When news came out that Manny Pacquiao fought Floyd Mayweather Jr. with an injured right shoulder, fans took it with varying opinions.
Pacquiao, however, not only lost to Mayweather but also faced a class-action lawsuit for not disclosing his injury before the fight.
For UFC fighters, however, a fighter going atop the ring, or octagon in their case, is not always “a hundred percent” with months of training pushing them to their limit.
UFC featherweight Urijah Faber, one of the main eventers in “UFC Fight Night 66” together with Frankie Edgar, said he went to fights where he was not at a hundred percent.
He said Pacquiao’s decision to push through with the fight was right as long as his shoulder did not deter him from winning.
Edgar said Pacquiao’s injury was “unfortunate” as he and pretty much everyone who watched the fight wanted the Pacman to be at a hundred percent for the much ballyhooed bout.
“We like to see him at a hundred percent, but as a fighter you got to step up,” Edgar said during Ultimate Media Day on Thursday. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that most fighters are not at a hundred percent, he may not be even at 50 percent, but as a professional athlete, as a professional fighter you’ve got to compete.”
Filipino UFC middleweight Mark Muñoz said it was hard for Pacquiao to fight with a torn rotator cuff.
“To be able to fight with an injured shoulder, a torn rotator cuff, that’s hard,” Muñoz said as he raised his right arm. “You can’t even do this, and there he was holding his position.”
Muñoz added Pacquiao did not want to waste the opportunity to have a fight with Mayweather, the bout which took almost half-a-decade to happen.
“He’s tough, he’s Filipino.”
Another Filipino fighter, UFC featherweight Mark Eddiva, said Pacquiao’s performance, even with an injured shoulder, was a good showing especially against the pound-for-pound king Mayweather.
“His decision to fight is fine with me,” Eddiva said. “Actually he had a pretty good performance even though the judges’ didn’t think so but even the people in the arena knew who had the better fight.”
UFC women’s bantamweight Miesha Tate said Pacquiao was under the pressure to fight with almost the whole world anticipating the mega fight at MGM Grand Garden Arena.
“There’s a lot of pressure on Manny, everyone was anticipating it,” she said. “His whole country here was behind him. Even in America a lot of people including myself were rooting for him in that fight.”
“I felt he felt obligated that he needed to go out there and perform the best he could regardless of the injury. I respect that as an athlete but it’s a very difficult decision to make.”
For Tate’s partner, UFC bantamweight Bryan Caraway, he thought if Pacquiao did not fight Mayweather on May 2, the fight would never have happened.
Caraway gave three reasons why Pacquiao continued.
“Manny wanted to give back to the fans. Another reason is that in his heart he wanted to beat Mayweather, he wanted that win,” Caraway said. “Third is a business decision, he made a lot of money, that’s hard to turn down.”
“Fans think ‘oh he robbed us,’ he didn’t rob you. Guess what if he didn’t fight. That fight would never ever have happened again because Mayweather is so hard to get a fight with, he probably would never take that fight again and the fans would have missed out on that fight forever.”
“Well despite that injured shoulder, he fought a great fight.”