Pacquiao still fighting at too high a level to retire

By Boxing News - 04/11/2016 - Comments

pac555By Jeff Aranow: Manny Pacquiao supposedly wrapped up his 21-year pro career last Saturday night with his 12 round unanimous decision win over Tim Bradley in a fight that no one asked for. Pacquiao says he’s going to retire, go back to the Philippines and help the people as a politician. Pacquiao says he could change his mind and return to the sport at some point if he misses boxing. He’s not sure at this point if he’ll miss it.

Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum needs to do what he can to get him to continue his pro career oin a fight to fight basis. He needs to not think about a certain number of fights. Instead he should be focusing on a fight to fight basis. If Pacquiao can look good in winning his next fight, then he should continue his career for another fight.

It would be smart on Arum’s part to forget about trying to pressure Pacquiao into fighting one of his own Top Rank fighters, because that would look like a self-serving move on Arum’s part if he tried to keep Pacquiao fighting just so he can work as a stepping stone to help Arum increase the popularity of his fighters.

If Arum wants Pacquiao to continue his career, then he needs to be trying to lure nothing but non-Top Rank fighters into facing him. I think it would be a huge mistake on the part of the 84-year-old Arum to try and coax Pacquiao out of retirement to fight Top Rank fighters like Terence Crawford, Jessie Vargas or Viktor Postol. It would be smarter if Arum only brought up non-Top Rank guys like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Danny Garcia, Amir Khan or Adrien Broner.

At least if Arum mentioned those guys, it wouldn’t come across like he wants to have Pacquiao working a helper to him in building up fighters that need help with their popularity. That’s why it was a mistake on Arum’s part in having Pacquiao fight Bradley a third time. Few boxing fans wanted to see that fight again unless it were free, and it just came across like another in house fight for Top Rank instead of them working without outside promoters for more interesting fights. There’s been too retread fights for Pacquiao in his time with Top Rank, and he should have been fighting newer guys each time instead of fighting the same Top Rank fighter repeatedly.

Retirement at this point makes little sense because Pacquiao showed with his one-sided win over Bradley that he’s still fighting at too high a level for him to walk away. Pacquiao looked almost as good as ever against Bradley. What was even more interesting was how good Pacquiao looked given that he’d been out of the ring for 11 months following shoulder surgery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApyPFAYwSLc

I can’t think of too many fighters that would look as good as Pacquiao coming off of shoulder surgery and a nearly one-year break from the sport. Pacquiao fought like someone in his last 20s rather than someone nearing his 38th birthday. Bradley was totally outclassed by Pacquiao in that fight, and it wasn’t even competitive. Bradley moved around the ring, and all he was doing was avoiding taking punishment. The scores of the fight showed that Pacquiao dominated the action with him winning 116-110 on all three of the judges’ scores.



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