By GREG BISHOP
MACAU — Say this for Brandon Rios: he hardly ever backed away.
Manny Pacquiao kept coming at him. He kept striking Rios with left hands to the chin, the nose, the right and left side of his body and both eyes. By the later rounds, Rios’s face was swollen, bruised and bloodied, and Pacquiao, as the sport of boxing knew him before his knockout loss last December, had returned to devastating form.
Plenty will be said as to how Pacquiao’s chosen opposition figured into this resurgence. But those who, like Rios, insisted this bout would be defined by calls for Pacquiao’s retirement were sorely mistaken — Rios most sorely of all.
To say Pacquiao (55-5-2) won by unanimous decision is to undersell just how one-sided the contest was. He seemed to win every round, and if those rounds were split in half, or into quarters, it still could have been a shutout.
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