Pacman back in LA, reviews tape of rematch

LOS ANGELES – After spending the whole morning Sunday receiving guests, signing autographs and posing for pictures with his fans at his Mandalay Bay suite, Manny Pacquiao decided to head back to Los Angeles.

“There’s nothing to do here. I have no plans of playing in the casino ever again,” he said.

And so, at around three in the afternoon, Pacquiao and his huge entourage of about 50 persons took a 12-vehicle convoy back to LA, but not after a major stopover, a visit to the Vegas home of one of his close friends there, Dr. Allan Recto.

There in his friend’s beautiful home, Pacquiao was greeted by fans once more. But he didn’t mind. He was having a good time.

Pacquiao caught a video of the fight, watched it, and enjoyed late lunch of chicken afretada, rice and some desert.

“The cut really made it very difficult for me,” he said later on.

“It  was very difficult for me. And the first thing I told (assistant trainer) Buboy (Fernandez) was that I could hardly see anything,” he said of the cut he suffered in the eighth round after taking a powerful right straight from Juan Manuel Marquez.

“If not for the cut, maybe the fight didn’t last 12 rounds. I got a little over-confident after I knocked him down in the third round. And after I took the cut, I started blaming myself for being over-confident,” he said.

The convoy left for LA at around 4 p.m., and after another brief stopover at Barstow, the halfway point of the 300-mile journey, he was back in his La Palazzo apartment before 10 p.m.

He was still up as of 1:30 a.m. – again, watching the tape of his most recent fight, with wife, Jinkee, beside him, and a more than a dozen friends behind them. – Abac Cordero