The Biggest Little Man in the WorldBy Andrew Corsello
Photograph by Mark Seliger
What do you get when you cross Muhammad Ali, Sly Stallone, Vaclav Havel, Michael Vick, Che Guevara, & Clay Aiken? Manny Pacquiao
He is in the car. I am in the car. Physically we are, both of us, in the car. Still, I wonder.
It's now January. In December, I spent a week traversing the Philippine archipelago in a vain attempt to speak with this man. Though it is difficult to arrive at an exact number, it is safe to say that during that week, slightly less than half the national population of 90 million people assured me with a wink that they would get me "in the car" with Manny Pacquiao. But there had been no car. No Manny Pacquiao. (Pronounced like a comic-book sound effect: pack-ee-ow!) I did spend the afternoon of the man's thirty-first birthday in his living room, playing a series of increasingly aggressive Christmas carols on his Yamaha grand piano in a last-ditch effort to flush him from his bedroom. (It was five in the afternoon. He had risen for the day an hour earlier.) But there was no Manny. At 6 p.m., in a single brisk movement, he descended from the balcony—eerily reminiscent of the one on which Al Pacino dies after screaming, "Say hello to my lee-tle frien'!" in Scarface—and out to a waiting caravan. He brushed my shoulder without looking at me as he passed. Or did he? Later, I could not shake my suspicion that the shoulder brush, the whole trip, was a dream. A vivid dream, of a place where every soul and every thing was lit from within by the still, small voice of Manny Pacquiao—Manny… Emmanuel…Hebrew for "God is with us"— but where Manny Pacquiao himself was nowhere to be seen.
But now, at a promotional event in Texas, the first boxer ever to win seven world titles in as many weight divisions, the first athlete ever to appear on a Philippine postage stamp, a man who in 2008 portrayed the Philippine warrior Lapu-Lapu, whose forces killed Magellan and repelled his conquistadores, in a reenactment of the 1521 Battle of Mactan, a man who often survives on three hours' sleep and is said to possess a photographic memory, is "in the car." As am I.
"Manny," I begin, "one of the many reasons GQ wants to feature you is that we want to explain why your appeal in the United States extends far beyond the sport of boxing. Do you have a theory about this?"
The members of his posse, encircling him at ten, two, three, four, six, eight, and nine o'clock, lean in and look. Nothing about the man moves. He remains perfectly postured, eyes forward, arms crossed, the vertical of his chassis aligned with, determining, the center of the SUV's bench seat and of the vehicle itself. Time passes.
"Manny," I begin again, "are you aware that millions of people in this country who don't follow boxing follow you?" I can see myself reflected in his oversize mirrored Oakleys. I look ridiculous.
After a time, the tiniest parting of the lips, just a sliver of a shadow between them, and a low exhalation:
"Yaaah."
Then Manny Pacquiao tilts his head back several degrees to indicate the departure of his presence.
It is then, at long last, that a phrase Pacquiao's people use to explain his mysterious ways—which isn't an explanation at all but a surrender—begins to seem adequate.
Because he is Pacquiao.
After the car ride, we all fly to New York on his promoter's plane. There is great consternation in the hangar prior to departure. Five men huddle over a small package. They look ashen, cancer-stricken. A decision is reached. The tallest of them, a Canadian named Michael Koncz, takes the package and marches, as if toward his own death, onto the airplane.
After takeoff, Koncz opens the package. It's Manny's dinner. Koncz presents the dish to Pacquiao and, in a tone born more in sorrow than in anger, announces that something has gone terribly wrong; instead of rice, the chef has accompanied Manny's meat with mashed potatoes. Manny nods. "I'm so sorry, Manny," Koncz says as he begins to cut Pacquiao's steak and season his cooked vegetables for him. "The bread is very soft, though." Manny prays, eats. After, he reposes on a couch. As one member of Team Pacquiao begins to massage his feet, calves, and thighs, Koncz drapes him in a blanket, methodically but gently tucking its edges in.
"And now," Manny Pacquiao says to me with a lovely smile, "you talk."
*****
You're not a boxing fan? Doesn't matter. We're all fans of the strange, hardwired to seek and behold it—and Manny Pacquiao is the most beautifully strange human being to befall boxing, and perhaps even all of sport, in a generation.
Beautiful and strange to the eye, of course. That speed! The coil and float. The spooky slowing of time. The suspicion he creates in you that your naked eye only partially apprehends him—that what he does in the ring exceeds your spectrum.
And beautifully strange on paper. At the elite level, a boxer's optimal fighting weight involves a trade-off of speed and power. Particularly in the lighter weight classes, a boxer who enters the ring thirty-two ounces over or under his natural fighting weight is often too slowed or weakened to win. Despite such parameters, Pacquiao has won divisions ranging from flyweight, a belt he won in 1998 as a 112-pound 19-year-old, to welterweight, a division that tops out at 147 pounds, in November 2009. (He began his career in 1995, as a 16-year-old, 106-pound light flyweight.) On March 13, he'll defend his welterweight belt against the Ghanaian fighter Joshua Clottey. According to every metric, Pacquiao…can't be. Which is why, over the past fifteen years, the expert nay-saying has come even from his own corner. "I would think that Manny can fight at 140. But I think going past 140 would be a mistake," Pacquiao's promoter, Bob Arum, told ESPN in December 2008. "Every time I think of Manny in a ring with [Puerto Rican welterweight] Miguel Cotto… it begins to look a little ludicrous." In other words, even Pacquiao's supernatural speed wouldn't matter. A natural welterweight like Cotto would register the punches as love taps; Pacquiao, in turn, would be crushed.
Just eleven months later, a 144-pound Pacquiao met Cotto at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. As always, that strange beauty was fully on display in his combinations. But it was also present in a deeper, almost undetectable way. Only a few people in Pacquiao's camp caught on, and even then not while their man was in the ring.
"About five hours before the fight, I asked him how he was feeling," says Jayke Joson, who identifies himself as the chief of staff of Team Pacquiao, the fighter's entourage. "I thought maybe he didn't hear, because he didn't say anything. But then he said, real quiet, 'I want to feel my training.' I said, 'Okay, Manny, what do you mean?' He just smiled and said, 'I feel curious.' "
Only later that night, hours after the fight had ended, did he see how Pacquiao's cryptic pronouncements explained the first two rounds. To those in Pacquiao's corner, they were terrifying rounds. To their surprise, Cotto was moving beautifully, cutting off his lighter, faster opponent, steering him into a retreating posture and into the ropes. Having turned Pacquiao into a nonmoving target, Cotto unleashed everything he had— and connected. To the ribs, the gut, the head. Big undiluted punches, bigger than any Pacquiao had ever endured, the kind of hits experts claimed he could never withstand, the kind his own promoter had deemed so "ludicrous" that he'd never subject his fighter to them. From the corner, Pacquiao's longtime trainer, Freddie Roach, screamed, "Son! Son! Son! Don't play with him! Stop it!"
And then, early in the third round, quite abruptly, he did. And how: In the slo-mo hi-def replays of Pacquiao's most vicious flurries in that round and those that followed, the dislocation and snapback of Cotto's face wasn't just "ludicrous." It was horrific. Here was Cotto, a world-class welterweight, every square inch of him taut. Yet Pacquiao's punches kept shifting Cotto's whole face off its foundation—almost an inch, it looked like—creating a fractional second during which a fun-house Silly Putty version of the man's unmoored visage jiggled and warped before reafixing itself to his skull. It was impossible to keep the thought at bay: If Pacquiao doesn't stop, he's going to hit Cotto's face off.
Hours after Pacquiao's twelfth-round win by technical knockout, Joson recalled Pacquiao's words. Manny was curious. So curious, Joson realized, that even with his place in boxing history and tens of millions of dollars in the balance, Pacquiao decided to violate Roach's fight plan.
"I wanted to feel his power," Pacquiao tells me on the plane ride. The question seems to discomfit him. Too private? His answer, spoken with lowered eyes, feels less an explanation than an admission. "I just needed to know. For myself."
Consider that—a boxer attempting to join his spectators in watching himself in real time, and with the same question: Is there a limit to this man's ability?
"Do you know what Manny Pacquiao does in between rounds at the MGM Grand, where they have the big screens up?" Roach says. "He watches himself. I have to slap him in the face and say, 'Manny, look at me!' "
Is it vanity? Or only vanity? It may be worth noting that in the hours leading up to a fight, Manny Pacquiao does not feel nervous. Nor does he harden his face into a warrior's mask. He sings. Rousingly ("La Bamba"). Tenderly ("Sometimes When We Touch"). He stops singing only when the priest arrives to conduct Mass. During the prayers, Manny does not petition for a victory— only for a good fight, and for the safety of his opponent and himself.
"Manny has never needed to hate his opponents," says Miles Roces, a former Philippine congressman and current member of Team Pacquiao. "There's no chip on his shoulder. He just wants to play."
Once the priest departs, the singing resumes. He sings his way out of the dressing room and into the arena, and the music doesn't stop until he's in the ring and the mouth guard goes in.
"Manny Pacquiao likes to be happy," Roach explains. "And when Manny Pacquiao is happy, that motherfucker can fight."
You think that when you talk about Manny Pacquiao, you're talking about just an athlete? You're not. You're talking about a man born to Dickensian tin-shanty poverty in General Santos City, a dry-baked scab on the Philippine nation's equatorial bottom. You're talking about a man who spent every hour of his childhood stomach-hungry, shoeless, and stinking. A man whose father abandoned the home when he was a toddler, stayed away for many years, showed up one day for several hours, just long enough to cook and eat his son's dog, then vanished again. A man who never finished school and left for Manila as a teen not because he was pulled, not because others sensed a destiny in him, but because he felt duty-bound to decrease the mouths under his mother's roof. This may be the strangest twist in Pacquiao's athletic history: He grew up in a nation where the cultivation of boxing talent amounts to a civic duty, yet those who saw him compete as a boy considered Pacquiao, at best, a local talent. After arriving in Manila at the age of 14, he spent a year selling doughnuts in the street, working construction, training in a gym, at times sleeping under a bridge swaddled in newspapers—and fighting for one-hundred-peso purses (about two U.S. dollars) in illegal back-alley brawls. You're talking about a man whose consciousness was reduced to the purely physical by the time he hit puberty, a nasty little fighting cock, everything about him that could have been supple and imaginative scraped down to and off the bone…yes? Well, no. By all rights, that's how this guy's life should have unfolded. But then that other element, the strange—which meant this was a fighter who often subjected the gym where he trained to…speeches.
"Sometimes there'd be somebody there, sometimes there was nobody else around as far as he knew, but it didn't matter to Manny— he was dreaming out loud," says Nick Giongco, who handles the Pacquiao beat for the Manila Bulletin. "He would announce himself as the mayor and speak about his plans for improving things. He would move his arms around like a politician. I could never tell if he was just trying to entertain himself or if he was, you know, practicing."
The latter, it's now clear. Pacquiao's March 13 fight was originally slotted for May, but moved after Manny announced his candidacy for a national congressional seat. His political ambitions (he lost a previous race in 2007) feed the strange mainly by way of contrast. To appreciate this contrast, one must understand the tectonic, archetypal figure Manny Pacquiao has become to his countrymen. A seemingly ridiculous comparison is anything but: As commercially and symbolically and narratively huge as Michael Jackson was in America in 1984 in the wake of Thriller, his hugeness pales next to that of Manny Pacquiao in the Philippines at this very moment.
Consider the elements. Consider that in the Philippines, the Roman Catholic devotion and the talent for and aesthetic of violence run deep, and are not unrelated. Consider that Manny Pacquiao is both the Philippines' most visibly pious Roman Catholic and its most accomplished practitioner of violence. Consider that Manny Pacquiao, whom one former Philippine congressman describes as the country's "most important source of social welfare," is also its most enthusiastic cockfighter (it's a legal and beloved pastime there) and has constructed a private training compound for his warrior birds. Consider that Manny Pacquiao is… you surely saw this coming…a pop singer with two platinum albums in a nation in which karaoke singing is serious fucking business—in which breaches of karaoke etiquette actually get people killed, and where over the past decade poorly received karaoke performances of Paul Anka's signature tune have generated half a dozen murders now known as the "My Way" killings.
You could consider many other elements— that he's a Philippine action-film star, or his weekly sitcom, Show Me the Manny, or that the birthday party he throws for himself and 3,000 of his dearest friends (including several of his former opponents, whose expenses he covers, as well as the country's president) every year is to the Philippines what the Super Bowl is to America, or that he spends thousands of dollars a day feeding anyone who comes to his door, or that he loves to gamble and plays billiards at a world class level—but none of that is required.
What is required, firstly, is an understanding that everything Manny Pacquiao does, is, and represents is amplified a thousandfold by way of being annealed in the crucible of Third World poverty. Secondly, what is required is an awareness of the way the national narratives this man embodies—the one springing from his boxing career and Christian good works, the other from his political aspirations— contradict each other. Simply put: Manny Pacquiao is his nation's favorite son. In his excellence, in his humility, in his impeccable sportsmanship, in his unreconstructed boyishness, he represents to his fellow Filipinos everything about their nation that could be, and maybe even is, uncorrupted.
"We Filipinos are not accustomed to this kind of story," says Roces, the former Philippine congressman. "We're too used to everything on the front page being negative. As Manny has risen through the weight classes, nobody has doubted him more than Filipinos. We expect our public figures to falter. It's incredible, but for a long time the people who loved Manny Pacquiao the most, his own people, were the ones who least believed in him." What's more, Pacquiao is an unimaginably wealthy self-made man who could easily make himself even wealthier by moving to the United States to decrease his tax liabilities and multiply his endorsement opportunities. This is, in fact, the Philippine way, and has been for more than a hundred years; Filipinos who dream of building better lives for themselves and their families go to America and send money home. But this is not Manny Pacquiao's way. Because…he is Manny Pacquiao. And Manny Pacquiao has chosen to find his bliss at home. "Not just in the Philippines," says Abac Cordero, who covers boxing for The Philippine Star. "In his hometown. The place he started. You cannot understand how this has stunned us Filipinos. That Manny Pacquiao chose us."
Yet Manny Pacquiao's decision to make his country his home stuns Filipinos far less than his political forays. "Take Manny Pacquiao out of the equation and then tell me: Who is the first person you think of when you hear 'Filipino'?" Cordero asks, before quickly (and correctly) answering for me. "Marcos. This is how the world knows us. By our corrupt political clans that have been around for centuries. This is how we know ourselves. And Manny Pacquiao, the most beloved figure in the country, talks of going there? It makes his people fear for him."
It's the strangest thing: Pacquiao was routed in his run for public office two years ago in part because voters revered him too much to elect him.
This cognitive dissonance, the way Manny Pacquiao channels two mutually contradicting national narratives—it's not academic. Manny himself concedes that last fall, a Philippine mayor named Andal Ampatuan enjoyed a ringside view of his demolition of Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, Ampatuan's father, a former provincial governor irked by a political challenger to the Ampatuan clan's long-standing dominance, allegedly decided enough was enough and ordered his son to "take out" the man that very day and, if necessary, anybody "with him." There turned out to be quite a few "withs" on November 23, the day Ampatuan allegedly carried out his father's order—fifty-seven in all, including thirty journalists. (Though not the target himself, who knew he was in danger and had sent his wife and daughter, whom he presumed would be considered untouchable, to register his candidacy.) According to survivors, the mayor "thoughtfully" considered each plea for mercy, then laughed "at the top of his voice" as he delivered his verdicts at close range.
If last fall's victory over Cotto, who punches as hard as any true welterweight, was Pacquiao's most daunting, his domination of Oscar De La Hoya in December of 2008 was his most iconic. (For background on that fight, read Peter Owen Nelson's series of essays on vanityfair.com.) "People were telling me I should be ashamed of myself because Oscar was going to kill him," Roach says. "Even [Arum's] matchmakers were saying, 'Come on, it's not even a fight. It's irresponsible.' " As well they should have; over fifteen years, Pacquiao had added more than a third of his original fighting weight to his frame. This should have made him as strong as a bull and as agile as a hippo. But something Roach had done, a by-product of complicating him, of turning him from a one-dimensional brawler with limitless physical courage and a savage left hook into an ambidextrous threat who now thought and fought with his feet—who posed as much of a threat when he was separating from an opponent's body as he did when he was advancing into it—had sped him up. Dislocated him from the weight of that accumulated muscle while still allowing him to tap its power.
Though the ref called the De La Hoya fight after eight rounds, anyone watching knew it was over after sixty seconds. And its meaning was set: De La Hoya, who for fifteen years had justly been called "the best of his generation," was done, supplanted. After the Cotto fight, the default terminology for Pacquiao has been further augmented. Forget "generation," or even the qualifying "pound for pound": The five-foot-six Pambansang Kamao—"National Fist"—of the Philippines is arguably the best athlete ever to don gloves.
"I used to say that Ali was the best I'd ever seen," says Arum, an industry legend who co-promoted the Ali-Frazier "Thrilla in Manila" in 1975. "I had never said that about another man. I don't use those words cheaply. But here it is: Manny Pacquiao is the best I have ever seen, including Ali. I have never seen the combination of this incredible speed, this crippling punching power, and the concentration he has in the ring. Nobody has. No one has ever moved the way he does. No one has been so equally potent with the right and left hand. If this were baseball, we would be talking about a switch-hitter who bats .400 from both sides of the plate."
Do note that qualifying "arguably" several lines above—and know that it would have inarguably been banished had Pacquiao beat the great 40-0 welterweight, Floyd Mayweather, on March 13. To the ongoing disbelief of boxing fans all over the world, however, the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, the most anticipated fight since Ali met Foreman in the Congo, the richest (some $35 million per fighter, conservatively) and most watched (given likely pay-per-view numbers) fight in the history of the planet, the fight that couldn't not happen…didn't. Instead, there is Joshua Clottey. The reasons the fight with Mayweather fell through are stupid and ugly. And juvenile. And strange.
The strange of Manny Pacquiao! In December a Team Pacquiao "rep" instructed this magazine to place its writer at Manila's Mandarin Oriental hotel "on Monday." Manny would be "ready at 2:00." So I traveled to the Philippines. (Didn't I?)
Manny Pacquiao may be a figure of international import who in his own country represents everyone and everything. But nobody in his country represents Manny Pacquiao. Many purport to. Guarantees are made, places and times named. And then…nothing.
At first there was disappointment. The call at one forty-five informing me that "he's running late." And then, an hour later, a similar call. Then another. As one "meet" after another fell through, disappointment became concern. And then, as ever more basic questions proved unanswerable—Is Manny in Manila? Is Manny in the country? Has Manny actually agreed to be profiled by GQ? Does Manny even exist? Do I?—frustration, irritation, indignation. But in the end, sympathy. Though Manny's men did not represent him in any workaday sense, they clearly believed they did. There was no bad faith. Only madness.
Who gives a shit about some writer's logistical snafus, right? Yet to understand all that is Pacquiao, one must understand the epical dysfunction of his entourage. Because the entourage is the everyday manifestation of the larger Pacquiao "thing"—the way the two narratives he carries within him obliterate each other, matter and antimatter.
Take Luis "Chavit" Singson. The Governor, they call him, though he no longer holds that office. He's a 68-year-old tobacco magnate and one of the most powerful men in the Philippines. He's Manny's main political sponsor and a close friend—the kind admitted into the ring after fights. The Governor takes care of things for Manny. Actually, the Governor takes care of all sorts of things, some of which he speaks about with surprising candor. Say, the millions of dollars in gambling kickbacks he gave to former Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Or beating up his mistress. Last summer, the Governor found her with a younger man. He and a number of cohorts allegedly rectified this situation with (among other implements) a tiger whip.
"I beat up both of them!" the Governor cheerfully told a radio interviewer in September, after a picture of the mistress, her face looking like a lasagna, appeared on the front page of The Philippine Star. "It's good I'm not ruthless," he added. "I didn't kill them."
The Governor was gracious enough to fly me and some two dozen other members of Team Pacquiao from Manila to General Santos for Manny's birthday party. We sat together. Later, one Team Pacquiao member expressed surprise that the Governor hadn't shown me the picture in his wallet.
"Who's it of ?" I asked.
"That guy's dick."
"What?"
"After the Governor's guys had laid it on a table and whacked it with a hammer. It had to be surgically cut off after. Too mauled."
On the plane, I asked the Governor about Manny. "Girls squeal" in Pacquiao's presence, he remarked. "Like the sound of a pig being slaughtered!" But after a few minutes he changed the subject. "I have twelve tiger. When I home, I swim with them every day. But now I want to make liger, yes?" The product of a lion and a tiger. "So I bring lion in, and he do this, yes?" The Governor made a fucky-fucky motion with his right index finger and his closed left fist. "And he do, and he do. No liger. And so I make him do, and do some more. And then…acchhhhh!"
The Governor clasped his hands to his heart and rolled his eyes back in their orbits; his lion stud had literally died of a cardiac infarction while being made to copulate for the umpteenth time with one of his tigresses.
"No liger," the Governor said dejectedly.
Or take Joe Ramos, who was also on the Governor's plane. (He's the one who'd advised me to be "ready" at the Mandarin Oriental. After several scheduled interviews didn't materialize, I'd sought help from other Team Pacquiao handlers, whose contempt for Ramos was matched only by their contempt that I had not gone to them first.) Joe is a close friend of Manny's. Manny says so. Multiple members of Team Pacquiao say Ramos stole a substantial amount of money from Manny. (Manny and Joe call the issue a misunderstanding.) According to these members, Manny told Joe he was angry and saddened by the betrayal, but that he forgave him. So Joe remained in the fold.
The thing is, a number of people have stolen from Manny, been caught by Manny, then been forgiven by Manny: Never has a fighter been possessed of so pacifistic a nature. What's more, there seems to be a consensus that these redeemed-Judas tableaux were… pre-scripted.
"He has made numerous people in his camp believe in God with what he's done," Ramos says. "Do you understand?"
Abac Cordero puts it more directly: "I think he was put here to make us better men. There is a feeling that those who betrayed him had to, so that Manny could teach them."
"Sometimes, the way things happen with Manny, it's like, parables," Ramos says. "Here's one: At the last training camp there were about thirty of us there. Now, one of my jobs is to lower the overall costs of living. So we go to this Thai restaurant next to [Roach's gym]. Our bill there was between $500 and $700 every day. So I said, 'Manny, why don't we buy some food from the local Philippine restaurant and have it delivered to your apartment? It'll only cost about $150.' Manny took me by the shoulders and in front of everybody said, 'Don't ever mess with another man's livelihood. Now let us enjoy their food.' "
It is difficult for an American to comprehend the degree to which Manny Pacquiao keeps his disciples close. Not just emotionally but bodily. When training in Los Angeles, where Roach's gym is located, Pacquiao rarely stays in the home he recently purchased. Instead, some fifteen members of Team Pacquiao—an ever metastasizing organism currently comprising about three dozen men—stays in a dingy two-room apartment.
"Whoever's on the best terms with Manny at that moment sleeps closest to him, at the foot of his bed," Roach says. "You think I'm joking? The first time I went to the Philippines, they put four guys in my room. I said, 'What is this bullshit? I want my own room.' And they were like, 'Team Pacquiao likes to be together!' So I wound up in the bed, and these…guys, helpers, sparring partners, Manny's brother, Bobby, slept on the floor."
Why is it that the closer Manny Pacquiao brings his people to his bosom, the more incapable they become of speaking for him, representing him, even knowing him?
"Because they're scared," Roach says. "Nobody wants to be the guy who asks Manny the question that might irritate him on a particular day. If you're the guy who says, 'Manny, you're supposed to fly to Manila today,' and Manny doesn't want to hear it, you might not be the guy who gets to fluff his rice."
Last year Manny was supposed to throw out the first pitch at a Dodgers game. Dodgers management worked out the details with Team Pacquiao. Manny Pacquiao didn't show up. He wasn't even in the country.
No one ever told him.
"For the last fight, I couldn't get an answer about where we were going to train," Roach says. "I'd gotten all the sparring partners a month in advance. Finally, four days before training was supposed to start, I got Koncz on the phone in the Philippines and said, 'Where are we doing this?' The answer was, 'Yeah, well, we haven't asked him yet.' You haven't asked him yet? Two days later, Manny flew to the States for a press conference. I said, 'Where are we training, Manny?' He says, 'Baguio.' Okay, done deal. I mean, this is his boxing career, and nobody had the nerve to ask him a basic question."
The day I wound up banging on Manny's piano happened to be my last in the Philippines; though it was also Manny's birthday, one of his "reps" had promised to get me "in the living room at two thirty," and by God it had happened. He hadn't stipulated whether Manny would be in the room, however, and by then I was too bewildered to ask. So I spent a few hours admiring the decor. The room was a carnival of the baroque, as if four designers had been dosed with LSD and then assigned one wall each, with no awareness of what the other three were doing. The porcelain merry-go-round, encrusted with zirconium and with the tags still attached, was by Vittorio Sabadin. The orchids were plastic.
Because he is Pacquiao.
The birthday party, in a convention hall, began with a 6 p.m. Mass. There were no prayers for the people—just for the Person.
…that he will be blessed with good health and money…to share his blessings…
The birthday supplied convincing evidence that the boxing and the politics and the mythos are secondary—only in the mix because they create the circumstances under which Manny Pacquiao can annually subject a captive audience of 3,000 to six hours of karaoke-style singing.
As ever, he began with "La Bamba." With its triumphant chorus came a bursting open of doors and an outflowing of bounty: tuna the size of linebackers; a herd of swine— thirty? forty?—roasted wide-eyed and whole. As his guests began to eat, Pacquiao slowed things down with "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You." His wife, Jinkee, sang a number. The audience then watched Pacquiao as he stood onstage watching his children line dance to Top 40 hits.
Because he is Pacquiao.
Manny sang "Endless Love" with a Britain's Got Talent contestant.
Manny's mother, Dionisia, exploded onto the stage in a red dress with white polka dots and performed a tango to a dance remix of ABBA's "Dancing Queen."
A beautiful and strikingly tall Filipina woman approached out of the blue to inform me that "you are not handsome, but you are cute." A Filipino man named Curtis informed me that he owned "the premier gentlemen's club in Manila" and that "I'll hook you up."
Dionisia retook the stage. There had been a wardrobe change. She delivered a fiery speech in the native Tagalog tongue. Three hours in, the inescapable thought: But why?
To feed us. To entertain us. To show us what he means to us and what we mean to him.
There were gymnasts and belly dancers. A Lady Gaga impersonator. A metal cart heaped with the ravaged shells of pig and tuna, hocks and picked spines and half-masticated ribbons of gristle and skin cascading over its sides. (Partygoers kept slipping on the glistening snail trail the cart left in its wake.) A slide show featuring images of Manny Pacquiao dressing and assessing himself in various mirrors soundtracked by Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror." Throughout the evening, Michael Koncz, who is unanimously acclaimed as Team Pacquiao's most ubiquitous and inexplicable member, stood on the left side of the stage. Watching.
To judge us.
Six hours in: Dionisia redivivus! Another wardrobe change! Another tango!
To punish us.
At four in the morning, three hours before my flight out of General Santos City was to depart, Joe Ramos texted my cell. "Manny playing pool. Can get you in the room."
On the plane to New York, after Manny has eaten and Michael Koncz has tucked him in, I ask Pacquiao about walking into Cotto's punches. About his birthday party. About his various meanings. About everything. I can only pass on what he gives me.
Manny says: "Boxing is not about your feelings. It's about performance."
Manny says: "Because I been in the poorest life, I know what they live. I remember what it is to be hungry. People are shouting for help. Most of leaders in Philippine politics come from rich family. Most politician from government is hands to their pocket. They don't feel what the people are shouting."
Manny says: "God is love. Love your people. Keep them close. If you always keep them close, no matter what, because you must love, then you must forgive. Yes?"
Manny says: "Before fight? I am just laughing. I talk to God. I said, 'God, I trust you. If you want me to lose this fight, I will accept that. Whatever you want. But I am not scared.' "
Manny says: "I'm surprised that that [De La Hoya] fight I win easily, yeah?"
Manny says: "So your wife, you can tell her that me, I have a good nature?"
Manny says: "My faith to God. It not make a great story for you. I sorry, but that is truth."
Manny Pacquiao then closes his eyes and falls asleep.
And I watch him sleep. Or rather, I join his men as they regard their beloved boy-man in the act of sleep. It cannot be helped. In motion or at rest, he is beautiful to behold. I feel an inexplicable need to protect him.
I think about how the people closest to Pacquiao—and there are an astonishing number of them, literally, bodily, at all times—do not know who or what Manny is. How they don't even know when or where he is.
I think about something Freddie Roach has said—that Manny often loses on purpose when gambling with his friends in order to alleviate their shame over accepting his alms.
I think about the umbrage with which Michael Koncz asserts that he—not Jayke Joson or some other Team Pacquiao pretender—is Manny's chief of staff: "Manny made that announcement two months ago at a billiards tournament in General Santos."
I think about how Manny Pacquiao's life is a cyclone of madness and dysfunction and karaoke and tango dancing and fucked-to-death lions and grown men vying to fluff his rice and cut his meat and massage his thighs and sing harmony parts on Beatles songs.
How can he live this way?
Because he is the serene centering Eye. The storm, his life, envelops but does not touch him. The Tysonesque psychopathologies that drive other boxers to the dark side are flung centrifugally from his body and soul, outsourced to his disciples, who carry this burden and lay down their lives for him.
I begin to think about how Manny Pacquiao cannot be pieced or parsed. I begin to enter a fugue state. I begin scrawling in my notebook.
The great I AM.
Because he is Pacquiao.
God is Love.
Cogito, ergo sum.
Lapu-Lapu.
"What are you doing there?" Freddie Roach asks. He's looking over my shoulder at my scratchings. He seems amused.
"I don't know," I tell him. Roach stands there for a moment. Then he shrugs.
"We're not going to see another Manny Pacquiao again," he says. "Not in this lifetime."
andrew corsello was recently named Manny Pacquiao's chief of staff.
