“I can't come to grips with the feeling that this is his last fight,” Arum said in Boxing Scene. “Maybe he will retire. But I'm not gonna lose sleep on it.”
Why the skepticism? Arum noted that it is common for boxers to change their minds after taking a hiatus from the fight game, citing “Sugar” Ray Leonard, George Foreman, Antonio Margarito and even Floyd Mayweather Jr.
“Brandon Rios retired after his last fight [with Bradley]... and unretired half an hour later. Some of these fighters, they retire when they have one wife, and when they get another one, they un-retire,” he said.
Pacquiao has a different reason for retiring, however.
The boxing superstar and congressman is set on pursuing a political career and is running for senator in the May elections.
“If his first thing is gonna be politics then he has to do that as well if not better than he did as a boxer,” Arum said in a separate interview with Boxing Scene Radio Rahim. “If a political career will interfere with him boxing in the future, so be it... he has to look as to what he's gonna do for the rest of his life.”
“When he told me that this was gonna be his last fight, I took that with a grain of salt. But if it is his last fight, I'll acknowledge what a great ride it has been.”
But Arum said there are two things that could affect change Pacquiao’s mind about his imminent retirement. One is a stellar performance against Bradley; and two is the possibility of Mayweather coming out of retirement.
Nostalgia
The boxing promoter admitted that he could not help but get emotional about his friendship with Pacquiao.
What made the Filipino boxer so special, he said, is Pacquiao’s rise to superstardom in the US despite being a non-American.
“Think of where he came from,” explained Arum. “He was as obscure as you can get, a little guy, coming from half-way around the world. It is a tribute to him, but it is almost a bigger tribute to this country (the US), which accepted him, even embraced him. He couldn't speak English.
"If he had been Hispanic, or African-American, he might have had a leg up. But he wasn't.”
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
