When I read this piece by Gregg Doyel on CBSsports.com I was unbelievably irritated. It strikes me as the worst sort of journalism, the type of awful partisan political hit piece you’d read in one of the advocacy magazines. It made me think of the terrible pressure Manny must be under and what he must think when he reads such a piece.
But then it struck me that Manny never would read this. And even more crucially, if he did it wouldn’t even mean the same thing it does to an American athlete.
One can imagine an elite American athletes PR team on overdrive after some of the general media hits Manny has taken. From PTI, to CBS, and everywhere in between the steroid scolds have been out in full force. An American athlete would almost be certain to cave in, like a politician accused of hiring an illegal nanny or something like that.
This might be obvious, but what I don’t think our media and public understand is that Manny and the rest of the Filipino public don’t have the same cultural indicators that we do. What would an article comparing Manny Pacquiao to Mark McGwire mean to Manny? What would an article comparing him to Alex Rodriguez mean to an average Filipino. Probably not too much.
Now I’ll admit that my understanding of a Filipino sporting fan’s interest is pretty limited, I do know that MLB is not high on their athletic list. Very few know about Shawn Merriman’s illegal positive test. How many are aware of Lance Armstrong’s controversial history?
By this I mean we immediately assume that the cultural indicators of athletes outside of America are the same as those in America. They’re not. America’s steroid culture only became a major area of interest in this decade. That’s why it took people so long to suspect our athletes of any wrongdoing. An athlete today would have an extremely difficult time undergoing the type of physical transformations that McGwire went through without being an object of suspicion. Back then people didn’t even think it was a possibility.
It took years of education and seepage into the general public consciousness before steroids became such an easy part of the sports vernacular. Today, any educated fan has an opinion on the clear, blood-doping, and HGH the same way they do about rebounds or RBI’s. Ten years ago that wouldn’t be the case.
And I suspect that is a significant factor with Manny Pacquiao and his fellow Filipino’s reaction to this mess. The American sports they are most familiar with – boxing and basketball – have been largely free of steroid culture and discussion. Their frame of reference doesn’t include our pharmaceutical knowledge of the latest PEDs.
It’s like asking me to have a strong opinion of flopping in soccer. Or perhaps, more accurately, an article comparing Manny Pacquiao to Mark McGwire would have comparable impact to a Filipino journalist comparing Floyd Mayweather negatively to Philippine Basketball Association star Ramon Fernandez.
Manny Pacquiao is still of the Philippines, no matter how hard we try to make him one of our own. While I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the Fillipino press’s take on the situation, what I have seen has been largely sympathetic to Manny’s cause.
Which is as it should be, Lance Armstrong was almost universally treated positively in this country despite reason for suspicion. His brutal treatment from the European media was largely ignored.
While American athletes are often presumed guilty as charged, I strongly suspect it’s not that way in the Philippines. I suspect it’s viewed as outlandish and exotic. As Manny’s press release yesterday showed, he is as angry over attacks on his country as he is on attacks on him personally. There’s more than blood on the line, there’s honor.
