For Pacquiao, a Victory Comes at a Painful Cost

LAS VEGAS — Shortly after his latest fight, Manny Pacquiao lay flat on his back on a wooden table in Locker Room No. 2 at the MGM Grand. Tissue paper covered all of his face except for the area around his right eye. He gripped the arm of his wife, Jinkee, with his right hand, squeezing tightly.

Above the eye, a gash extended about an inch and a half diagonally through his eyebrow, the result of what looked like an accidental head butt in the 10th round of his third fight against Juan Manuel Marquez. As doctors numbed and cleaned the cut, Pacquiao twitched, his face twisting into a grimace, his grip on his wife’s arm tighter each time doctors plunged the needle in.

In this room, no one talked about what had just happened in the ring, as if the events that unfolded late Saturday — another entertaining bout; another controversial decision; this time, a crowd that booed and lobbed beer cans in the direction of the judges — did not exist.

Instead, Pacquiao and a handful of friends talked about religion. They recited the Ten Commandments. They scheduled a Bible study for when they return to the Philippines on Wednesday. “God is great,” Pacquiao kept saying, his face swollen in spots, his hands sore, his pride likely also bruised.

“God is great,” he said again.

Doctors began to sew the cut closed. Because of the depth of the gash, they stitched in layers: 8 stitches on the deepest level, 8 more on an intermediate one and 12 more on the top. Inside Pacquiao’s bottom lip, blood dripped into his mouth. Perhaps Sunday this, too, would require stitches.

He wore jeans, slippers and a blue T-shirt that blared UNDISPUTED CHAMPION across his chest. His locker room, though, did not feel like the temporary quarters of a champion, of a boxer who promised throughout last week that this time he would pummel Marquez thoroughly, remove all the questions and all the doubt.

While Pacquiao praised God and received the stitches, much of his entourage gathered in the adjacent room. Gloom spread across their faces. They cast their eyes downward, saying little, celebrating less.

In the far corner of the room, Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, sat on a folding table. He shook his head. He said he had expected Marquez to engage more, to attack, especially after Marquez bulked up in the weeks before the bout.

Instead, Marquez fought a brilliant tactical fight. He flummoxed Pacquiao by waiting for him, then counterpunching, with left jabs and right hooks and right hands. Whenever Pacquiao moved forward, Marquez hit him square and hard. He never allowed Pacquiao to mount the offensive onslaughts that marked Pacquiao’s rise to stardom, never allowed Pacquiao to find any kind of rhythm or dictate the bout’s pace.

Instead, Marquez boxed Pacquiao the way Floyd Mayweather Jr. had boxed Marquez. But while Mayweather won that fight handily, Marquez did not win this one. Pacquiao did, by majority decision, “majority” meaning on two of the three judges’ scorecards, not in the sold-out stands at the MGM Grand, where the fans clearly disagreed.

Roach said he had wanted Pacquiao to move right more as he stalked Marquez around the ring, instead of falling into Marquez’s trap by bobbing left almost exclusively. On the folding table, and later at the news conference, Roach insisted Pacquiao had won. Again. He seemed certain, but he knew others most certainly were not.

“I’m still nervous,” he said when asked how he felt before the decision was announced.

After the cut was closed, Pacquiao climbed off the table, looked in the mirror and shadowboxed with a small bandage above his right eye. Already, talk had turned to another fight between the men, a fourth chance to find a definitive winner, once and for all, or perhaps to never find one.

Pacquiao’s promoter, Bob Arum of Top Rank Boxing, said he wanted to hold the fourth bout in early May. Pacquiao’s adviser, Michael Koncz, said such talk was premature.

“Come on, we just finished the fight,” he said, sounding slightly annoyed as he supervised the stitching. “We’ll look at our options a couple weeks down the road.”

Then, to Pacquiao: “You look as good as you did before, champ.”

Pacquiao combed his hair, changed into a dress shirt and sang in the front of the mirror. Someone held his fedora for him. Someone else held his water bottle. Cuts covered his torso, his arms, even the back of his neck. “I’m from Scotland,” he said in a British accent, and he smiled, but it was a wary smile, a painful smile, the less-than-definitive win still hovering over the locker room and dulling the mood.

An hour had passed since the fight ended, since the boos that cascaded throughout the arena drowned out Pacquiao’s in-ring interview. He went upstairs, walking gingerly, to the postfight news conference. For the first time in a long time, he felt it necessary to defend himself.

“It’s very clear that I won the fight,” he said.

Pacquiao took all of two questions, then retired down the street to his suite at Mandalay Bay after another classic fight between two men that raised more questions than it answered.

As Pacquiao climbed down from the podium, his limousine awaiting him downstairs, someone in his entourage ran after him. “Manny! Manny!” the man shouted. “It’s the president!”

With that, the bruised champion with 28 stitches above his right eye walked slowly into the night, talking into a phone.

No one asked whether he planned to fight Mayweather anytime soon.

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