WHAT A letdown. Manny Pacquiao promised all fight fans good entertainment. The fight, quite frankly, was simply boring. I quote from the Inquirer: “Volume puncher outpunched” (News, 5/4/15). Immediately after the verdict was announced, rabid fans opined Manny should have won, one of them even suggesting that the fight was rigged! Manny’s initial reaction after the verdict was that he thought he won. But after reflection, he conceded he was beaten. So, Manny had a sore shoulder?
No doubt there will be many more excuses by pundits in trying to explain the loss.
So, let’s tell it like it is: Floyd Mayweather Sr. was right when he said Manny does not have this (pointing to his head). What the basketball coach cum boxer cum congressman had was his faith in a deity that he thinks takes sides in contests—like the basketball coaches of prominent Catholic universities declaring after a win, “God was on our side”; or after a loss, “The other team prayed harder.”
And like the many netizens who showered Manny with verses from the Bible before the fight, “Punch like Samson, hit like David, in Jesus’ name!” You are calling on God to have your idol punch a fellow boxer black and blue?
Former senator Rene Saguisag, commenting on pastors of Manny’s sect singing the national anthem during fight night in his latest foray into McGeehan’s “Manly Art of Modified Murder,” asks: “A Filipino boxer just killed his Australian foe Down Under. A Christian sect endorsing a ‘sport’ whose intent is to harm, maim, knock out and even, willy-nilly, kill a fellow human being, for money?”
I agree. Perhaps now Manny can hang up his gloves and see to his duties as an absentee congressman, pay the government the P3 billion he owes in taxes, and stop flaunting his wealth, he being an elected official of the land.
Sev Sarmenta, in the May 4 issue of the Inquirer, said we “needed mommy Dionisia’s prayers,” implying the outcome would have been in Manny’s favor if she had prayed. Really? Perhaps, Sarmenta should have bombarded the heavens with more prayer, or had a Mass said by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines?
I am a critical thinker and, thus, not superstitious. But let me turn the tables around: Don’t you think HE is teaching Manny and us a lesson: “Stop using my name in vain. I do not take sides in contests. Tell that bishop from the province in the south I am not responsible for Typhoon ‘Yolanda’ that killed 7,000 of my children, and I had nothing to do with the granting of a stay in execution for Mary Jane; it was your president that did it.”
So, let’s hear it from the over-pious netizens.
—ROBERT ALVAREZ HYNDMAN,
Tahanan Village, Parañaque City