Will Manny Pacquiao be the same fighter when he comes back?

By Boxing News - 09/21/2015 - Comments

pac777By Chris Williams: Only four months after suffering a torn right rotator cuff injury there are reports that Manny Pacquiao is playing basketball in an exhibition game and not feeling any pain from his surgically repaired right shoulder.

It’s hard to understand how Pacquiao’s shoulder could have healed so quickly because in different sports like basketball and baseball, it takes up to a year for a player to recover from the surgery and come back to the level that they were before they injured. Perhaps Pacquiao’s home remedy of salt water really did do the job on his shoulder.

The quick healing of Pacquiao’s shoulder means that there is a good chance that Pacquiao will be able to make a complete recovery and return to the ring in early 2016 like his promoter Bob Arum wants. But there is still a lot of doubt whether the 36-year-old Pacquiao can ever fully come back from the torn rotator cuff injury to be the fighter that he was before he was injured during his May 2nd fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

What was interesting about that fight was that despite Pacquiao having torn his shoulder early in the fight, he showed no signs of being injured. Pacquiao didn’t favor one arm the way that you would think would happen with a devastating injury like that, and he didn’t slow up any. It was the same Pacquiao.

It’s just really hard to understand. If you saw how Jeff Lacy tore his left rotator cuff in a fight against Vitaliy Tsypko, you could tell that Lacy hard suffered the injury because he was forced to fight almost entirely with his right hand after suffering the injury.

When Lacy did finally come back from the injury exactly a year later, he no longer had the devastating punching power in his left hand that he once had. Pacquiao has a good right hook, and he might lose that weapon if his shoulder fails to regain the strength and flexibility that he had before the injury.

At this point there’s a high chance that Pacquiao is going to get beaten in his first fight back from his shoulder surgery. Arum doesn’t want to put Pacquiao in a tune-up for some reason, and he’s going to go ahead and match him tough in his first fight back in February or March of next year against one of the following fighters: Amir Khan, Terence Crawford, Lucas Matthysse or Juan Manuel Marquez.

I think it’s crazy for Pacquiao to come back without a tune-up fight, but it’s even stranger that he could come back within nine months after suffering the torn rotator cuff. I’ve never heard of an athlete returning that soon to competition after suffering that kind of injury. I guess it’s different with boxers compared to pitchers or basketball players.

In being rushed back to the ring in less than a year since surgery, I think it makes it likely that Pacquiao will be put in with Top Rank fighter Terence Crawford by Arum rather than a non-Top Rank fighter. If Arum waits to match Pacquiao with Crawford later in 2016 after he’s already had one fight, it may be too late for Arum to make the Pacquiao-Crawford fight because he’ll already have been beaten.

Crawford needs a big fight against the likes of Pacquiao to turn him into a star, and that can only happen if Arum matches him up with Pacquiao at the start of next year. In that sense, Pacquiao will be a stepping stone for Crawford in the same way that Oscar De La Hoya was a stepping stone for Mayweather and Pacquiao.



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