Pacquiao’s trainer: Game plan a secret

LOS ANGELES— Freddie Roach’s hip is killing him, and his sternum feels like somebody dropped an anvil on his chest. He took a shot to the chin the other day, and it knocked him across the ring onto the far ropes.

Roach knows he doesn’t have to take this anymore. He is the most prominent trainer in boxing. His assistants could be in the Wild Card gym’s ring with Manny Pacquiao, absorbing the punishment that’s inevitable when you work the mitts with an eight-division champion preparing for the biggest fight of his life.

“Everyone says I should take a break, let someone el se do it,” Roach said. “He wants me to do it. Manny don’t want some other guy. When he hits me, he says he’s sorry sometimes.”

Roach has guided Pacquiao to the pinnacle of their sport over the past decade, fighting off the effects of Parkinson’s disease and a lifetime in this brutal business.

Yet he still hasn’t done everything in boxing, and that knowledge still gets him up before dawn each day.

Roach has spent the spring working on the ultimate puzzle for any modern trainer: A master plan to take down the unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday in Las Vegas.

“That would be about the greatest thing you could accomplish in this job, right?” he asks. “The way Manny is training right now, he can do anything I can put in front of him.

“He knows exactly what we want to do and how to do it. He wants this more than anything in the world, but you know what? So do I.”

Roach thinks he has the plan, and he thinks Pacquiao will be able to implement it at the MGM Grand Garden. Until heading to Las Vegas on Monday, they spent almost every day in Hollywood going over the details — even watching Mayweather on film.

“They ask me why I’m not letting anyone into the gym to film sparring or mitts, and I say it’s because our game plan is vital,” Roach said. “I used to be more lenient, but this fight is so big, the adjustments we made need to be a little bit more of a surpr i se. We’ve got stuff he hasn’t seen before.”

Roach knows a victory would be a valediction for himself and Pacquiao — a culmination of a 14-year partnership that stands out in sports for its consistency and loyalty.

Roach wants it more than he can say, but he can tell Pacquiao wants it even more.

“I know he doesn’t like Mayweather a little bit, because sometime s when we’re doing mitts and I’m catching, he turns into Mayweather and does his shoulder roll a little bit,” Roach said, pantomiming Mayweather’s signature defensive move.

“He says, ‘I’ll kill that.’ He makes fun of him a little bit, and he doesn’t make fun of too many people.”