Roach says he regrets letting Pacquiao fight injured against Mayweather

By Boxing News - 11/05/2015 - Comments

pac777By Chris Williams: In a startling confession, trainer Freddie Roach says that he was against letting his fighter Manny Pacquiao take the fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. last May because the Filipino was injured and not capable of being his best for the fight.

Roach, 55, says he wanted to cancel the fight with Mayweather, but other people felt that if the fight didn’t take place at that time then it would likely never happen at all. Roach doesn’t say who the other people are that were in favor of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight still going ahead, but you can guess who the major players were.

By letting the fight go ahead with Pacquiao going into it with a bum right shoulder, it turned out to be a huge fiasco with the fight being less than thrilling to watch.

A lot of boxing fans were angry afterwards at learning that Pacquiao had come into the fight with an injured shoulder, because the cost for the fight was extremely high in both tickets and for pay-per-view. Some boxing fans felt that there should have been a huge discount, given Pacquiao’s injury and him not being 100 percent for the fight.

“I’m not going to say it’s his last fight,” Roach said to secondsout. “I always regret that [Pacquiao fought with injury against Mayweather] because I was one of the ones who wanted to cancel the fight because of injuries, but everyone else thought that if it didn’t happen now, it would never happen and there was so much money involved. I knew my heart was in the right place. He [Pacquiao] wasn’t going to win that fight one-handed, and I think we should have waited until he was healthy and we would have had a better shot, but that’s how things go in boxing. Miguel, I’d like to see him fight Mayweather, and I’d like to see Manny fight him,” Roach said.

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By taking the fight with an injury, Pacquiao will make it difficult to sell a second fight between him and Mayweather. There will be a lot of boxing fans who will be mistrustful of a second fight, as they’ll be suspicious about whether Pacquiao is going into it with another injury that he’s not revealed openly to the boxing public.

In hindsight, Roach should have insisted that Pacquiao pull out of the Mayweather fight, because there’s no way that fighter can fight at their best with a torn rotator cuff in injury like the one Pacquiao had. It doesn’t matter that it was a partially torn rotator cuff. It’s still a debilitating injury that would have been impossible for any fighter to be at his best.

At least if Pacquiao had pulled out, he would have sparred himself being beaten in such a one-sided manner by Mayweather. I don’t think Mayweather would have moved on to fight someone else. I think he would have waited for Pacquiao to heal up because there was too much money in the fight for him not to wait. Whoever was the one that was telling Roach that the Pacquiao vs. Mayweather fight not happen if Pacquiao pulled out of the fight due to an injury was just dead wrong in my view. I think Mayweather would have stuck it out because he wanted to show the boxing world that he was the better fighter than Pacquiao.



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