By Chris Williams: Errol Spence Jr suffered a left-eye retinal tear in training, resulting in him pulling out of his title defense against Manny Pacquiao on August 21st at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
IBF/WBC welterweight champion Spence (27-0, 21 KOs) will be having surgery on Wednesday to repair his left eye. If the eye surgery is successful, the fight with Pacquiao is rescheduled, provided he doesn’t lose on August 21st.
There’s no word whether Spence had felt any symptoms of the injury in his injured left eye, such as pain, blurriness, or double vision. One would suspect that with a torn left retinal, Spence might have felt something was wrong with the eye.
The good news is that Pacquiao (62-7-2, 39 KOs) will stay on the card and challenge WBA welterweight champion Yordenis Ugas for his title in the headliner on FOX Sports pay-per-view.
Ugas (26-4, 12 KOs) had been previously scheduled to defend his WBA 147-lb title in the cop-feature bout against 140-lb contender Fabian Maidana.
Sliding the 35-year-old Ugas into the main event against the former eight-division world champion Pacquiao will get the Filipino star a chance to win back his old WBA title, which was recently stripped from due to his two years of inactivity.
Facing Pacquiao will easily give the 11-year professional Ugas the biggest fight of his career by far.
The talented Cuban Ugas has been waiting for an opportunity like this to come his way since he turned pro in 2011, and it suddenly fell from the sky on Tuesday with the news of Spence suffering an eye injury.
It would be interesting to know what Terence Crawford is thinking right about now, as he’s been pining away for a shot against Pacquiao for over a decade, and the fight has proven to be an elusive one.
It’s bad luck on Crawford’s part to be missing out on a golden opportunity to face Pacquiao after waiting for years finally.
Ugas is like someone that has stumbled upon the golden ticket lying on the ground, and he’s scooped it up and will be ready to make millions on August 21st, as long as he doesn’t get injured in the final week and a half before the fight.
If you’re Ugas, you want to be as careful as possible in the final days of training for his huge payday fight against Pacquiao on August 21st.
For Ugas to be getting the fight against Pacquiao has got to be a bitter pill for the 33-year-old Crawford to swallow.
With that said, it’s unlikely that Crawford would have agreed to step in to face Pacquiao on less than two weeks’ notice. Unless Crawford had been preparing for a fight, he wouldn’t likely agree to replace Spence.
As far as Spence’s eye injury, it was discovered by the Nevada State Athletic Commission upon being given a pre-fight medical examination on Tuesday.
“I’m very disappointed that I won’t be able to fight Manny Pacquiao on August 21,’’ Spence said in a statement. “I was excited about the fight and the event.
“Unfortunately, the doctors found a tear in my left eye and said I needed to get surgery on it ASAP and that there was no way I could fight with my eye in that condition.
“I’d like to apologize to everyone. You know I’ll be back as soon back soon. We’ve come back from worse,” said Spence.
The last part of Spence’s statement says he’s “come back from worse” is likely the terrifying car crash that he went through in October 2019.
This isn’t a guaranteed win for Pacquiao against Ugas by any means. Ugas is a fighter that is a step above Shawn Porter in talent, and we already saw Spence barely beat him in their fight in 2019. It’s quite possible that Pacquiao could lose to Ugas, which would permanently wreck any chances of Spence facing the Filipino star.