This is hardly an original observation, but it is nonetheless a remarkable reality that would be true of very few boxers in history: you could divide Manny Pacquiao’s boxing career into two distinct halves — from 1995-2008, before he went fully mainstream by beating Oscar De La Hoya, and everything from the Oscar fight onwards, spanning 2008-2021 — and each half would be a slam-dunk first-ballot Hall of Fame career even without the other half.

On Thursday morning, both halves will be recognized collectively by the International Boxing Hall of Fame, when Pacquiao’s impending induction is announced. We can only guess as to who the various other honorees in Canastota will be in June. But we know for sure that “Pac Man” will be on the list and will be the unofficial headliner.

Pacquiao was an all-time great by any and every measure. There are always critics and contrarians, of course. But the Filipino icon gave them sparingly little to work with. The list of negative things to say about Manny Pacquiao, the boxer, goes something like this (and there’s a flip side to each point):

  • He won at least one decision over Juan Manuel Marquez that he didn’t deserve… though that was later plenty balanced out by the first Tim Bradley fight and the bout with Jeff Horn in Australia.

  • He was a one-handed fighter for the first 10 years or so of his career… but he learned and improved and made adjustments – it is a rare achievement for a boxer some three titles and 45 fights deep into his career to start developing the right hook.

  • There were always holes in his defense… which is a standard trade-off if you’re one of the most explosive offensive fighters of your generation.

  • He is suspected by some of having had chemical help in climbing the scale and retaining his power… but he never failed a drugs test and it never rose above rumor and conjecture.

And that’s it. That’s all that the Pacquiao haters have — a handful of imperfections and flimsy arguments.

Pacquiao’s greatness is not really up for any serious debate, and his place among his era’s pound-for-pound elite is fairly clearly delineated: he ranks below Floyd Mayweather, and above everybody else.

So instead of trying to compare Pac Man to other fighters, let’s try a different thought experiment, and compare him to himself. No, not by splitting his career into two halves. Rather, by asking this question: was Manny Pacquiao more quantitatively great, or qualitatively great?

In other words, what’s more spectacular? The sheer numbers of what he accomplished as he ripped apart the history books, or the way he made us feel as he blurringly blasted his way through the eye test?

We’ll start with the numbers. Assuming Pacquiao — who will turn 46 later in December — is done fighting, as we all hope he is despite persistent quotes to the contrary, he finishes with a record of 62-8-2 (39 KOs). Among current hall of famers who turned pro after 1990, only Wladimir Klitschko tallied more than 62 wins.

The length of Pacquiao’s career at the top level is flat-out remarkable. His pro debut and his final fight were separated by 26 years and seven months, and he spent 23 of those years competing at the championship level.

The most significant number on Manny’s ledger is eight — the number of weight divisions in which he won major titles. Pacquiao held belts at 112, 122, 126, 130, 135, 140, 147, and 154 pounds. No other boxer in history has won straps in eight weight classes (though, admittedly, in previous eras, there were fewer divisions and fewer recognized alphabet belts). No other male boxer in history has even won titles in seven divisions.

Perhaps most impressively, Pacquiao was the lineal champ in four of those eight divisions — the first boxer to hit that number.

Oh, and there’s this: he held alphabet titles in four different decades, something achieved by nobody else ever.

Pacquiao fought nine fellow Hall of Famers across 17 fights and compiled a record of 12-4-1 against them. Those are ridiculous numbers. Earlier in 2024 Ivan Calderon went into the IBHOF with a record of 0-0 against hall of famers. The other inductees, Ricky Hatton, Diego Corrales, and Michael Moorer, went 1-2, 0-1, and 1-2, respectively, against fellow hall of famers (with the caveat that some of those numbers would change if Jose Luis Castillo or Joel Casamayor eventually go in).

Pac Man was recognized by both The Ring magazine and the Boxing Writers Association of America as the fighter of the year three times — in 2006, 2008, and 2009 — and was also named fighter of the decade for the 2000s by the same two entities.

He was in The Ring fight of the year once, delivered the knockout of the year once (and was on the receiving end of it once), and was the magazine’s comeback fighter of the year one time as well.

Pacquiao turned pro as a 16-year-old junior flyweight, and in his second-to-last fight, became the oldest man ever to claim a welterweight belt, at 40.

And for what it’s worth, he was one half of the duo that produced the most lucrative fight in the history of pay-per-view, when Mayweather-Pacquiao sold a reported 4.6 million PPVs for a gross of over $400 million (to go along with the $72 million live gate).

So, yeah, the numbers are utterly mind-blowing. But is it possible they don’t quite do justice to the experience of watching Pacquiao ply his trade?

In the early days, Pacquiao basically only had one move: propel himself forward and land a southpaw straight left hand so fast that almost no one could get out of the way of it. After he savaged Lehlo Ledwaba in his US debut, in 2001, HBO’s Larry Merchant immediately put Pacquiao in his pound-for-pound top 10. I objected, feeling the resume didn’t warrant such placement yet. The passage of time made clear that Merchant was on to something.

I’ll never forget the experience of watching Pac Man blitz Marco Antonio Barrera in 2003. It seemed so obvious going in that the crafty Mexican would dismantle the one-dimensional upstart. But over and over the left hand was in Barrera’s mouth before he could even flinch.

Another magnificently skillful Mexican, Marquez, ran into the exact same problem six months later, and was nearly erased by that left hand in a single round. Watching Pacquiao in that opening round may be the closest we’ll come to proof that aliens walk among us on Earth.

But the adjustments Marquez made over the next 11 rounds, followed by Erik Morales’ brilliance in defeating Pacquiao in 2005, forced the southpaw to ask himself some hard questions — and to become a complete fighter.

I’d say Pacquiao’s absolute prime stretched from January 21, 2006, when he added the right hook and a little body punching to avenge his loss to Morales, until November 13, 2010, when the punches of the much bigger Antonio Margarito appeared to take just a little something out of Manny (even though the Filipino won just about every round that night). And at his two-fisted, destructive best for those five years, Pacquiao was truly a marvel.

It took him only three rounds to make Morales surrender in their third fight. And as he showed in his comeback against Marcos Maidana a few years later, “El Terrible” wasn’t cooked yet; he simply couldn’t handle Pacquiao’s heat.

If you want to see what it looks like when a “normal” championship-level fighter becomes target practice for a lightning-fisted freak of nature, rewatch the David Diaz fight from ’08. That’s a performance so dynamic that it got people itching to see what might happen if Pacquiao jumped up two more weight classes, even though he’d just moved up in weight to face Diaz.

Then came the three-fight run that compares to any back-to-back-to-back bouts of any boxer in history: the KO 8 shellacking of De La Hoya, the left hand that turned out Hatton’s lights in the second round, and the thrilling (for four rounds) and chilling (for the next eight) evisceration of Miguel Cotto. That’s three Hall of Famers, all of them stopped, perhaps two rounds won by them collectively, as Pacquiao became the face of boxing.

Imagine placing a bet a decade earlier that a flyweight champ from the Philippines would someday become the most popular boxer in America! (And a recurring karaoke performer on a late-night talk show!) It’s preposterous.

After the Margarito fight, some of the spark was gone, though the level of competition and the magnitude of the fights remained top-notch for at least another half-decade. There were two more fights with Marquez — including probably the most dramatic battle of the 2010s, culminating in that indelible, harrowing Pacquiao face-plant — and three tussles with Bradley.

The Mayweather fight wasn’t Pacquiao’s finest hour. But it was his richest.

Pacquiao wasn’t quite the same in the post-Mayweather period, and his fights didn’t always feel like mega-events anymore, but he did give us one last night of magic when he upset Keith Thurman, a man 10 years his junior, in one of the all-time “the old guy’s still got it” sports performances.

The cheat answer to the overarching question here is that the numbers alone don’t quite capture the full picture of what a unique delight it was to follow Pacquiao’s career, and the knowledge that we were watching someone truly special is enhanced by the history we see compiled in the record books.

Manny Pacquiao packed two Hall of Fame careers into one, and he should be a unanimous vote — whether you watched every single one of his fights as they happened, or you missed his entire career and can only go on what BoxRec and Wikipedia tell you.

We won’t see the vote totals when the press release goes out Thursday telling us Pacquiao is now a hall of famer. But we’ll have a pretty good idea of how overwhelming they are even without the numbers in front of us.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on or , or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.