Manny Pacquiao didn?t lose too much face in the actual fight with Floyd Mayweather, which he lost by unanimous decision Saturday, but the congressman is having a very bad week, politically. He has made faulty decisions up the wazzou in recent weeks that seem to be playing havoc with his sound reputation here and now.
The fight aftermath has been far more memorable and lively than the fight itself, which Mayweather controlled with his knack for dictating the tenor of any fight while Pacquiao pursued him in scattered bursts that were too-seldom successful.
When Pacquiao disclosed he entered the bout with a bum shoulder and it got worse during the fight, well, that explained why he wasn?t trying the right hook and was less aggressive than we expected.
Perhaps he was surprised that he couldn?t beat Floyd Mayweather with one arm.
He should have gone public about the shoulder from the get-go, which not only would have covered his posterior, disclosure-wise, with the boxing commissioners but also would have put the issue out there. He could have said, ?Look, I want to go through with this fight, but I can?t with this injury unless they let me use a certain Anti-Doping Agency-approved painkiller.? Public opinion probably would have been on the side of loading Manny up.
He certainly should have foreseen that a lot of Pacquiao bettors would like to have known what they were getting and are furious enough to sue.
Right behind the bettors are the more casual boxing fans who beefed up the pay-per-view demand and then thought it was a dull fight and thus felt cheated. That?s politically harmful to Pacquiao as well as Mayweather, who already is perennially the Sonny Liston of ring statesmanship.
Then there were those who claimed Pacquiao did make it happen ? that he deserved the decision in the fight. Some of those folks were convinced the judges had been confused by a mislabeling of the red and blue corner designations. As If the judges couldn?t tell Mayweather from Pacquiao without seeing their trunks.
Nevertheless, at first I thought the official scoring was the most important of all the post-fight firestorms.
The stance that Manny won is predominant in the Philippines this week, so I started trying to re-evaluate the seventh, eighth, and ninth rounds to see if I could scrounge two or three more rounds favoring Pacquiao for my scorecard, which had favored Mayweather 116-112. At that, finding the four good rounds for Pacquiao seemed a bit of a stretch.
As my writer pal Ryan Songalia put it, ?I’m Filipino but not ?I-thought-Pacquiao-won? Filipino.?
Maybe one big left wins Manny the seventh or ninth, or you give Pacquiao undue credit for his strong start in round eight. Or maybe Mayweather gets docked a point for all that holding.
By the time I decided that seeing Pacquiao as the winner was such a stretch that I had pulled a muscle and needed a certain Anti-Doping Agency -approved painkiller, ?Shouldergate? had become a song-and-dance and suddenly Manny had developed a tin ear for the whole situation.
