A couple of nights before Manny Pacquiao left for Macau, he played for and coached the professional basketball team he owns. A day later, he spoke at a college, praised the students as the future hope of the Philippines and awarded scholarships from his own pocket.
Then on his last day in camp in General Santos City, Pacquiao sparred four easy rounds in his Wild Card Gym East, showered and left for the airport in a caravan large enough to outnumber the 7th Cavalry and the entire Sioux Nation at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
There, a modest traveling party was assembling. It consisted of two commercial AsianAir jumbo jets and 380 fans and family members. This group was not to be confused with roughly 26 regiments of devoted enlistees in Manny’s Army who would have cheerfully jumped on the wings for a ride to Macau but were outnumbered by security.
In other words, it was just an ordinary week, filled with distractions, on the calendar of Manny Pacquiao.
But as boxing calendars go, the days of Pacquiao have, for some time, begun to move forward at warp speed. In the 1938 Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday, Walter Houston introduced the classic “September Song”:
” … it’s a long long while from May to December,
and the days grow short when you reach September.”
Pacquiao will be 36 next month. This will be his 63rd fight when he climbs into the ring against Chris Algieri to out his WBO welterweight title on the line Sunday morning in Macao ? Saturday night in the United States.
For any fighter ? no matter how skilled ? that’s one hell of a lot of Septembers. Algieri is younger, far less experienced, with just 20 professional boxing matches behind him, and when you weigh the two sets of qualifications, the one blip on what so far has been Manny’s blue horizon is the stalking nature of “the other opponent” ? tougher than Father Time and as unforgiving as a junk yard dog.
