Pacquiao beats Bradley; Beltran and Vargas win

Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KO’s) pounded out a 12 round unanimous decision win on Saturday night in beating WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-1, 12 KO’s) to hand him his first career loss in a closely contested battle at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was scored 116-112, 116-112, and 118-110.

The judge that scored it 118-110 must have been watching another fight because there’s no way Pacquiao won the fight by that score. It was close.

The win wasn’t the huge one-sided victory that Pacquiao needed to prove that he was back. Indeed, he looked slow at times tonight, and clearly not the fighter he was five years ago when he beat Miguel Cotto in his prime. But Pacquiao at least got the victory over Bradley, and he can now go on and fight the winner of the Mike Alvarado vs. Juan Manuel Marquez fight in September. As for Bradley, he’ll very likely get a third fight with Pacquiao in 2015.

There’s not a lot of options for Pacquiao to fight in Bob Arum’s Top Rank stable, so Bradley will likely be brought back next year for a rubber match. It’s clearly not needed, but the fight will get made anyway, especially if the pay-per-view numbers for tonight’s card were good.

Undercard results:

Ray Beltran UD 12 Arash Usmanee
Jessie Vargas UD 12 Khabib Allakhverdiev
Bryan Vasquez UD 12 Jose Felix Jr
Sean Monaghan TKO 5 Joe McCreedy
Oleksandr Gvozdyk TKO 1 Mike Montoya
Oscar Valdez TKO 4 Adrian Perez
Esquiva Falcao UD 6 Pubilo Pena