REGAN: What, fifty followers? Is it not well? What should you need of more? Yea, or so many, since that both charge and danger/ Speak ?gainst so great a number?
LEAR: Oh, reason not the need!
(William Shakespeare)
?It?s tough to wake up and go running at five in the morning when you?re in silk pajamas?
(Marvellous Marvin Hagler)
There?s something epic about Manny Pacquiao. Rags to riches stories are two-a-penny in the west, but few south-east Asians have quite taken the world by storm as completely as the little Pinoy. And it?s not just the fighting style of the current WBO welterweight champion that appeals ? a winning smile, a genuine humility bordering on self-deprecation, and a quiet intelligence, mark Pacquiao out as someone most extra-ordinary.
By the end of 2010 it had become well-nigh impossible to deny Pacquaio?s credentials as the finest fighter on the planet. As his chief co-claimant Floyd Mayweather Jr. faltered at the twin altars of inactivity and indifference, Manny seemed to be bringing the fistic world to its knees ? highly thought of adversaries like Ricky Hatton, Miguel Angel Cotto, Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito had not only failed to best the Philippine, but had been swatted aside like pesky flies.
So what?s changed? As we embrace 2012, Manny Pacquiao finds himself at something of a crossroads. 2011 has not been kind to him, at least between the ropes, and having turned thirty-three in December there?s sudden talk of decline and retirement.
Manny?s ring excursions in 2011 yielded two victories, but scant plaudits. In May he decisioned Shane Mosley in a sham of a contest that owed more to market forces than to any kind of sporting endeavour. Both Mosley and Pacquaio made an awful lot of money, as did their respective backers, but all at the expense of pay-per-view punters who financed a sorry spectacle in which both fighters effectively shouldered arms. The fight felt like thievery.
Then, in November, Pacquiao reprised his two encounters with Juan Manuel Marquez, and for a third time took a decision that few of the cognoscenti felt he deserved. The Philippine, by now the darling of Las Vegas, appeared to benefit from judging that seemed distinctly homespun. In the fight, he?d been befuddled by Marquez?s control of speed and distance, unable to fire off his usual quick-fire combinations, and even appeared at times to have surrendered control to the rock-hard Mexican. In fact the contest was closer than some alarmist observers have suggested, but pre-fight Manny had been predicted to give the ageing Marquez something of a beating and in failing to do so he seemed to be confirming suspicions that he?s on the slide.
But much has changed in the life of Manny Pacquiao in the last three years. I had the privilege of getting close to Pacquaio in the build-up to the Hatton fight back in 2008. Manny traveled to the UK to publicize the event, and over the course of a week or so he took part in pressers at the Imperial War Museum in London, and then at the Trafford Centre in Manchester, Hatton?s hometown. At the conclusion of the latter event, Hatton?s PA pressed a piece of paper into my hand, and whispered ?Be here in about an hour?.
