By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach says Manny Pacquiao suffered an eye injury to his right eye sparring this week on Tuesday at the MP Wild Card Gym in General Santos City in the Philippines.
Pacquiao was Wednesday off from sparring. Roach says it’s not a serious eye injury, and he plans on giving him as much time as he needs for it to heal. Pacquiao, 37, is getting ready for his April 9 fight against Tim Bradley at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s not much time for Pacquiao to heal, so you have to hope that his eye can heal quickly.
Pacquiao came into his last fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. with a shoulder injury, and that became an excuse to some fans why he lost. If Pacquiao comes into the Bradley fight with an injury, we could be going down the same road with another excuse.
“No, there’s nothing serious about it. Nothing to worry about,” Roach said to philboxing.com. “It’s just that he hurt his eye during sparring yesterday and I thought maybe he needs another day of rest.”
When is an injury not serious? Roach needs to get a good doctor to fly over from the U.S so that they can check Pacquiao out. Maybe they should get Dr. Neal Ellatrache to come over from the U.S to check Pacquiao’s eye to make sure he’s not messed up. Ellatrache is the doctor that worked on Pacquiao’s shoulder recently. Pacquiao suffered a torn right rotator cuff injury before his fight against Mayweather.
The injury got worse during the fight with the superstar last May. Pacquiao has since had shoulder surgery to reparir the problem. However, he hasn’t had a tune-up fight to test it out, and he’s not going to get one. Pacquiao will be going straight into the fight with Bradley without a tune-up. It kind of reminds me how former Top Rank fighter Antonio Margarito took a fight against Miguel Cotto without a tune-up after coming off three eye surgeries and a year-long layoff. No tune up at all.
Not surprisingly, Margarito’s surgically repaired eye closed up quickly, causing the fight to be stopped. I wonder if Pacquiao’s surgically repaired shoulder will fail fast against Bradley and cause the fight to be stopped? If Pacquiao had a tune-up bout of six rounds, then something like this could have been spotted.
“What we’re happy about is his shoulder which got injured and was operated on as a result of his losing cause against (Floyd) Mayweather is no longer hurting,” Pacquiao’s helper Buboy Fernandez said to philboxing.com. “Meaning his injury is, indeed, completely healed.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNqLRyoTv-M
Fernandez won’t know whether Pacquiao’s shoulder is healed from one or two sparring sessions. It’s going to take some serious sparring to know for sure. I don’t think Pacquiao has gotten to the serious sparring yet because training camp just started.
There are some fans who believe that Pacquiao’s shoulder was never really hurt to begin with. They point out that he was fighting at what appeared to be full strength with his right arm in the Mayweather fight, and not using just one hand. When a fighter suffers a torn rotator cuff, they often stop using that arm to throw punches during a fight. Pacquiao was using his right hand until the very end of the fight against Mayweather.
With an eye injury, you have to be careful. Hopefully, Pacquiao doesn’t go into the fight with a bad eye because it would be a real pity if he were to lose to Bradley, and then start talking about his eye injury at the post-fight press conference. We don’t want to hear about Pacquiao being only 60 percent of full capacity and that’s why he lost the fight.
This will be the third and hopefully the final fight between Pacquiao and Bradley. Pacquiao is supposed to be retiring, but few fans believe that. If he does continue to fight, you never know if his 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum will stick him back in with Bradley yet again. There are not many options for Pacquiao to fight in Arum’s Top Rank stable, so that’s kind of why we’re seeing Bradley trotted out yet again. Their past two fights brought in 700,000 and 800,000 pay-per-view buys respectively. Those were in house Top Rank fights.
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