HIS first name Manny rhymes with ?money? while Pacquiao, his last name, is stylized spelling of the Cebuano word ?pakyaw,? which roughly means ?to buy or grab everything.? Emmanuel ?Manny? Dapidran Pacquiao can therefore be said to be living up to his name.
ESPN The Magazine, in an issue that will come out on May 12, 2011, lists Pacquiao and US baseball star Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees as the best paid athletes in 30 sports and from 182 countries in 2010.
Their earnings? A whopping $32 million each. For Pacquiao, that is equivalent to P1.376 billion at the current exchange rate.
The listed earning, according to ESPN, ?represents official base salary? from recently completed season or calendar year and ?excludes endorsements, appearance fees, sponsorship money and other sources of extra income.?
Which means the $32 million is the smaller base of Pacquiao?s 2010 earning.
In the more comprehensive ?The 20 Highest-Earning International Athletes? for 2010 by Sports Illustrated (si.com), Pacquiao is fifth in the list, with an estimated earning of $38 million. This time, the estimate includes ?salary, bonuses, endorsement income and appearance fees.?
For comparison, Sports Illustrated has a list of the 50 best paid American athletes in 2010. Topping that list is Tiger Woods with a little more than $90 million in earning, or more than twice that of Pacquiao. Even then, Pacquiao is in the top tier of the world?s best paid athletes last year, topping even Shaquille O?Neal ($36 million) and Kobe Bryant (a little more than $33 million).
Decades ago, who would have thought that a Filipino athlete would earn such a mind-boggling amount of money? Pacquiao, of course, is not the only Filipino or personality with Filipino roots racking up their earnings from their endeavors abroad.
One wonders, then, how much of these earnings are being invested in the homeland and whether these investments have helped prop up the Philippine economy or pump-primed its economic growth.
This is important considering government?s efforts to lure foreign investors to the country and its effort to harness the potentials of what the World Bank calls ?diaspora savings? or the remittance of overseas Filipinos for investment purposes.
With the poverty that hounds many Filipinos, the earnings of Pacquiao and our other ?fortunate? brothers have reached scandalous levels. That perception can be mitigated if these earnings are spent the right way, including investing in the country and providing employment.
