Are Manny Pacquiao's Post-Fight Comments Diminishing Floyd Mayweather's Victory?

It was billed as the “Fight of the Century.”

What it became instead was the “Anticlimax of the Century.”

After leaving the ring with—based on what he’d said to HBO’s Max Kellerman, anyway—what seemed like no worse than a middling belief that he’d actually defeated Floyd Mayweather Jr., the subsequent post-fight press conference seemed an ideal place for Manny Pacquiao and a frustrated support team to lob the verbal grenades that would establish battle lines for yet another Las Vegas financial orgy.

Instead, the only thing the Filipino and his people lobbed were sour grapes.

And by peeling the “I don’t want to make excuses, but I had no business even being in the ring” ditty straight from the Frustrated Beaten Fighters Songbook, about all he managed to do was land a blow in the wee hours of the morning that he’d never come close to landing during 36 minutes in the ring.

John Locher/Associated Press

In doing so, he took at least the shine off a nearly flawless performance by a now 48-0 champion.

While it’s true that the only person who knows how badly hurt Pacquiao’s shoulder was is Pacquiao himself, it’s at least a bit surprising that a fighter who’s built a personal brand on a capacity to overcome adversity would choose to make an injury the most significant takeaway of history’s biggest fight.

Once he, Freddie Roach and Bob Arum let the would-be cat out of the bag at the conference, the give-and-take endeavor quickly devolved from objective deconstruction of Act 1 of the sport’s hottest rivalry to a step-by-step retracing of when the malady occurred, what was done to combat it and whether or not Team Pacquiao ever considered postponing the match rather than entering injured.

It was of little surprise, then, that Mayweather flashed frustration when the queries upon his arrival at the podium quickly steered from recapping a career-validating win to determining to what degree his opponent had been adversely impacted. In response, the verbally calculated champ took the high road.

Sort of.

“If he had come out victorious,” he said, “I would have shown respect and said he was the better man."

John Locher/Associated Press

But given that Pacquiao is a smiling politician and Mayweather is a once-jailed and oft-accused abuser of women, it’s hardly a long-shot bet to suggest that an opposite claim would have rendered an opposite response. In fact, given that public opinion in most places—and certainly as it was measured at the MGM—leaned heavily in the Filipino’s favor, anything less than genuflection would have been deemed insufficient, even if Mayweather had taken the fight legally blind with a club foot.

Such is the no-win life of a popularity contest runner-up.

Nevertheless, if and when people get critique the fight’s X's and O's, rather than its doctor’s logs and rap sheets, they’ll realize pretty quickly that Mayweather pitched a gem in his career’s biggest game.

Not only did the 38-year-old man throw six more punches over 12 rounds than a supposedly supersonic opponent, but he landed 67 more, too—leading to a one-sided 34-19 edge in accuracy percentage.

The whirling dervish, it seemed, was reduced to Robert Guerrero.

But when it came to gaining credit for the mastery, Mayweather might as well have been the “Ghost.”