Manny may unretire for Mayweather bout
WIN, LOSE or draw, Manny Pacquiao’s fight against welterweight champion Timothy Bradley on April 9 in Las Vegas will be the last of his career. Maybe.
Boxing retirements always should be taken with a grain of salt, even if Pacquiao has a legitimate reason to step away from the ring. He reiterated Thursday at Madison Square Garden that he will retire, after saying so in Los Angeles earlier this week, as the Filipino congressman is running for senator in the Philippines, a position which will be much more time consuming.
Though Pacquiao opted for a third fight with Bradley after clearly outboxing him twice — Bradley’s win in the first matchup was shrouded in controversy because of what was widely believed to be poor judging — both Pacquiao and trainer Freddie Roach allowed that a rematch with Floyd Mayweather would’ve been the preferred option if Mayweather hadn’t retired.
Many wonder if Mayweather is truly retired for good. When asked if Mayweather coming back would cause him to change his mind about his own retirement, Pacquiao left the door ajar.
“I don’t know,” the 37-year-old said. “What is in my mind right now is to retire after this fight.”
Pacquiao, who in the fourth round of his loss to Mayweather in May aggravated a rotator cuff injury which he suffered in 2009, maintains that he should have won that fight, while Roach disagrees. He thought Pacquiao had much more to give and said the fight “bothers” him.
“I just think he pitter-pattered his way through it too much,” Roach said.
On Wednesday, renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who originally performed Pacquiao’s rotatorcuff repair after the fight, gave Pacquiao a clean bill of health.
The public reception to a third Pacquiao-Bradley fight has mostly been negative, but Bradley is optimistic things will be different in April now that he has Teddy Atlas as his trainer, dumping Joel Diaz after his win over Jesse Vargas in June.
Bradley nearly lost that fight near the end of the 12th round after being caught by a right hand. When he later was a guest on SiriusXM’s Going The Distance, Atlas broke down why Bradley got caught and Bradley was convinced he needed Atlas to refocus him.
“He made me feel like I didn’t know anything about boxing,” said Bradley, who won by ninth-round TKO in November against Brandon Rios in his first fight with Atlas in his corner.