Meeting Manny Pacquiao for an interview in downtown Dubai in January 2025, the first thing you noticed was how trim he looked, as though he could eat breakfast and make the welterweight limit there and then.
Daily workouts and morning runs along Marasi Drive suggested that while he did not have a fight booked, he already had a date with destiny on his mind.
The Paramount in Business Bay has all the trappings of a Las Vegas resort, so watching an in-shape Pacquiao bob and weave his way through a packed lobby in a giant pair of mirrored aviators, he could easily have been arriving for a fight-week media engagement at the MGM Grand.
The 46-year-old Filipino will no doubt have had a few of those in recent days as he prepares to make a return to world-class boxing against the Mexican Mario Barrios on Saturday night.
It’s a comeback that somehow feels both implausible and plausible at the same time.
Implausible because those legendary nights where he duelled with the likes of Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, Juan Manuel Marquez and Oscar De La Hoya seem like an eternity ago.
Twenty-two years have passed since he first fought Barrera. Saddam Hussein was about to be toppled and MySpace was launched. Some of us have gone grey since then; started and raised families. Pacquiao feels like a fighter from a bygone era because he is a fighter from a bygone era.
Yet while the world and the sport have moved on, his competitive spirit endures, and that’s why Saturday’s bout also feels plausible.
Fighters are built differently and Pacquiao, whose last outing was a defeat to Yordenis Ugas in August 2021, is the epitome of that.
He is hard-wired to challenge the conventional wisdom that he is too old, too inactive and too shopworn to return to world-level competition.
Having grown up starving, destitute and sleeping under a tree, he went on to bank millions, become an all-time great and achieve global stardom. It’s little wonder he believes that God will answer his prayers.
Right now, he is praying for victory over Barrios, 16 years his junior, a result that would see him become the oldest welterweight champion in history.
Pacquiao's veteran status means that fighting younger men is nothing new. The last time he boxed an opponent older than him was Floyd Mayweather in May 2015.
Barrios has been hand-picked, something the Mexican WBC title holder says is both a compliment and an insult.
As Pacquiao told The National in January, he studies his opponents meticulously, and is confident of beating a man he would have eased past in his prime years.
Barrios (29-2-1) is a seasoned contender but has come up short in his biggest tests, as he did with Keith Thurman and Gervonta Davis.
He has never been a destructive puncher and looked poor when labouring to a draw with Abel Ramos last November. He has been selected for a reason.
It’s doubtful he would have heard the final bell against the very best of Pacquiao, but that is not the version he will face on Saturday.
Just how diminished the former Philippines senator is should become apparent in the early stages. By all accounts he has been training like a demon with Freddie Roach at the Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles, but performing under the lights is a very different proposition, and deteriorating motor skills and four years of civilian life could prove trickier adversaries than Barrios.
Ask Ricky Hatton, whose own comeback ended in a stoppage defeat to Vyacheslav Senchenko in 2012, or Shane Mosley, another of Pacquiao’s former foes, who tried and failed to recapture the old magic.
But Pacquiao believes he will emulate another man of faith, the late George Foreman, who returned to claim the heavyweight title, age 45. He has spoken of having multiple fights left and even surpassing the sport’s oldest world champion, Bernard Hopkins, who held a version of the light heavyweight title at 49.
First, he must get past Barrios, and there’s a good reason he is rated as an outsider. Pacquiao entered the sport as an underdog and will now see out his career as one.
Victory on Saturday would sit alongside his many special and historic achievements, but of course the risk is all too real that this bout might produce another cautionary tale in a sport littered with them.
Boxing tends not to specialise in happy endings, but Pacquiao has spent his entire life beating the odds.
