"The right side had that cut on the cheek bone. He had swelling right under the eyelid all the way pushing up to his eye. He had a cut right on his right eyebrow, and the swelling was coming down. And his field of vision on his right eye was very limited," said Cole.
"On his left side, Margarito just had swelling under the left eye, and, it was starting to swell, but it wasn't affecting his vision at all. But what I was concerned with from about the ninth round on was his vision out of the right eye and whether he could see any more," said Cole. "I just didn't want him to eat any more left hands from Manny, because he was already eating left hands way before he even started to have a problem with his vision."
Margarito (38-7, 27 knockouts) was beaten bloody over the course of Saturday night's HBO pay-per-view televised, Top Rank Promotions 12-round unanimous decision loss to Pacquiao (52-3-2, 38 KOs), who earned his eighth title in as many different weight classes by adding the WBC's junior middleweight (154 pounds) belt to the WBO welterweight (147 pounds) crown that he already owned.
But as a result of the punishment he took against the 31-year-old Pacquiao, the 32-year-old Margarito is hospitalized at least until Wednesday with a broken right orbital bone that will require surgery to repair on Tuesday, according to the fighter's manager, Sergio Diaz.
Margarito was out-punched, 474-to-229, overall, even as he had an advantage in jabs, 94-63. Margarito absorbed 411 power punches while landing 135 by comparison, and was an easy target for the powerful left hooks, upper cuts and crosses from Pacquiao.
"Margarito leaned into an uppercut, and I think that the first cut surfaced under his eye in the fourth round," said Cole. "I want to say that it was the fourth round that he got that original cut on his cheek bone right below his right eye."
Cole twice stopped the action in the 10th and 11th rounds to examine Margarito's face, holding up fingers and asking him if he could still see them.
"I was covering up his good eye. I was covering up his right eye and I was asking him how many fingers I was holding up. So that way, I could tell if he could see my hands at all. I was kind of setting them a little bit off to the outside because I didn't want him to keep on eating those left hands that Manny was throwing," Cole said.
"If he's a blind fighter, then you can't let him keep on fighting. Both times that I did that and I asked him, he answered correctly. The doctor did the same thing once also between rounds. I did it first, like at the beginning of the 10th, and then, the doctor did it in-between the 10th and the 11th.
"And then I did it a little bit later on in the 11th round, when he got another little cut above the original swelling of his right eye. So I was getting worried about whether or not he could see. My concern was always with his right eye."
At that point, said Cole, "I was very close to stopping the fight."
"The whole 10th and 11th round, I was close by. Most of the other parts of the fight, I stayed away from them, so that you can see the vision of their entire bodies and you can see their feet, which can often get tangled up" when you have a right hander in Margarito, and a southpaw in Pacquiao, Cole noted.
"But in those rounds, I started to sneak in closer so that I could work a lot closer and wait to see how Margarito was responding. I wanted a reason to stop it," said Cole. "I guess that Tony kind of knew that I was getting close and that I wanted to stop it, because Tony kept firing back and he kept fighting. Every time that I got close, and he'd eat two or three punches, he would fire back.
Source: boxing.fanhouse.com
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