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Has Manny Pacquiao, the world's greatest boxer, ever taken performance-enhancing drugs? And will he let a testing deadline get between him and a November date in Dallas or Las Vegas with the world's second greatest boxer?

"No way," Pacquiao trainer Freddy Roach told me on Tuesday evening. "He doesn't know what a performance-enhancing drug is."

In what may be the most passive-aggressive boxing rivalry not to involve Don King, American welterweight Floyd Mayweather has, without directly accusing the Filipino champion Pacquiao of steroid use, insisted that officials take blood from them fourteen days prior to any match as opposed to the usual twenty-four. Pacquiao, whose entourage often wears T-shirts that read 100% GOD NO STEROIDS, has been hesitant about an earlier cutoff date. "It will be a disadvantage for me because I'm smaller and he's big," he told a hometown radio station, just a few weeks after telling me something a bit more direct: "I feel bad [about] him accusing me of using drugs... Maybe he's afraid of me? Maybe he's not ready."

But now, as Camp Pacquiao books Cowboys Stadium and the MGM in Las Vegas and insists a Mayweather fight is on the horizon ("It's going to happen, probably in November," Roach told me), the real reason behind Pacman's steroid-testing skepticism has surfaced — and it apparently has nothing to do with drugs. "He is not afraid of needles; he is afraid of taking out the blood," Pacquiao's fitness trainer, Alex Ariza, told me. "It's a Third World thing, like being wary of immunizations." In the Philippines, where Pacquiao is awaiting confirmation on his election to Congress this week, old-world superstitions often outweigh modern science; I saw several Filipinos nailed to crosses on Black Saturday.

And while he has lost when blood tests were closer to fight night, there is a chance Pacquiao may just give in to all testing as a kind of psychological play back at Mayweather, the Karl Rove of boxing. "Look, the commissions are talking about it — they are considering using Olympic tests," Roach said. "I told Manny, 'Let's just go along and knock this guy out.' He just laughed — that's his call."

After a March date for Pacquiao-Mayweather was wiped off the calendar, the fighters' rabid fans remain skeptical. But handlers have now begun official negotiations, and you don't exactly fill Cowboys Stadium with an undercard. "It's too big not to happen," Roach says. "I am looking forward to shutting Mayweather up."

EARLIER: Behind the Scenes with Camp Pacquiao and His Secret to Success