Hopkins thinks fans should be upset with Pacquiao’s injury revelation

By Boxing News - 05/12/2015 - Comments

1-MAYPAC-FIGHTNIGHT-TRAPPFOTOS-5238By Chris Williams: Boxing great Bernard Hopkins says that Manny Pacquiao had the burden on him in his mega-fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. to produce the things that he’d talked about before the fight. When Pacquiao failed to do that, he was reduced to making excuses about being injured before the fight.

Hopkins notes that Pacquiao revealed the injury to the public after the fight when he was going to get paid for the fight. It doesn’t seem to sit right with Hopkins that Pacquiao didn’t tell the boxing world about his injury before the fight. Pacquiao’s team told the USADA drug monitoring agency about the fight, but he reportedly didn’t inform the Nevada State Athletic Commission until the day of the fight.

It’s unclear whether Pacquiao’s team assumed that USADA would tell the Nevada Commission about the injury. But whatever the case, it would have been an easy thing for them to have contacted the Nevada Commission themselves to let them know about the injury when it first occurred last April.

“The burden was on his side and Pacquiao told you the reason he couldn’t fulfill that burden was because he had a shoulder injury a month ago but he told you that after you paid him,” Hopkins told RingTV.com. “We should all be in uproar about what Pacquiao said to the world and fans.” revelation

Boxing fans have been in an uproar about Pacquiao’s shoulder injury. They’re understandably angry about it because many of the fans would have liked to have known about the seriousness of the injury so that they could have saved their money and not purchased the fight on PPV, or not traveled and paid huge sums of money to see it live at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Finding out about the injury after the fight is something that has rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way. A shoulder injury like the one Pacquiao had was a serious thing in the minds of many fans. It wasn’t coming into the fight with a hand problem that would only have minor significance to the fight.

It was a tear of Pacquiao’s right rotator cuff, and those are difficult injuries for boxers to fight with. Trying to fight with a rotator cuff injury, even if it wasn’t a complete tear, must have been really difficult for the 36-year-old Filipino fighter. That’s why a lot of boxing fans are upset that they weren’t told of the injury ahead of time. I imagine the gamblers felt the same way. The gamblers that bet huge sums of money on Pacquiao to win likely would have wanted to know if he was going into the fight with Mayweather with an injured rotator cuff.

“Floyd did what I would have done, disarm him, reduce him down to average and take the wind out of his sails,” Hopkins said.



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