By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao isn’t listening to the advice given to him from Filipino Dr. Rustico Jimenez, who suspects that Pacquiao may be showing signs of early Parkinson’s disease after reportedly seeing “twitching” of Pacquiao’s hands while watching him on television. Jimenez didn’t perform an examination on Pacquiao and that’s the whole problem. Jimenez should have examined Pacquiao first before he started with the Parkinson disease talk.
Jimenez is worried that Pacquiao may end up in a wheelchair if he continues to fight. Pacquiao was knocked out in the 6th round by Juan Manuel Marquez on December 8th, and it was an especially bad knockout where Pacquiao lost consciousness. Naturally, the knockout loss has a lot of people concerned about Pacquiao’s health, and this doctor Jimenez appears to be yet another person with concerns.
Pacquiao has no plans on retiring and he’ll likely be fighting in September against Marquez. As for the claims made by Jimenez, there’s talk that Pacquiao may pursue civil litigation against him for his comments about his suspecting that he has Parkinson’s disease.
Pacquiao did well financially in spite of him getting beaten for the second consecutive time. Pacquiao made over $20 million for the loss, proving that it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses, boxing fans are still interested in seeing him fight. How much longer the fans will be willing to pay to see Pacquiao fight is unclear right now. If he keeps losing like this it may be hard for Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum to ask the boxing public to pay to watch him fight. You have to wonder what the breaking point will be before fans start drifting away and not showing interesting in paying to see Pacquiao fight.
Arum could possibly make some adjustments in Pacquiao’s competition to keep him winning if he loses his next couple of fights. Arum would almost have to if he wants to keep asking the boxing public to pay to see him fight. Two losses in a row is one thing, but once it gets to four and five, then Arum is going to have to be more careful in who he matches Pacquiao up against if he wants to keep boxing fans paying $50 per fight to watch him. You can expect there to be an even bigger cry that Pacquiao should retire if he keeps getting knocked out, and I suspect more doctors will come out of the woodwork and give their medical opinions about Pacquiao.
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