweight limit. From what I was told and what Freddie’s said, he still stays around about 138 and that’s with eating and feeding him and sometimes weighing-in and eating the day before the fight just to make 142 or something. So for him to be what I call really a lightweight/junior welterweight or whatever, to be fighting these types of guys who seem too big for him. The fact that Manny’s such a special, special machine, and I haven’t seen him fight since he lost to Mosley, I didn’t see Margarito’s fight in Mexico—his timing and coordination is not going to be able to deal with him. Even though he has a physical advantage, I just don’t think he’s going to be sharp enough to deal with the speed and accuracy and pinpoint punching of Manny. Even though he’s physically much smaller, I think he’s going to just be too much for Margarito.”

It's worth reading the whole thing.

great article..manny speaks very honestly and with a fountain of knowledge..i see he also shares our frustration that fighters dont want to fight for a championship..

dmar5143 wrote:great article..manny speaks very honestly and with a fountain of knowledge..i see he also shares our frustration that fighters dont want to fight for a championship..

He's another guy we're gonna miss when he's gone.