Manny Pacquiao Faces a Fight Against Time Landry Major for The New York Times Manny Pacquiao plans to fight through next year, but those around him are not so sure. His commitment to religion, family and politics has grown. LAS VEGAS - When Manny Pacquiao climbs inside the ring Saturday to face his longtime nemesis Juan Manuel Marquez for the fourth time, his every movement will be scrutinized, analyzed, picked apart for signs of decline. His legs. His reflexes. His willingness to attack. Manny Pacquiao, left, with Freddie Roach, his trainer. Roach, who has always hated telling fighters to retire, said, "We're at a crossroads." Even those closest to Pacquiao admit he is not the same fighter who rearranged Miguel Cotto's face at the same MGM Grand three years ago. He is more consumed with politics, less aggressive, less menacing, still highly skilled but also different. This is relative, of course. Pacquiao is also indicative of the state of modern boxing, of an era far closer to the end than to the beginning. He will turn 34 this month. Floyd Mayweather Jr. is 35; Sergio Martinez is 37. Ricky Hatton recently retired again. Erik Morales should. Cotto could. Collectively, they provide a window into boxing's aging process, among the saddest and most pronounced in sports. Rare is the boxer who ages gracefully, who retires with brain, soul and body parts intact. Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer, knows this as well as anyone. "Show me a fighter," Roach's brother Pepper once told him, "and I'll tell you who beat him." Roach spends most days inside his Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood, surrounded by walls covered in pictures, misleading, all. The photos show boxers, hands raised in triumph, young and strong and indestructible. They remain that way only in the photographs. Roach sat underneath the pictures last month. He said, "If he doesn't go out there and do what he's supposed to do in this fight, we're one step closer to the Talk." He added: "We're at a crossroads. That's why in this fight we need a knockout badly. Not because it's Pacquiao-Marquez 4. We need to prove that we can do it. See, every boxer has that moment, the moment that he knows. For some, it comes in training. For others, from a punch, a round, a particular fight. For Roach, that moment happened in his final bout, against David Rivello. Roach's trainer, Eddie Futch, urged him to retire years earlier. Yet he hung on. He knew in the second round. He was not trying to win. He was trying to survive. He was debating which party to attend afterward. Then he heard an unfamiliar sound, one that embarrassed him, one that shook Roach to his core. "You're in there," Roach said. You're thinking about something else. You're not trying. Then they boo you for the first time in your life. It's the worst feeling in the world. I never wanted to risk having to go through that again. As if on cue, while Roach spoke, an older gentleman approached. He said he was 89. He goes to Wild Card every Friday, a tradition he plans to continue until at least age 90. Boxing, in the blood. The legs go first. Roach can see it, the unsteady steps, the way "they're feeling for the floor but they're not sure it's there." Sometimes, that shows up in conditioning; sometimes, in a fight. The reflexes go next. A boxer can survive when the legs begin to slow, Roy Jones Jr. said, but not when the sharpness starts to erode. The drive goes, too, somewhere along the line, often because of those two factors, combined with the tedium of too many early-morning workouts, or too many blows to the head. Boxers know this before anyone; they can sense what others cannot yet see. "It's a three-punch combination," Bernard Hopkins said. It's a three-stage demise. Then comes the denial. And it happens to every fighter. Every fighter who ever lived. To the uninitiated, Hopkins said, it appears that age crept up on fighters, like "some sort of boogeyman." That is not the truth. They all know. Hopkins saw it when Sugar Ray Leonard fought Terry Norris in 1991. That one hurt to watch. "It took this fight to show me this is no longer my time," Leonard said then. He fought again six years later. Lost again. "That's boxing," Hopkins said. The older guy normally gets beat to a pulp. It becomes senseless. It becomes life and death.