LAS VEGAS — The Greyhound bus rumbled south from San Francisco, a boxing champion unknown outside the Philippines seated near the back. Manny Pacquiao was headed toward Los Angeles.
That was 2001, before Pacquiao became fighter of the decade, a Congressman and a millionaire. The boxer who now rides buses with his likeness splashed across both sides did not even have his own row. He weighed about 122 pounds. He was 22. He spoke no English. He possessed a left hand and a vague plan and the experience of 34 professional fights. Yet for Pacquiao, this trip was a luxury, the bus more like a limousine. He came from poverty that extreme, grew up without shoes, sold flowers and donuts and fish caught from the ocean on the street.
“The Greyhound, that’s the beginning,” Pacquiao said this week. “The beginning of it all.”
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Pacquiao will fight Saturday night at the MGM Grand, the site of his first bout in the United States. Even those closest to him wonder whether Pacquiao is too nice now to summon the savagery that marked his rise to stardom; not whether he can beat Timothy Bradley, but whether he can knock Bradley out, or whether he even wants to.
The boxing world spent the months previous nitpicking Pacquiao’s last two years: the erroneous loss gifted to Bradley by the judges in their first meeting, the knockout by longtime foil Juan Manuel Marquez, the selection of Brandon Rios for the comeback fight. But lost in all the handwringing over the old Manny Pacquiao was the unlikely and improbable way that he emerged, how Pacquiao became that Pacquiao in the first place.
No one, not even the boxer himself, expected a political endorsement from Bill Clinton, or a visit to a training session from Bob Dylan. Both happened in recent months.
“Before he became a superstar, he fought in relatively obscurity. He wouldn’t have been on any top 10 lists,” says Ken Hershman, president of HBO Sports.
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A young Manny Pacquiao celebrates his 2001 win over Lehlo Ledwaba. Jeff Gross/Getty Images/SI
Pacquiao climbed the steps of the Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood. Its owner, Freddie Roach, had never heard of him. Roach finished a workout and Pacquiao introduced himself and the two climbed inside the ring. This was so unusual, Roach cannot recall another time a world champion essentially showed up without an appointment and asked him for a tryout.
The way Roach remembers the story, Pacquiao had started his search on the east coast and come west. Promoter after promoter passed. Roach said Pacquiao once told him that other trainers charged Pacquiao for the mitt workouts he requested.
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“I never saw a guy with that much speed and power together,” Roach said. “Every punch was like whack, whack, whack.” The day after his first workout with Pacquiao, Roach’s elbows ached. He welcomed his new client.
Roach had moved to Los Angeles to train the actor Mickey Rourke. He tutored fighters at a random gym, nearby weightlifters and karate classes. He paid $10,000 for the Hollywood spot. That left $50 for advertising, and he made flyers and handed them out himself.
His trainer, the legendary Eddie Futch, discouraged Roach from opening a gym. Too big of a headache. “You never know when the next Muhammad Ali is going to walk through your doors,” Roach told him.
After the Wild Card visit, Pacquiao planned to return to San Francisco and head home. Instead, Oscar De La Hoya was scheduled for a pay-per-view matchup against Javier Castillejo, on June 23, 2001. The undercard featured a super bantamweight named Lehlo Ledwaba, the most feared boxer in that division. His opponent, the No. 1 contender, dropped out two weeks before. The No. 2 contender did not take the fight on such short notice.
Pacquiao did.
One then-promoter, Murad Muhammad, called Kery Davis, then an HBO executive.
“I’ve got your replacement,” Muhammad said.
“Who?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” Muhammad said, and it struck Davis. He did not believe at that moment that Muhammad could recall the fighter’s name.
“I got the Bruce Lee of boxing,” Muhammad said.
Muhammad did not respond to voicemails left for comment, but Pacquiao did end up opposite Ledwaba on that card. Roach went to a sports book beforehand to bet on Pacquiao. He wanted to lay down the $100 in his bank account. The book refused. The odds — maybe 40:1, maybe 50:1 — were too long to post.
Larry Merchant called the bout for HBO. He, too, had never heard of Pacquiao, who entered the ring with blond-red highlights in his hair. Then Pacquiao broke Ledwaba’s nose. “It wasn’t too far into the fight that I was saying Pacquiao was a typhoon that had crossed the Pacific,” Merchant said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a southpaw who threw a punch like that.”
Pacquiao won by technical knockout in the sixth. “He did remind me of Bruce Lee,” Davis said. “He threw these wicked left hands. He darted in and out.”
Roach ventured Pacquiao made $10,000 that night, $20,000 at most. Afterward, they searched for a restaurant on the strip they could afford. They found a Thai place. “Terrible,” Roach said.
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In recent years, the mega-fight that never happened dominated boxing. Here were two fighters that defined a generation, Mayweather and Pacquiao, who competed in the same weight divisions and danced around each other, yet never met.
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But they did box on the same night, in the same place, at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Nov. 10, 2001. Mayweather trumped Jesus Chavez in the main event. Pacquiao met Agapito Sanchez.
Sanchez hit low, Pacquiao said, tapping a thigh nearby for emphasis. He head-butted. He held. The referee disqualified Sanchez but the bout slowed Pacquiao’s momentum. His failure to respond marked one of his worst career fights.
Bob Arum, founder of Top Rank Boxing, was in the audience. He promoted Mayweather, now his nemesis, back then. This was a small show, with zero indication that two of the boxers in attendance would carry the sport into 2014. Arum watched Pacquiao, unimpressed. To his matchmakers, he said, “This is the guy that everybody loves?”
Arum smiled at the memory, the smell of profit in the air. “I can probably sell, or lease, the tape of that,” he said. “The only card ever that Manny and Mayweather fought on, and I own the rights!”
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When fans ask Merchant about Mayweather-Pacquiao — and they still do, all the time — he likes to remind them of another super-fight that took years to make: Mike Tyson vs. Lennox Lewis, in Memphis, in June 2002.
Long before the cold war between boxing’s premier networks, Showtime and HBO collaborated for that bout. Each chose one rising star from its stable for the undercard. Showtime tabbed Jeff Lacy; HBO picked Pacquiao. He registered a second-round technical knockout.
If that fight bolstered Pacquiao’s growing legend, his first bout against Marco Antonio Barrera sealed it. It took place in November 2003, in San Antonio. Pacquiao believes he had five fans in the Alamodome that night. Filipinos, he jokes, who whispered their allegiance.
At the weigh-in, Pacquiao found a pool table near the stage. He sank a trick shot, six balls at once, and Roach, who did not see the set-up, saw that as a sign. He rarely bets on his fighters, but said he placed $1,000 on Pacquiao to win and parlayed that with another bet to win by knockout. You can’t even make that kind of wager anymore.
As the first round started, Roach stumbled on his way outside the ring. He looked up and saw Pacquiao on the canvas. The referee stood over him, counting. Perhaps they took on too much, too soon, Roach wondered, but Pacquiao said he slipped.
This marked Golden Boy Promotion’s first major televised event. De La Hoya, his CEO, Richard Schaefer, and his lawyer, Stephen Espinoza, sat in the front row. Pacquiao battered Barrera, announcing himself on a world stage with an 11th-round technical knockout that could have been stopped sooner. “The feeling was, among all three of us, welcome to the world of boxing promotion,” Espinoza, now the head of boxing at Showtime, said. “There’s one element you can never control. That’s what happens inside the ring.”
“That’s when the bandwagon started to fill up,” Davis said.
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About the suitcase: as Pacquiao’s star climbed, promoters formed a line, the upstart Golden Boy included. Roach said De La Hoya asked for a meeting, and when Pacquiao arrived in California from the Philippines, a limousine waited for him outside of LAX.
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Roach had told De La Hoya that Pacquiao liked to deal in cash. He paid Roach that way; once even $200,000. They met at the limo and again later that night at a Morton’s steakhouse.
De La Hoya’s crew wheeled a black roller suitcase, Roach said, the size of a carry on. Pacquiao showed Roach the contents, $250,000 in $20 bills placed inside. Roach said — and sources confirmed — that the contract Golden Boy offered Pacquiao was among the best he had ever seen. It offered the boxer a cut of all revenue from cards staged in the Philippines. But Pacquiao wanted more up front. Roach said Golden Boy cut a check for an additional $250,000.
Arum gave a similar account of the limo and the suitcase. Schaefer, reached via email on vacation, declined to comment.
“We walked out, and I see Richard and Oscar go one way,” Roach said, “and I see Manny walking down the street with the roller suitcase. I’m thinking, this is like a f—ing movie.”
Pacquiao ultimately signed with Golden Boy and Top Rank. They all landed in court. Top Rank won, but as part of the settlement, Golden Boy received a piece of Pacquiao’s purses for years, until the end of a 2011 defamation suit brought by Pacquiao against Mayweather and others.
“I don’t know if Golden Boy ever got the money back, because I think Manny spent it,” Roach said.
“Think of how that changed everything,” he continued. “If Manny signs with Golden Boy, he probably never fights Oscar. That fight changed it all.”
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Inside Pacquiao’s 61st-floor hotel suite Tuesday morning, everything is different. Someone plays keyboard and sings gospel music in the living room. Someone else slices his banana. Security checks their earpieces. Assistants carry walkie-talkies.
“God bless you, champ,” someone says.
Pacquiao takes the elevator downstairs. He hops into a gray Lincoln Navigator with impossibly shiny rims. A Range Rover and BMW fall in behind. By the time the caravan arrives at the MGM Grand for scheduled media obligations, it has expanded from three cars to five, everyone jockeying for position in the parking lot. By Sunday, the boxer who came from poverty is likely to have surpassed $700 million in career PPV revenue generated.
Pacquiao’s catchphrase for this fight, the sentence he repeats most often, is “my journey will continue.” He means in boxing, and in politics, where Pacquiao says he is 80 percent sure he will run for senate in the Philippines when his current term as a Congressman expires in 2016.
“I feel like when I start boxing and have my breakthrough for a championship,” he says.
That breakthrough changed a sport, a country and dozens of lives. Pacquiao dabbled in singing and acting and cockfighting before he turned to politics. He became the Philippines’ most famous citizen. Roach expanded his gym and his stable of world champions and starred in a reality television series. He threw out the first pitch at a Dodgers game. He visited the Great Wall. Eminem referenced the duo in a song.
Their pairing opened the door for other Asian boxers and led to Arum’s foray into China. Pacquiao fought there last November against Rios.
“When you have a champion, you’re going to draw customers,” Roach said. “But when you get a guy like Manny Pacquiao, now I have the most famous gym in the world.”
Those who fret over Pacquiao’s loss of aggressiveness, or killer instinct, have forgotten where it came from, the poverty that forged it, the improbability of his rise. His savagery came from somewhere and lessened when his life went somewhere else. It’s hard to find a comparable story in sports, let alone boxing.
“I can’t think of non-American fighter who didn’t come from south of the border who was ever able to become a consistent attraction in America,” Merchant said. “Much less a star. Much less a superstar. Much less somebody who people who don’t care about boxing have an idea about.
“That just doesn’t happen.”
