By the time Manny Pacquiao was fighting heavier opponents, beginning with the lightweight champion Diaz in mid-2008, I stopped watching his fights and just waited for the results, fearing for my ability — or inability — to bear the tension (read ‘fearful for my age.’)
In the fourth fight with Marquez, however, I decided to again watch. Like everyone I underestimated the menace that in fact lay in wait for the Pacman in this fight. Like so many others I thought a Pacman loss would mean Marquez outboxed and outpointed him, as in fact the Mexican claims he did in all three previous fights.
Fortunately for me, I failed to reconnect to SkyCable on time.
I listen to Cebu radio instead.
When Pacquiao is knocked down in the third round, the fact takes a hard time to sink. I leave the room, the fight. When I resume listening, my ears are told that the Pacman has been knocked out. The announcer says it in Cebuano — my mother tongue, Pacquiao’s mother tongue.
The enormity of the loss made it unreal. As the announcer kept saying that Pacquiao was knocked out I could somehow actually feel the whole nation in denial — for at least a few seconds. This unreality persisted when I finally got to watch the fight on television and it wasn’t just a thing subjective. The knockout punch came just a second or fraction of a second to the bell — and you didn’t have a full, big clear view of Pacquiao as he caught the punch and fell. It simply happened too fast. Too fast and too much — for anything even remotely resembling comprehension on the TV viewer’s part.
Why should one be so surprised it — the Pacman is knocked out cold — happened? The experts hardly have a right to be surprised. They were all saying, before the fight, that Pacquiao must go all out, must knock Marquez out. He must take risks. He must go back to his brawling style because that was the Pacquiao that conquered the world. Such a course of action was, to be repetitious, risky, but Pacquiao must do it. Freddie Roach fanned the fire too. Wanted Pacquiao to knock down his sparring mates on the way to knocking out the umpteenth Mexican victim.
Pacquiao fought as Roach and the sweet scientists and the whole nation wanted him to fight.
That we were all surprised — heck, shocked not surprised — by him getting knocked out points to one thing it seems to me. We had lost our objectivity, the Pacman included. Nobody sized up Marquez for the handwriting on the wall that he was despite what the experts told us: Pacquiao’s style was perfect for the consummate counterpuncher that Marquez was. Nobody took stock in what some observers pointed out: Marquez was to Pacquiao as Ken Norton was to Ali and Japan’s Shigeji Kanekowas to Flash Elorde — an opponent you just lose to for no clear reason. Contra pelo, in Spanish. Nabalhiboan in Cebuano. Elorde was the superior boxer but Kaneko beat him four times in four fights. In chess we have the amusing case of Torre losing consistently to Antonio who lost consistently to Paragua who lost consistently to Torre.
I sense something irrational here. The incalculable. The aleatic. Even fatality is not too big a word for it. The Tagalogs have a word for what happened: napurohan. Pacquiao said it himself: In boxing there are times you win; other times you lose.
We were not far away when we decided, for a decade, that Manny was invincible. That he secretly possessed an amulet. That his mom was something of a babaylan.
