“PANALO si Pacquiao natin! (Our dear Manny Pacquiao has won!),” swooned Amy, the plump, dusky woman with the garbage collection cart, from outside our simple gate.
The daily street worker, who morning after early morning would rouse residents into bringing out their garbage, must’ve thought some neighbors had overslept through the “Clash in Cotai” on Sunday, and therefore had to be retold and assured about Manny Pacquiao’s epic comeback.
It was a song of joy and praise, an assuaging assurance, a thanksgiving for Pacquiao who, with mystifying magnificence, redeemed himself and reignited the hopes of his poor, hungry countrymen.
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Said Sanny Jegillos, Filipino crisis control consultant with the Bangkok-based United Nations Development Program (UNDP): “Every Filipino has the ability to bounce back—this is what Pacman has taught us with his big win on Sunday.”
The text message came through yesterday morning, hours after this reporter, rushing a couple of dispatches after the fight to catch the 7 p.m. ferry from Macau to Hong Kong, groped through the dark streets for the MTR station, where he barely made it, and bought a train seat to the airport to catch the early morning Cebu Pacific flight back home.
So what if he had to risk his health, not to mention what little was left of sanity, in order to be at the fight site?
So what if he failed to find a sportsbook window out at The Venetian (Macao) to bet a few cold Macau dollars that the fight would go the full 12-round distance?
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Pacquiao’s splendid victory, minus the KO firework, is without a price tag.
Everybody was a winner, including trainer Robert Garcia, who had initially thought—and announced—“this was the best time to beat Pacquiao.”
“Pacquiao was quite good, he was too fast, and definitely trained very, very hard,” the articulate trainer of the loser, Brandon Rios, told media people before taking a plane back to the United States.
Garcia assured that the big, one-sided points win clearly brought Pacquiao back on top of the elite pound-for-pound heap.
He also said he found Pacquiao to be a genuinely good man, obviously thankful that the Filipino hero had refused to finish off and further hurt Rios, once a victory on points had been more than assured.
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Bob Arum readily announced Pacquiao will be back on the big stage in Las Vegas, possibly in early April. A most likely foe is Tim Bradley, who stole Pacquiao’s WBO welterweight crown in 2012 with the help of at least two blind, scheming judges.
The sky is again the limit, but don’t take this to mean everybody was happy.
It’s like this. After the messages of joy, the swoon of success, one strange text message got through mid-morning yesterday:
“Good say, Sir! This is (name deleted for obvious purpose) from Solar Sports News Channel. I would like to know your opinion if Manny Pacquiao should retire now. We are going to discuss this on our show, please let me know when is the best time to call.”
She predictably did not get any reply. If at all, I would have wanted to know if she had been granted authority by her superiors to pursue the topic which, as things stand, is wholly insignificant.
Hers was a different hunger that was truly impossible to assuage.