Boxing, thank God, has a new honest face

So where does professional boxing go from here? In the 6 a.m. Mass last Sunday at the San Felipe Neri Church in Mandaluyong City, the priest, leading a prayer for personal intentions, capped his call by saying, “Let’s all pray for Manny Pacquiao who will be fighting in Texas a few hours from now.”
The call was unnecessary, but it had to be sounded.
It’s doubtful if there’s one red-blooded Filipino—lawmakers and lawbreakers included—who did not pray a little harder for a Pacquiao victory on Sunday.
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Pacquiao himself made an extra pitch and called for divine guidance from the Holy Spirit.
In a special prefight Mass inside his hotel suite in Texas the morning before the big bout, Pacquiao made a fervent wish for nobody to get hurt during his mega duel with the bigger and taller Antonio Margarito at the cavernous Cowboys Stadium.
That’s a bit odd, but it seemed to have been part of the prefight script.
It was also very awkward because Manny would soon be entering the ring with the singular intention of hurting his assigned foe.
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Listen. There was this old anecdote on how the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson, picked by many experts as the greatest boxer ever, put one judge in a spot over a fighter’s assigned role inside the ring.
Reports had it that the judge had summoned Robinson to court over charges that the boxing great had unnecessarily put his opponent into trouble during a bout.
“But, Your Honor, it’s my job to put the other guy into trouble,” Robinson explained with a straight face.
Case dismissed.
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On Sunday, out there in Texas, Pacquiao had no choice but to try and hurt—short of maiming—his opponent who was not only five inches taller, but was 16 pounds, or three divisions, bigger than him.
In fact, that awesome discrepancy in heft and height had some pundits clamoring that Pacquiao should have been made to compete with a concealed weapon, if not a sling like the one wielded by David against Goliath.
Instead of an ordinary weapon, the lighter, smaller Pacquiao squared off against the burly, fearsome Margarito armed with incredible swiftness, or the speed of lightness as one ringside mainstay from the Los Angeles Times noted.
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Anyway, to make the long story short, the bout turned into a gory mismatch.
Starting the second half of the 12-round duel, after Pacquiao survived an ax-like stab in the back of his rib cage in the sixth round, the Filipino superhero proceeded to dominate his foe.
When the camera next closed in on Margarito’s sharp, bearded profile, what appeared was the puffed, ugly, tragic face of boxing.
Well, it has become the core and theme of Pacquiao’s annexation of an eighth world crown—how he had exposed himself to unnecessary trouble in trying to save Margarito from further harm.
Pacquiao was no longer fighting but was in fact trying to lead the blinded Margarito to the nearest exit in the final two rounds.
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Sportsman Lito Puyat, former president of the International Basketball Federation (Fiba), was right in blasting the referee for criminally refusing to halt the fight, although Margarito’s right eye had already been cut, busted and shut.
Meanwhile, the famous boxing chronicler Michael Marley of examiner.com commented that the Pacquiao who conquered the gigantic Margarito was out of this world, maybe from another planet.
Magical and magnificent, too.
Maybe, but in reality, Pacquiao is every inch an Earth man.
It’s also hard to deny he’s God-sent.
It has clearly become the core of a divine design to make Pacquiao the honest face of boxing.
It’s a caring, compassionate, hard-working, pleasant Filipino face.