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Keith Thurman should’ve fought more animusly against Pacquiao

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Marcellus Wiley says Keith Thurman brought a knife to a gunfight — and left the animus at home.

Two days after Manny Pacquiao took Keith Thurman’s undefeated record and his WBA (Super) welterweight belt, Marcellus Wiley used his July 22 platform on FS1’s Speak for Yourself to explain exactly where Thurman went wrong. It wasn’t power, conditioning, or game plan, according to Wiley — it was attitude. Thurman, he argued, simply didn’t fight like a man who wanted it badly enough.

• Pacquiao, 40, won a split decision over Thurman, 30, on July 20 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, handing Thurman the first loss of his professional career.
• Judges Tim Cheatham and Dave Moretti scored it 115-112 for Pacquiao; Glenn Feldman had it 114-113 for Thurman.
• The win made Pacquiao the oldest welterweight world champion in boxing history.

A First-Round Statement

Thurman had spent fight week promising to knock Pacquiao out and send the Filipino senator into retirement. Pacquiao answered in the opening round with a sharp body-to-chin combination that put Thurman on the canvas, then spent the early rounds keeping him on the back foot and bloodying his nose. It was the opposite of the script Thurman had written for himself in the build-up.

Thurman did fight back. He adjusted in the middle rounds, sharpened his accuracy, and clawed his way into the fight statistically. But Pacquiao reasserted control in the tenth, landing a debilitating left hook to the body that forced Thurman to retreat and simply try to survive the round. That sequence, more than any single punch stat, is what stuck with Wiley when he broke the fight down on Speak for Yourself.

Wiley’s Diagnosis: Not Enough Animus

Wiley’s core argument wasn’t about Thurman’s chin or his conditioning — it was about his temperament in the ring. He pointed out that despite holding real theoretical advantages in youth and strength over a 40-year-old opponent, Thurman fought with a level of reverence that undercut those advantages instead of exploiting them.

Thurman should’ve bought more animus against Pacquiao.

That single idea framed the entire segment. Wiley wasn’t disputing the judges’ scorecards or relitigating the split decision itself. His complaint was about approach — that a fighter with Thurman’s physical tools needed to impose himself early and often against a legend, rather than let the legend dictate terms from the opening bell, as Pacquiao did with that first-round knockdown.

The Cost of Hesitation

Thurman’s mid-fight rally proved he had the skill to compete with Pacquiao when he chose to engage. That’s precisely why Wiley’s critique landed — the tools were there, the sustained aggression wasn’t, at least not early enough or consistently enough to swing two of the three scorecards. By the time Thurman found his rhythm, Pacquiao had already banked the first-round knockdown and the accumulated damage from bloodying his nose, a deficit that the tenth-round body shot only widened.

The split verdict left plenty of room for argument about who actually deserved the nod, but Wiley’s point on Speak for Yourself sidestepped the judging debate entirely. His issue was with what Thurman put on display for twelve rounds — a fighter who had the physical case to be the aggressor against a 40-year-old opponent, yet let Pacquiao operate like the younger man in the ring.

Thurman’s unbeaten record is gone, and Pacquiao walks away from Las Vegas as the oldest welterweight champion the sport has seen. For Thurman, the number that will follow him now isn’t his age or his power numbers — it’s that “0” in the loss column, and the tape from July 20 that shows exactly the round-one moment Wiley says he never recovered from.