Pacquiao: I’m ready to fight next year

By Boxing News - 07/08/2015 - Comments

1-MAYPAC-FIGHTNIGHT-TRAPPFOTOS-5321By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao is still currently recovering from his shoulder surgery on his torn right rotator cuff that he suffered before his recent loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. on May 2nd. Pacquiao says he’s ready to fight in 2016. He feels confident that his right shoulder will be well enough for him to resume his career.

“Im ready to fight, next year,’’ Pacquiao said via thecable.ng. “I’m fine. I can lift it.”

Pacquiao says he’s ready, but the truth is he’s not going to know what the status is with his right shoulder until he starts training camp. If Pacquiao ends up only regaining partial strength in his shoulder, then his promoter Bob Arum is going to need to make a big decision with what to do with the 36-year-old Filipino star.

The smart thing for Arum to do would be to cash out with Pacquiao by doing whatever he needs to do in order to get the rematch with Mayweather. If that means accepting a 70-30 or 80-20 purse split with Mayweather, then Arum needs to do it.

Arum would obviously like to match Pacquiao against one of his Top Rank stable fighters like Terence Crawford, but Arum should resist that urge if Pacquiao fails to regain the strength in his right shoulder. The money that Pacquiao would get for a pay-per-view fight against Crawford would be chickenfeed.

Arum would be lucky if the fight even does 400,000 pay-per-view buys. Casual boxing fans don’t know who Crawford is, and there’s no fan base there ready and willing to pay to see Crawford and Pacquiao fight. If all Pacquiao has is one arm to fight Crawford, he’ll lose the fight. At that point, I see Pacquiao really going downhill in terms of his pay-per-view selling ability. That’s why Arum needs to cash out with Pacquiao by accepting whatever deal they can get with Mayweather.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Arum, Pacquiao and trainer Freddie Roach bluff Mayweather by saying that his shoulder is as good as new. If Mayweather thinks Pacquiao’s shoulder is like once was, he might give Pacquiao a decent cut of the revenue. But if he finds out that he’s only got one functional arm, I don’t see him giving Pacquiao a good cut of the cash because he would have the power in the negotiations in a huge way. Mayweather and the boxing world won’t find out the state of Pacquiao’s shoulder until he gets inside the ring, and by then it’ll be too late for boxing fans because they’ll have already plunked down $100 to see the fight for a second time.

I wonder why Arum and Roach don’t want to have Pacquiao take a tune-up bout before he starts taking on the top caliber opposition. Is it because if Pacquiao’s right shoulder isn’t the same it will be spotted immediately by the boxing fans and the fighters? I have a feeling that might be the reason.

If you’ve got a fighter with a serious injury like that, then there’s a good chance he’ll never be the same again. That’s why it’s not a good idea to have him fight a tune-up because it’ll be spotted right away, and the fighter might not even be able to make it through that one fight without his injury causing the stoppage.

I still remember the circumstances behind the rematch between Top Rank fighters Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto. Margarito was coming off of a year layoff and three separate eye surgeries during that time following his loss to Pacquiao in 2010. Instead of Margarito taking a tune-up fight to test whether his surgically repaired right eye would hold up to actual contact, Margarito went straight into a second fight against Miguel Cotto.

As you would figure, Margarito’s surgically repaired eye swelled up immediately until finally the fight had to be stopped because of it. That was the last time Margarito ever fought. Had they tested the eye with a tune-up bout, they would have found out what the condition of the eye was, but then again there wouldn’t have been the money fight against Cotto.

So when I see Pacquiao coming back without a tune-up fight after a serious potentially career-ending shoulder injury like the one he suffered, it reminds me of exactly what happened with the Cotto-Margarito 2 fight. It also reminds me of the Cotto vs. Sergio Martinez fight in 2014, where Martinez came back without a tune-up following knee surgery and a 14 month layoff from the ring. Martinez’s right knee looked like it was still badly injured and unfit for him to be fighting on it.



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