Understandably, the Mexicans felt raw. When Manny Pacquiao was interviewed on the stage after the fight, you couldn’t hear what he was saying. It was drowned out by a collective boo that arose from the bowels of the arena and boomed across it. Along with the beams of light that danced around the cavernous hall like laser swords crisscrossing each other, it was bedlam. Loud music pulsed. Some threw bottles into the ring.
The Mexicans were still spewing their anger down the hallway among the thick crowd that crawled toward the exit, complaining about how they were robbed. At the spot where posters of the match hung on the wall in profusion, showing Pacquiao and Marquez with arms akimbo looking fiercely at the world, someone shouted, “Marquez! Marquez!” The others took it up. “Marquez! Marquez!” the hallway boomed.
The Filipinos did not reply. Why should they? They had won. Let the Mexicans lick their wounds.
But the Filipinos were not exulting either. Some were not altogether sure who had won the fight. Others wouldn’t have minded if the fight had ended in a draw. But everyone knew it wasn’t the fight they had expected to see. Everyone knew it wasn’t the fight they had gone there to see. They were there to see another masterful performance by Pacquiao, another annihilation of a seemingly fearful opponent by Pacquiao, another claim to the title of “Mexi-cutioner” by Pacquiao.
Pacquiao had won. But the Filipinos did not feel elated, they felt relieved.
Pacquiao was the prohibitive favorite in the fight. The odds were 9-1, or 8-1 at best, a thing that did not change greatly at the eve of the fight. Which probably added to the ire and fire of the Mexicans: They hadn’t just been cheated of victory, or so they thought, they had been deprived of a fortune, or so they were. Many compatriots, congressmen included, were telling me they were betting on the round at which Pacquiao would deck Marquez—it wasn’t a question of if, it was a question of when. Just betting on who would win wasn’t worth it. Too little to gain, too much to lose with the tsamba.
That belief was driven home by the images that flashed on the screen overhead before the fight begun. Which was of Pacquiao demolishing his recent opponents, the last of whom, a thing to put fear in the hearts of the dauntless, or hopeful, being Ricky Hatton looking like a cartoon character with his eyes going “x” after receiving a left from Pacquaio flush to his jaw. The Mexicans, of course, were chanting Marquez’s name deafeningly, which made me wonder if like Steve Jobs (I’ve just been reading Water Isaacson’s biography of him) they weren’t trying to twist reality to fit their will, or their need. I was tempted to conclude afterward that, alas, reality conforms only to the demands of geniuses.
Alas for me and the legions of Filipinos who descended on the oasis that Bugsy Siegel hacked out of the desert by sheer force of vision or will, it nearly worked.
Who do I think won the fight?
Pacquiao of course, though that little matters now. Of course being Pinoy, I can never claim to have great objectivity there. But I’m not entirely devoid of it either, or so I’d like to think.
The only way to see that Pacquiao lost the fight is in relation to expectation. Most of us were looking forward to Marquez looking like Hatton, Cotto and Margarito afterward even if he survived the fight. Floyd Mayweather had punished him in every round when they fought a couple of years ago. Pacquiao would do better, he would turn him into a pulp. His showing over the last several years guaranteed it. Else how can he hope to win against Mayweather? How can he be better than Mayweather? How can he cling to the title of being the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world?
But you look at it in terms of what actually happened, Pacquaio won. Thin as a razor’s edge, but he won. Marquez had the easier time of it. He wasn’t expected to win. More than that, he himself never thought to put down Pacquiao. That has never been his agenda in all the fights he has fought with Pacquiao. All he needed to do, all he wanted to do, was outpoint Pacquiao. You saw that in the way he never followed up an advantage. He would never go all the way. After delivering a flurry of (counter)punches, he would go back to his shell.
All the pressure was on Pacquiao, he was expected to live up to his legend. He himself wanted badly to send Marquez crashing to the floor. He had trained hard for it. He was gigil na gigil. He did try. But Marquez would not oblige, he would not fight toe-to-toe the way the bigger Hatton, Cotto and Margarito had. He would rely instead on his awesome defensive skills. He would put on a carapace thicker than a turtle’s and just as hard to pry loose.
At the end of it, there’s the matter of kontrapelo as we put it in Tagalog. Some opponents just have a way of confounding champions. Look at Roger Federer who can never seem to solve a problem called Rafael Nadal. Mayweather would do well not to delude himself with this fight.
All in all, it was a thrilling fight, it was a classic fight, it was a spectacle of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Made all the more pulse-pounding by the immediacy of being there, an experience that assails all the senses. (But that’s for tomorrow.) For the nonce, what can I say? You watch 12 rounds of that with completely literally bated breath, feeling the collective mind of a crowd focused on an event, twitching involuntarily each time Pacquiao took a blow to his face, rising to a roar each time he caught a piece of Marquez, you’d feel as if you had been in the ring yourself. By the end of it my throat was dry, and I needed a drink—of every kind.
I came, I saw, but I left not a little bitin.