Top of the world

IT DIDN’T exactly stop the world. Next day, I looked at the news in the Web and it was just a footnote on things. And true enough, the Pacquiao-Mosley fight didn’t turn out to be an earth-shaking thing, the way a Pacquiao-Mayweather bout might be, which is never likely going to happen. After that fight last weekend, Floyd is going to find more excuses to make it not happen.

But no matter, forget the world, there’s us too. There’s the country too. There’s the fate of the nation too.

All that hung in the balance in the fight. Hindsight is always 20-20 vision, and from its benefit, the fight was bound to be lopsided. As one text joke went: “I thought the fight was between Pacquiao and Mosley. It wasn’t. It was mosley Pacquiao.”

The odds reflected it: Pacquiao was the 7-1 favorite. I was in Las Vegas shortly before the fight to attend a Gawad Kalinga affair (I left before Pacquiao held his press conference at MGM to endorse GK, or indeed enlist in its fight against poverty) and every other Pinoy, residing or descending, was saying the pickings were slim. Betting on Pacquiao was investing too much on too little.

The wise money said Mosley was an old man. In sports, age weighs like a ton of bricks, the more punishing the sport the heavier. At 39, Mosley was long gone, driven home by his losing his last couple of fights, not least to Miguel Cotto, the fighter whose face Pacquiao rearranged last year. Pacquiao hadn’t lost in a spell, he hadn’t slowed down with time, he had gotten faster. And he was armed with something Tiger Woods once had which made him invincible: confidence. The kind of confidence that said he couldn’t be touched, there was no man alive who could do that. You only had to look at his face, grinning from ear to ear every time he entered the boxing arena, like a child seeing a playground for the first time, to see that. Hell, you only had to see what he did to Cotto, which was not just to rearrange his face but to prearrange for a concert afterward, to see that.

But that is hindsight. Looking at it beforehand, it was scary too. Mosley was quite another order of fighter. He wasn’t another Mexican, he was an African-American, the first Pacquiao was fighting. He was big, and at least not too long ago fast and strong. When he said that Pacquiao hadn’t yet faced someone like him, you had to wonder if he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

There was always the lucky punch. Mosley was bigger, and you knew what bigger men could do to Pacquiao the way he winced when Antonio Margarito caught him with a vicious left to his ribs. Pacquiao would confess later that stung like hell. Margarito was slow, but even the slow could sneak in a punch or two. And Mosley wasn’t.

And so it was with as much trepidation as excitement that I watched the fight last Sunday. I watched it along with a group of people courtesy of pay-per-view (I had learned long ago not to bother with free TV; it’s not just the barrage of ads, it’s that everyone you know insists sadistically on texting you the outcome), and was filled with the same agitation and bloodlust as everybody else. I knew that Pacquiao’s own parish priest wished he would hang up his gloves soon not for the usual reason that he could get hurt but for the more Christian reason that he would hurt others. And I knew that despite the efforts to civilize boxing, it was a sport that retained vestiges of its gladiatorial past, as witness the faces of Cotto and Margarito before and after. But I left those considerations for another day.

For the moment, I was just like any other Filipino, in solidarity with all other Filipinos the world over, fearing for the safety of our champion, revelling in the unmatched skills of our champion, anticipating the glorious victory of our champion.

And he did not disappoint. My fears evaporated completely in the third round when he decked Mosley. You could see it in Mosley’s eyes as he got up. He was lost. He was defeated. He had tried to feel his way through in the first couple of rounds to see if he could take the fight to Pacquiao. Kissing the floor reminded him it was not a good idea. He would spend the rest of the fight pedalling away, trying to preserve a record of never having been knocked out in his career. That career was over after the third round.

That did not prevent me, like all the others watching with me, from cheering lustily on, shouting myself hoarse at the inanimate screen for Pacquiao to end things with a bang. But he tried to do that only after the referee wrongly ruled a knockdown against him. It brought the adrenaline rushing to his veins and he went after Mosley with newfound ferocity, even doing a jig as though to ask, “Is this someone who has been knocked down?” But he never floored him again. Commentators would say later the ferocity died in Pacquiao after he and Mosley embraced ritually in the last round, a gesture that seemed to include a plea from Mosley to leave him with something. Pacquiao would relent, he is a Pinoy after all.

Afterward Pacquiao would say that the reason he fought as though he had taken Alaxan was that he developed a cramp in his left leg after the third round, a thing that had been bothering him lately. He felt the same thing in the later rounds against Margarito. It limited his mobility, and made him a little flat-footed, such as flat-footed could be used to describe his still blazing speed by normal standards. May partida pa, as we would say. But which also shows what’s in store for him in the future. He has no opponent left to overcome, he has only himself.

But for the moment, he’s the champ, the greatest fighter of his time, possibly even the greatest fighter of all time. He’s on top of the world, and the whole country along with him.