He was a curious piece of goods, this Thai fist-tosser called Fahsan 3-K Battery. He had never been knocked out. His record claims he has beaten no less than 22 Filipinos, most of them via the short route.He had a “secret plan” to demolish Manny Pacquiao who would then be his 23rd Filipino victim. So the fight Saturday evening at The Fort was billed as Yanig sa Taguig. We were all made to expect fistic mayhem, where each fighter would draw freshets of blood from the other, and transform each other?s face to the ugly, pocked and pitted surface of a battlefield.
Well, it didn?t happen that way.
What happened was short, sweet and simple. What happened was what we all expected. The Filipino didn?t just enter the ring.Manny Pacquiao assaulted the ring like an enraged bull, snorting like all fired hell. When his fists came to a stop in the fourth round, Fahsan was spread out like a Tambuli carpet on the floor after a brief flurry of his legs twitching and kicking upward like cows just brought down at the slaughterhouse. The legs are the last to move. The referee didn?t even bother to count.
Manny Pacquiao was at his best that night. Yes, he was still that flurry of fists, still that hand and leg dazzle of a Bolshoi ballerina. But this time he learned to pace himself. His timing was near flawless, a superb discharge of motorized artillery that could have been manned by Gen. George Patton of blood-and-guts legend. On top of that, Pacquiao unleashed a new weapon, a right that was midway between a jab (he being a left-hander) and a hook.
It was that right that flummoxed Fahsan. The Thai?s strategy was to cover his face with his right glove, the shield he needed to protect his jaw against Pacquiao?s murderous left, then bending a little bit low while coming in. That way, Pacquiao didn?t have a horizontal target where he could hammer at will like a naval broadside hitting shore. If there was a secret weapon unveiled that night(Fahsan boasted he had one to demolish Pacquiao), it was that right.
Gabriel (Flash) Elorde ? also a southpaw ? soared to greatness when he pulled out that right hook from nowhere late in his career, gave it the lethal impact of torpedo crippling a battleship. Pacquiao put that right to use Saturday evening. In the fourth, he smashed a right to the Thai?s unwary jaw. He made a move to throw that right again like a harpoon. Fahsan recoiled, then eithout knowing it brought his gloved right down.
Babushki!
Faster than forked lightning, Manny saw that opening, unloosed his left like a short-range missile.It hit the Thai flush on his jaw. The crack was audible. Fahsan?s eyes immediately lit out, his body twisted and whined like a suddenly-abandoned accordion, and he was unconscious even before he hit the floor.There he lay. Only his legs twitched and moved before they too were claimed by the pitch darkness that had devoured Fahsan.
I won?t bother my readers with what happened in the first, second and third rounds.
They were all a prelude to the fourth.
Fahsan was able to sneak in several punches, explosive rights that missed by a mile. And for sometime he showed courage, standing up to the gathering hurricane of Pacquiao fists, moving in, getting staggered and still fighting on. But for how long? The first knockdown came in the second, the second in the third. I predicted Manny would finish him off in seven rounds. He did much better than that.
It was like coming into collision with an oncoming train, which is what happened to Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez. In their time, before they fought Manny Pacquiao, they prowled the jungle of fistiana, king of everything they walked on, unaware that in the Philippines, there was a fighter who could one day surpass them and perhaps shoot to the top as the best featherweight the world would ever see.
Pacquiao is now on the verge of passing into the lore of Filipiniana as possibly the greatest Filipino fighter that ever lived.
If the General Santos mittslinger takes care of himself, there are no limits to his prowess. He is that rare pugilist with twelve lungs, a heart with the breadth of the Grand Canyon, skills and talents rarely combined in one person, the determination to flatten a mountain if he takes a mind to it, to float in the air as he demolishes a foe. He is a killer, and loves to kill in the ring. He is Mike Tyson reconstituted into a featheight. Not Mike Tyson, the bully, the beast and the brute, but a Tyson who comes on like a primal force, flattening everything in its path.
Only 25, Manny Pacquiao has still quite a number of things to learn.
He?ll have to immediately get rid of the other Pacquiao the public hardly sees, the easy-going youth, who smokes and drinks and hops around town in search of good time. At age 25, he can still do this, then click his heels, when fight time approaches and Freddie Roach, his trainer, picks up . his travelling bags to be at Manny?s side. But as he ages, he?ll have to watch out.
As we have said before, Freddie Roach is the best thing that ever happened to Pacquiao. In the Filipino lad, the American trainer spotted the lodestone any trainer or manager is perpetually in search of. And what is this? A lad willing to learn, a hungry fighter with all the potential of being great. He saw all this in Pacquiao, a whipppet of a body that could move fast and prodigally, legs that could dart and hop like an adagio dancer and run the long mile, arms that had exquisite reach and, most importantly, fists that must have been excavated from a pit of fiery, molten lead.
Boxers, fighters like Pacquiao are rare. At their weight, they can hit like lightweights or welterweights, move with relentless fury, driven by lungs that can power a tank.
And so when Freddie Roach came upon Pacquiao, he found the still uncut diamond he was looking for, a probinsyano from General Santos whose dream was to scale the heights. But Manny was a rube, a stranger to the prodigious discipline required to be a great fighter. After all, everything came easy. He didn?t have to work hard to defeat and flatten his early opponents. Fistic destruction was his gift. All he needed were those knuckles to spread his opponents among the lilacs, roses, cherry blossoms and the sampaguitas.
And so at one time, while shifting to higher weights from a flyweight, he got stalled by some kind of inertia. There was one time when I saw him completely unprepared, easily knocked down by opponents who took advantage of his sloth, his easy-going life.
It was when he was lured to the United States, to big time, to the real jungle of fisticuffs, that luckily, he came to the attention and eventually the care of Freddie Roach. Roach is one of the best trainers in the business. A martinet, a Prussian drillmaster, he worked on the rawhide that was Pacquiao, put h im through the paces of daily training that would have bent a pack horse to its forelegs.
Pacquiao didn?t complain at all. In fact, he probably loved improving himself under the guidance of a master trainer. He heaved at the light and heavy bags with gusto, didn?t know his strength, and battered many of his sparmates bowlegged. You could see that Saturday evening at the Fort. He was just toying with the Thai, and he was no longer as tight as he used to be. He didn?t move so much, bobbed and weaved only moderately, easily measured the distance to Fahsan?s jaw, cut loose only when the timing was right.
Freddie Roach continued to work wonders on the Filipino, a partnership we hope will long endure.
Pacquiao, to an extent, still remains that stripling, wild when nobody watches him, wooly around a billiard table, smoking cigarettes as though they would get out of fashion tomorrow, belting the bottle with his buddies, and certainly crazy about broads. Freddie Roach is not only the trainer he needs, but the guide and father he needs, the trainer with the whip, with the genius that can fully exploit the lodestone in Pacquiao.
We also hope success and heaps of money will not eventually spoil Manny Pacquiao like it spoiled the immortal Pancho Villa. Villa loved to party all night long, and as most Filipinos do, he could dance, spend lavishly and the girls loved him. He had the misfortune of coming up with an infected tooth, and it was this toothache that eventually spelled his doom.
There was no Freddie Roach to take care of Pancho Villa. So the Filipino flyweight champion, still nursing a terrible toothache, climbed up the ring, and the result was obvious. He got battered in the mouth. The infection spread, and in no time at all, Pancho Villa died.
