By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Freddie Roach is holding out hope that Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. will fight again.

The undefeated Mayweather is retired and Pacquiao claims his April 9 rubber match against Timothy Bradley will be the last fight of his Hall-of-Fame career. Roach, however, “would not be surprised” if Mayweather, who’ll turn 39 on Feb. 24, and the 37-year-old Pacquiao continue fighting.

“I did ask Bob [Arum] if that was a possibility and he doesn’t think so,” Roach said of a Pacquiao-Mayweather rematch before a Pacquiao-Bradley press conference Thursday in The Theater at Madison Square Garden. “But the way that they both spend money, maybe they will fight again. Someone called me the other day and said, ‘Floyd just bought a $1.1 million watch.’ I says, ‘Yeah. Why are you telling me that? I don’t really care about that stuff too much.’ And Manny’s running for senator, and that’s gonna cost him a lot of money to become senator. That’s how votes go in his country. I mean, you pay for votes.”

If Pacquiao wins that May 9 election in the Philippines, he thinks serving as a senator will be too time-consuming to continue his boxing career. His current part-time job as a congressman is less demanding of his time.

Regardless, if Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) looks good while beating Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs, 1 NC) in their 12-round fight for Bradley’s WBO welterweight title, Roach will urge his fighter to pursue another fight against Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs). Their first fight amounted to mostly 12 rounds of boring boxing, but the long-awaited showdown shattered every revenue record for the sport by earning more than $600 million overall.

“I would tell him to maybe try to get that Mayweather fight back one more time,” Roach said. “That fight really bothers me. I haven’t even watched it again because I’m just so pissed off about the first one, because I thought Manny could’ve won that fight much easier than he did. Manny thought he won the fight anyway. But I think he could’ve done a lot more. But when he came back after the fourth round and said, ‘My shoulder’s shot,’ I said, ‘Well, do the best you can.’ He still thinks he won the fight, but I don’t. And I would like to get that one back, yes.”

Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.