Not quite David Haye-esque but an excuse nonetheless from Manny Pacquiao.
The Filipino boxer was outclassed by a frustrating Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas but he said that he was fighting through a shoulder injury at the MGM Grand.
Just an hour or so before the press conference though, Manny Pacquiao didn’t seem to think he had a problem as he claimed that he thought he had done enough to win the fight.
But then, PacMan told media afterwards about a tear in his right shoulder and that he was denied a pre-fight shot by the Nevada Athletic Commission.
“Two weeks before the fight, my shoulder was getting better and better, but it still wasn’t 100 percent.”
That goes against the form that Pacquiao’s camp filled out before the fight when it was said that he had no injuries and that’s why he was denied the shot he was after by the commission’s chairman, Francis Aguilar, who had not heard of any injury until the night.
“I have no proof of the injury,” Aguilar was quoted on Yahoo Sports. “If he told us on Friday, we would have gotten the MRIs and there are a lot of things we could have done.”
And his trainer, Freddie Roach, also thought that he was fit enough to compete – even if he would still have to battle through.
“I thought he could get through the fight,” Roach said. “I never want to put a fighter into a fight injured in that manner, but I thought the progress was good enough, and that’s why we stayed with the fight.”
