By Erwin Lastimosa
A fighter puts complete trust and faith in his team to protect him so all he has to focus on is the fight at hand. Manny Pacquiao’s team handled this whole injury situation poorly. They failed Manny Pacquiao and the fans big time. They thought they could just give him painkillers and deal with the pain and get surgery after the Mayweather fight. A pain killer is not a healing medication, it’s only a strong temporary relief for an injury, after the medication wears out the pain comes back, and while on pain meds you can actually further damage the injury without feeling it. Manny is a fighter and of course he will insist on fighting, it’s the duty of the trainer, adviser and promoter to tell him no! Just like in a fight if your fighter is taking a dangerous one sided beating it’s up to the trainer and people around to stop the fight because a fighter will continue to fight no matter what.
Freddie Roach, who trains Manny Pacquiao should have postponed the fight. He knew better but hid the injury with a closed camp. He gave his fighter pain killers instead and that further caused injury in training making the injury worse. Later one of Manny Pacquiao’s sparring partners Dashon Johnson said Pacman was injured and they stopped sparring early because of it. This whole situation is just a weird and messed up debacle. Pacquiao needs to let go of Freddie Roach and change his team, but he won’t do it because he is loyal to a fault.
Pacquiao’s team probably advised him not to check injured on the NSAC questionnaire so Mayweather’s camp wouldn’t know he was injured and go after the shoulder or they feared the fight would get postponed due to the injury, this was a stupid mistake, because they were denied the pain medication they listed on the questionnaire.
The fight fans wouldn’t have been mad if Pacquiao admit to injury and the fight got postponed, but the Mayweather fans would insist Pacquiao was ducking and even if Pacquiao was shown having surgery they would claim he pulled out of the fight in fear. Pacquiao insisted on fighting because he probably felt Mayweather would never fight him again if he postponed and the fans already had their tickets and everything. The onus was on Pacquiao’s team, they willingly let a fighter fight injured against the best defensive boxer in the world. The fight was strange from the start, Pacquiao was doing all the mistakes he did years ago, he looked frantic like he was in a rush to go for the KO, even when Floyd was in the corner he hesitated to attack.
Freddie Roach claimed he never wanted to win a fight so bad in his entire life well sending an injured fighter into this type of fight with only a few rounds of sparring tells us otherwise, maybe you didn’t want to lose the chance at making a fat check of several million dollars the highest of your coaching career.
Manny Pacquiao fought the best he could with the rotator cuff injury and no pain medication. His team failed him over money. Now they will use him as a stepping stone for other boxers.
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Erwin Lastimosa is a long time boxing fan and enjoys boxing discussion with his peers. Some of his favorite fighters are Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, Muhammad Ali, Flash Elorde, Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquiao.