Jinkee Pacquiao: Patched-Up Relationship Will Help Manny Bounce Back vs. Bradley

For those of you who have had issues with your significant other, you know that it can affect everything you do in your day-to-day life.

Manny Pacquiao is no different from the rest of us in that respect, as reports have circulated that he and his wife, Jinkee Pacquiao, had a pretty serious dispute before Pac-Man's fight against Juan Manuel Marquez in November 2011.

According to Kevin Iole of Yahoo! sports, the issues were so serious that Jinkee refused to leave her hotel suite to accompany her husband to the fight at the MGM Grand. The report also says that Pacquiao's "sleep was irregular during training camp because he spent long hours on the phone with his wife in the Philippines while he was in camp in Los Angeles. At the time she was contemplating a divorce."

That might be the perfect explanation (or excuse) as to why Pacquiao didn't perform up to his usual standards against Marquez. Marquez appeared to have Pacquiao's number in their last two fights, but a domestic dispute with his wife surely didn't help the Filipino congressman.

As per Iole's report, Freddie Roach said this:

"When he came into the dressing room, he wasn't smiling and he wasn't the old Manny Pacquiao I'm used to," Roach said. "He was [very late arriving] and he didn't have the kind of focus you normally get from him. Obviously, he was going through a pretty serious situation in his personal life and his wife was threatening to divorce him, so that's tough for anyone to handle."

This was clearly bothering Pacquiao and must have been a huge issue for him. A man of his faith definitely doesn't take a possible divorce lightly, and you'd be crazy to believe that it didn't impact his performance.

However, we won't see any of those issues when Pacquiao fights Timothy "Desert Storm" Bradley on June 9 in the same arena that he faced Marquez.

According to GMAnetwork.com, the couple have reconciled their differences, and Jinkee joined Manny during his training sessions in Los Angeles, California. That will obviously be a huge weight off of his shoulders going into his fight against Bradley, a fight that I predict he will win much more handily than many are expecting him to.

A boxer's hands can be considered lethal weapons. It's hard enough to dodge a lightning fast punch from a powerful puncher with a clear head. It's nearly impossible to duck a punch of the same sort when your thoughts are elsewhere. Marital problems can't be the sole cause of Pacquiao's disappointing performance against Marquez, but he may not have had his heart in the fight completely.

That would explain why he threw so many wild punches and got hit with so many shots he doesn't normally take. 

Pacquiao is going to head into this fight with a sound mind and a sound body, and Bradley is going to suffer the consequences. "Desert Storm" isn't the fighter that Marquez was, and if Marquez couldn't score a victory over a mentally depleted Pacquiao, then Bradley is going to have no chance against a 100 percent focused version of the welterweight champion.

Now that Pacquiao can concentrate specifically on boxing, and not the prospect of losing his wife, we are going to see a dominant performance against an inferior fighter.