Boxing, whether professional or amateur, is one of the great sporting interests of Filipinos, especially Cebuanos. Perhaps only basketball can boast of sparking more interest.
But while basketball may have more adherents, whether as actual participants of the game or as mere spectators, it is still boxing which has the capacity to make us globally competitive.
Yet there seems to be something very wrong with the sport of boxing in the country today. We do not need to relive our agony in Athens here, but even in professional boxing we seem to have hit a brick wall.
Manny Pacquiao, the country?s boxing hero of the moment, seems to be at a loss in finding worthy opponents, and it is not because he is feared, for fear and boxing are simply incongruous.
Our feeling is that the dearth of opponents is due to some management problems, making us suspect the handlers of Pacquiao want to grab as much as they can as soon as they can, making the boxer unpalatable.
Of course one has to be in a hurry in boxing because age has a way of always catching up and outcomes in the ring are simply beyond the reach of scientific prediction.
But you cannot be too in a hurry to seem too greedy. A boxer must only be greedy for a win. Any greed beyond that can erode the business prospects of a boxer, which is really what professional boxing is all about.
That is the only reason we can see why such a hot property as Pacquiao is being dropped like a hot potato while his last two opponents have already had fights
On the other hand, there is Gerry Penalosa, who refuses to admit he is gone. A few days ago, a comebacking Penalosa won over a Thai opponent, in what this paper described as a demolition.
It was a win all right, but it was far from a demolition. It was more like preordained, with the Thai boxer appearing all too willing to oblige and submit to a farce. The paying audience had been had.
The lesson we must learn is this. Boxing is our best chance for sporting glory but we cannot push too hard for a fight, whether with a boxer in his prime or with one way past his day.
Do that and either we lose marketability or we lose the audience. Professional boxing, or any other professional sport for that matter is, after all, essentially a business.
