FIGHT fans in my neighborhood and in the other towns of Antique where I grew up in, couldn’t believe when they heard the champ on television 10 days ago. One more fight next year, said the legend, the greatest Filipino fighter in the ring.
“He’s got money, he’s got fame, and he’s got the adulation of millions of fans. Why would Manny Pacquiao want to fight again? asked my friend, the venerable Sangguniang Panlalawigan Member Vince Piccio, who is a blue-bloodied sports aficionado.
In two months’ time, the champ will turn 37, a twilight zone even for the most gifted and conditioned fighter one could hope to see. In a sport where the best of them would usually rise on the crest of their most sublime form between 27 and 33 years old, Pacquiao isn’t anymore the champ who lit up the boxing world for a decade and drove pay-per-view sales to mind-boggling record levels.
“He is not just an old man for boxing,” Piccio, who once served as president of the Philippine Wrestling Association, said. “But already, he’s in an age that is beginning to define him differently.”
“He’s into charity?” I tested him. “He could put his compassion, his heart, to good use.”
“Wait, it’s not that,” Piccio said. “This champ is a fighter, a relentless one, and he could be just as successful fighting other battles of a different kind.”
My good friend is relentless, too, when he argues a point and wants to win it. His point is that we have seen the best of the champ, and Pacquiao knows he has seen his best come and pass him by. He’s done fighting in the ring for good. It is not a cause for disgrace to admit it, but a moment of recognition of a great fighter that he could be a champion for his people—a champion for social and economic justice.
He could do more fighting for Filipinos where it matters, and he has planted himself there. Politics. He could bring change to this country, not just promise it.
Ten days ago he was already thinking to that time when would be a full-time political leader and also a full-time boxing fan. On television he said the words many had been expecting for the good part of the months since his loss to American Floyd Mayweather Jr. on points in May.
“I think I am ready [to retire],” he said. “I’ve been in boxing for more than 20 years.”
Then switching his focus to the future, he began to talk about being someone else, touched with the certainty of the fighter who had walked into the arena so many times determined to walk away a winner. Running for the Philippine Senate may feel exactly that way for him, and he could smell the scent of victory even now. In fact, he has begun talking as if he’s already there, in the awesome chamber where laws are debated and made.
“If you are a senator, your focus should only be for your job and your family,” he said. “I will have to give up the other things that require my attention.”
But to climb the ring for one last time, why? To add to his prizefighter purse? Any more addition to it would only likely result in another round of skirmish with the brutal taxman. And Pacquiao has had more than enough of it.
In aid of election? In my book, despite all the undeserved adjectives said and written about him as a congressman from Sarangani, Pacquiao is in the winner’s circle of 12 senators in next year’s polls. Even in a senatorial derby filled with celebrity names, he is assured of an overwhelming win simply by being himself—Pacquiao.
When he launches into this 90-day campaign beginning sometime in early February of next year, he will not be required to sing and dance, but his every word will be measured and watched, like a left hook or straight, when he starts to fight for issues quite close to people’s hearts.
For instance, income-tax reform, that measure that will give more money for the poor to spend, rather than more money for the government to squander. Or the plight of the Lumads in his native Mindanao so that, somehow, he could be instrumental in stopping the unconscionable killings there and the desecration of the Lumads’ ancestral land to give way to an avaricious exploitation of its underground metals.
What is his stand on the Muslim entity? How could rehabilitation and reconstruction of typhoon-ravaged communities be made better so that the fatal mistakes of the departments of the Interior and Local Government and Social Welfare and Development, in fact of this entire government would in the post-Yolanda period not be replicated when the next major typhoon—one that could be bigger, more devastating as Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration has warned—strikes.
We don’t expect Manny Pacquiao to be everything expected of him. Or even to do something remotely spectacular on the Senate floor that would approach everything he had done on the boxing ring.
But we expect him to be conscientious, to be genuine, to be discerning, to be compassionate, and to stop being what the next politician does—poison the national atmosphere with promises and assertions filled with toxins as evil as sulphur dioxide.
In short he should focus on his 90-day campaign like the national leader he is expected to become.
Pacquiao should not listen to what that boxing impresario of several decades, Bob Arum. Arum has set April 9 as the champ’s final bout. He named the undefeated Terrence Crawford, the reigning light welterweight champion as a potential foe. Crawford is undefeated in 27 professional bouts with 19 KOs.
Manny, there is no more mountain to scale for you. You’ve been to Mount Everest. The view was pretty. It’s time to come down to the plains and valleys of discontent, to mingle with your own people and feel their pain, not yours.