GILAS Pilipinas’s bid for the Olympics crashed, adding yet to the 44-year misery of basketball fans pining to see Filipino dribbles in Olympic basketball.
I had that marked as the year’s biggest sports story, not Hidilyn Diaz’s miraculous Rio Olympics silver in weightlifting’s 53-kg division.
But Manny Pacquiao staged a swashbuckling ring comeback in Las Vegas in November, and that changed everything. The boxer he beat was not patsy but a world champion 10 years his junior, and with a significant height and reach advantage.
I wrote a column after watching the fight at the Thomas & Mack Center amid 16,000 mostly Pacquiao die-hards who shouted themselves hoarse in the fight that went the distance.
My column missed Manila’s deadline by a few hours. This is my top story of the year—and I wish our readers to feel the same excitement that gripped the arena when the Pacman added another win to his legend.
The great world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, reminiscing about the legendary “Thrilla in Manila” in 1974 years later, told the writer Mark Kram: “We went to Manila as champions, Joe [Frazier] and me, and we came back as old men.”
Jessie Vargas, who wore the World Boxing Organization world welterweight belt like it was a badge of courage for a young champion, surely has never read this line. And Manny Pacquiao, with thunderbolts of jabs and hooks that bloodied the champion’s eyebrows, floored him once, sent Vargas home feeling like an old, stricken man in the ring.
Dewey Cooper, the trainer of Vargas, had boasted the night before the fight, “You know we have [a big punch awaiting Pacquiao], of course. And when it lands, good night!”
Vargas did slip in some punches, of which I counted perhaps half-a-dozen heavy ones that landed on the jaw and head of Pacquiao. But his best punch, a right straight uncoiled as a counter punch, was not wicked. It sure could hurt—but not stop dead on his tracks an opponent who was quicker throwing left jabs.
While easily Jessie’s punch could make a dent on a punching bag, on the jaw of Manny, it landed like a million other punches that have tattooed the legendary boxer in a 67-fight career but could not floor him.
When he was in his prime, in exactly Vargas’s age at the moment, Pacquiao could drill his opponents, who were some of the best boxers of this generation, de la Hoya, Cotto and Marquez, to name a few, with heavier blows and more savage jabs.
Remember how he sent Ricky Hatton sprawling helplessly on the canvas with a vicious left hand in May 2009?
“I didn’t have to count,” said the ring’s third man, Kenny Bayless. Hatton lay on the canvas while doctors tended on him for several minutes before he got up and left the ring with a wry smile.
Vargas displayed that smile too in the early rounds, even after Pacquaio had sent him on all fours in the second round.
The titleholder wore that forced smile still in the middle rounds every time Pacquiao stung him or rocked his head. But that smile looked to me so much like a fragile psychological shield meant to mask his inner doubts and anxieties.
But after the eighth round, that smile was wiped out.
Pacquiao, “very fast and sharp” in Vargas’s own words, drew blood from the champion’s right eyebrow with a vicious combination. Backed against the ropes, Vargas was in a panic mode. He knew it with every jab that peppered his nearly closed right eye.
In the 10th round Pacquiao rocked the champion again with a combination, and Vargas was about to kiss his title good-bye.
“I still have the speed, power and hunger,” the Pacman said in a prefight interview. His trainer Freddie Roach insisted he liked “this Manny” a lot.
“Manny is the old Manny now,” Roach declared.
One ring commentator who observed a reenergized Pacquiao, said, “Manny is like a shark who smells blood.”
The analogy seemed apt, but I had the urge to call Pacquiao the way I remembered him best from the old days—as the Pacman who never knew how to pause, who was always running after his target, gunning at him at full speed.
By the time Pacquaio walked into the middle of the ring in the 12th round, the fight was all over but the shouting. He bathed in the adulation and chanting of a rabid Filipino crowd in the smokey night, and then he closed the fight with the look of a champion.
Pacquiao climbed into the ring chasing a piece of history. More than the prize money, more than the chance to be himself again—the warrior in the arena enjoying what he does best, which is to destroy opponents—his greatest motivation was to be a senator and world boxing champion simultaneously. It was a feat no one else has attempted, or pulled off, before.
“What I’m trying to do—being a senator and fighting for a world title—is history,” he told fans before the fight.
He owns that piece of history now, he holds a piece of the world welterweight title, and he is richer by $4 million simply by being the Manny Pacquaio of old, still hungry for ring glory.
It was not Pacquiao’s best fight. But I liked what I saw in him, the boxer who was thoroughly methodical but could still flash a grin, maybe a savage one, in the middle of such clinical destruction of his opponent.
He has never let defeat and age stand in the way of more conquests.
Hail to the senator-world champion!