Many fight fans, who are for the most part Pacquiao fans, have been expressing their disapproval for Timothy Bradley's recent pre-fight self-promotion and cocky persona.
Bradley has in the last several days said everything from he will destroy Manny Pacquiao, that his famous multi-award winning trainer of the year Freddie Roach is overrated and even most cleverly made a cool rematch poster for "Timothy Bradley vs. Manny Pacquiao II" set for their rematch clause date in November which obviously implies that he already won the fight on June 9.
However, for those of us who have ever met Timothy Bradley before, we know this is not his personality. In fact, Bradley in his own words in an interview, stated how he disliked Floyd Mayweather for doing the very same thing that he is now doing.
I first met Bradley at the Amir Khan vs. Marcos Maidana fight back in December 2010 and asked him how he felt and even a prediction on how he would do against Devon Alexander.
At that time, his fight with Alexander was the biggest fight of his career with both of the top elite champions at 140 pounds fighting to unify the titles and it was hyped to be one of the most meaningful fights in the sport of boxing.
Bradley was very humble and genuine and told me he feels good and that he does not know how his fight with Alexander will go down. What I gathered from him was that he was indeed confident that he would beat Alexander, but he did not want to come across as an arrogant person.
If you recall all of the HBO promos and pre-fight segments such as the Face Off with Max Kellerman tended to be biased in favor of Devon Alexander at the time. It appeared to me that HBO was desperate for their next big all American star to be born and they were intending for it to be Devon Alexander.
Even during the Face Off with Max Kellerman we see a trash talking Alexander and his trainer trying to play mind games and punk Bradley, but Bradley does not fire back.
Bradley either just takes it in and gets irked by the taunts from Alexander and his trainer or perhaps even HBO cut off or edited what Bradley had to say back to Alexander, to make it look like he was getting owned in the Face Off?
Either way, Bradley did not fight fire with fire and trash talk Alexander back and it seemed that HBO wanted to edit the Face Off with Max Kellerman in a way that showed Bradley as intimidated or insecure, but I was not buying it.
It seemed to me that Alexander was the insecure one laughing and trying to get inside Bradley's mind that day, but it did not work.
As we all know, come fight night Bradley was the better man inside the ring as he dominated Alexander onto a unanimous technical decision. Was Bradley just simply on a different level? Or was he just more hungry and willing to take it that night? I would argue it was a little bit of both.
