By Chris Williams: If Manny Pacquiao’s soon to be surgically repaired right shoulder heals up by next year in 2016, he’ll be getting a rematch against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
According to the reviewjournal.com, Mayweather sent a text message to ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith, saying that he’ll give Pacquiao “another shot in a year.”
The timing for the rematch works out well for Pacquiao because it’s going to take him about a year for his surgically repaired right rotator cuff injury to heal and for him to rehab it.
The doctor that will be performing the surgery on Pacquiao reportedly estimates that it will take between nine and twelve months for him to come back under ideal circumstances.
It could take longer if there are setbacks with the repaired shoulder. You never know. But if everything goes well with the surgery, it should take about a year for Pacquiao to bounce back from the injury. What you would normally want to see for someone with that much time outside of the ring is for them to have a couple of tune-ups so that they can shake off the ring rust and test their surgically repaired shoulder to make sure that it doesn’t fall apart once they face someone good. But as we’ve in the past with former Top Rank fighter Antonio Margarito, he took on Miguel Cotto in a rematch after Margarito had been out of the ring for a full year following three eye surgery procedures.
As one would expect, Margarito’s surgically repaired eye swelled up immediately and eventually the fight was stopped due to the swelling. This is why I think there won’t be a tune-up for Pacquiao. I see Pacquiao just taking the fight against Mayweather as is. If fans want to purchase it they will at their own risk of potentially seeing another dud like the one we saw last Saturday night.
Pacquiao lost to Mayweather last Saturday by a 12 round decision. Instead of giving Mayweather credit for the victory, Pacquiao said that he came into the fight with an injury to his right shoulder that prevented him from fighting at 100 percent. Pacquiao estimates he was at 60 percent on that night against Mayweather.
Pacquiao appears to have misjudged how this news would go over with the fans and the media, because instead of him getting sympathy from people, he’s been getting lashed continuously with many people feeling that he chose to still fight out of greed for the huge paycheck e was getting rather than belief that he could beat Mayweather with one good arm.
“I don’t want to make alibis or complain or anything, but it’s hard to fight one-handed,” Pacquiao said at the post-fight press conference.
Pacquiao may not want to make alibis or complain, but he sure did a good job of doing just that by bringing up his shoulder injury and making that a focus for why he was beaten by Mayweather. With Pacquiao talking about his injury to his shoulder, it just looked like he was trying to undercut Mayweather’s victory. I expected Pacquiao to say something along the lines of him being able to beat Mayweather if they had faced each other in 2010, but I didn’t think he would use an injury as one of the excuses for why he was beaten.
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