In what may be the ultimate boxing irony, after their 12 slumbering rounds, it is Manny Pacquiao and not Floyd Mayweather Jr. who is giving the paying public the “Shoulder Roll.”
Mayweather sued his patented Shoulder Roll during the less than inspiring “Fight Of The Century” and now Pacman, or more precisely, Team Pacquiao is juking and jiving with this breathless information about a shoulder tear injury suffered three to four weeks before May 2.
Not only did a churlish Manny claim he outpointed Mayweather, he then revealed the injury.
I hate to be critical but this could’ve been handled so much better by Bob Arum and Top Rank. Ditto for Freddie Roach and Michael Koncz.
Arum should’ve called a private huddle with Mayweather Maestro Al Haymon right after the shoulder tear was diagnosed and Pacquiao took a pain killing injection, presumably lidocaine and perhaps something else, both presumably “kosher” under anti-doping rules.
He wasn’t able to apply much effective aggression in the actual bout, losing nine or 10 of the rounds, but in this scenario Pacquiao could’ve made a mutual agreement with Haymon/Mayweather, one in which both Floyd and the Nevada commission would have OK’d Manny getting a prefight, even a fight night, injection to ease his pain.
But the commission is still steaming, and rightly so, after Pacquiao’s prefight documents saw the “no injury to disclose” box checked off. First Nevada officials heard tell of the injury is about the same time Manny gets to his dressing room?
The commission was not going to allow itself to get played like chumps.
Mayweather, on his side, knows about pain-killing injections. Muhammad Ali got pain-killing shots in his prefight dressing room from Dr. Ferdie Pacheco many times and nobody ever said boo. (Sure, that’s before stringent testing, long before USADA, VADA and WADA and the strict protocols that athletes of this modern era are subject to.)
My essential point is, do you think Haymon would not agree to almost anything to avoid a postponement? Let’s not forget that he was the lead promoter, not Arum.
Do you think Haymon would want to go to Richard Sturm, the MGM honcho, and to HBO’s Ken Hershman and Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza and ask for a postponement?
If Mayweather acquiesced, then do you think Nevada would not have accommodated Pacman? A postponement would’ve been a loathsome idea for all parties.
A prompt and timely disclosure to Haymon and then also to Francisco Aguilar and the other commissioners happens and it’s just common sense that, their interests in seeing the mega event not get a date change, would have carried the day.
But Team Pacquaio dropped the syringe, I mean the ball here.
Even in the dog eat dog world of boxing, honesty is sometimes the best policy.
First, Pacman claims the judges were wrong, Second, he claims he was pretty much limited to being a one armed bandit.
I don’t dispute Manny’s injury. I don’t view it as a sour grapes loser’s ruse.
But this thing was completely mishandled. If handled properly, the fight could’ve gone off on schedule and without the noxious odor remaining now.
The boxer took the fighter to school over 36 minutes.
But it’s Team Pacquiao that flunked out in botching the injury situation.
