Foreman’s knee surgery a success

By Boxing News - 06/12/2010 - Comments

Image: Foreman’s knee surgery a successBy Jason Kim: Former WBA junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman (28-1, 8 KO’s) had his right knee successfully operated on Friday to repair Foreman’s torn ACL and Meniscus and to remove torn cartilage around his knee joint. The injury partially occurred starting in the 7th round in his June 5th defeat against Miguel Cotto at Yankee Stadium. To what level the damage occurred in that fight isn’t really known. Foreman always was walking around with an injured knee for the past 14 years, as he had hurt it originally as a 15-year-old and had never had it operated on.

According to Dan Rafael of ESPN, Foreman will be out for six months recovering from the surgery. It won’t be known for awhile how successful the surgery is because there can always be additional problems that can pop up that might require additional surgery on the knee. When you have an injury as bad as Foreman’s and when you let the original knee problem go for as long as he did, there can be problems with fully recovering to where the knee originally was.

Foreman, 29, has been wearing a knee brace for all these years, which is kind of shocking considering he held down the WBA title and has been a top fighter for quite some time. Why a top level athlete like Foreman didn’t think to have his knee repaired all this time seems hard to understand. This isn’t a tooth ache, which he could ignore for awhile without it costing him.

But a bad knee is something that has probably been hindering Foreman for many years and keeping him from fighting at his absolute best. In a way, it was lucky it finally gave out on him entirely so now he can finally take care of the problem. It’s just disappointing that it had to happen in the biggest fight of his career against Miguel Cotto in front of a large crowd at Yankee Stadium. Foreman bravely attempted to fight on with the injury after in occurred in the 7th and made it all the way to the 9th, limping badly around the ring while taking punishment the whole time from Cotto. The bout was finally stopped in the 9th after Foreman was dropped with a left hook from Cotto.

Foreman would like a rematch with Cotto, but that’s not really feasible. More likely is that Foreman will have to turn to fighting the fringe contenders and the B level fighters that he had been mostly fighting before he took on Cotto. If Foreman can beat enough of them, and if his right knee holds up on him, he can move back in range of taking on one of the light middleweight champions.

Cotto likely won’t hold onto the WBA title for long, because he seems to have won it just so he can use it to try and get Manny Pacquiao to fight him for it. Pacquiao won’t keep it either. He just wants to win another title and his promoter Bob Arum likely prefers that I happen against his own Top Rank fighters rather than putting Pacquiao in a risky fight against the best light middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, who, like Floyd Mayweather, would have a great chance of neutralizing all of Pacquiao’s best assets.



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