Manny Pacquiao, OFW of the Century

Manny Pacquiao—OFW of the Century

In less than thirty-six hours, Manny Pacquiao will try to make boxing history by being the first fighter to win seven titles in as many weight classes. He'll brawl against the tough, natural welterweight Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico. The General Santos native started his boxing career at the 106-lbs. weight class and, tomorrow, will be fighting at 143 lbs. After retirement, he will surely join countrymen Pancho Villa and Flash Elorde in the Boxing Hall of Fame.

The Filipino boxer is relentless in the ring, uses excellent side-to-side and pivot motion to set up his combinations. He has a crushing left hook, knockout power that’s nearly matched in his right hand. Even prior to the making of the Pacquiao-Cotto fight, Bert Sugar has speculated on several occasions that Pacquiao isn’t just the greatest Asian boxer in the history of the sport; he is the greatest southpaw ever.

It’s been widely publicized how Pacquiao’s life has extended into a career that includes singing, acting, and politics. He is a mediocre singer and actor at best; and we have yet to witness telling examples of any political acumen to date, but he is, nonetheless, a superstar in the Philippines, and Filipinos adore their superstars.

Five-story billboard ads with some of the hottest and most popular faces line EDSA, a major artery in Metro Manila that runs between Makati and Quezon City. Their stories make top news, so when a scandal or big gossip hits, everyone within earshot of a public TV will pause to catch the update. Earlier this year, public fascination spiked when a sex tape emerged of model/actress Katrina Halili and her plastic surgeon.

One will often see, in a Filipino home, the latest poster of a Philippine supermodel hanging on the wall beside a rosary or crucifix. It’s not an exaggeration to say devotion to the nation’s stars is almost religious. Masses have been offered up by Philippine dioceses come fight time, supplications to God for a Pacquiao victory. Pacquiao himself is a devout Catholic and always attends mass before he enters the ring.

Perhaps the most stunning effect Pacquiao’s stardom has had on his homeland is that the crime rate drops to zero during his fights. The New People’s Army (the military arm of the Communist wing) and the Philippine government call a mutual cease fire to their three-decade long conflict during Pacquiao’s matches.

For those mostly unfamiliar with Philippine culture, it might be difficult to imagine the particular challenges of managing such fame with altruism, humility, and dignity. Even a modicum of success among the throngs of Filipinos who have left the country—nurses, doctors, domestic workers, sex workers, engineers—means they’ll carry the burden of providing for all the members of the clan that have been left behind. That burden can rend family members from one another. Those who emigrate to the middle and upper classes in the United States or similar countries sometimes cut ties eventually with kin in the Philippines because no one, no matter how upwardly mobile, can completely provide for the widespread poverty every Filipino seems to have familial obligation to.

The Philippines is a 7,100-island republic built like a small town. If everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation, people in the Philippines are connected by only three. Everyone knows one another, and Filipinos who meet abroad christen their conversations by asking the last name of their countrymen, often making connections down to the very barangay, the republic’s most local civic designation.

Given the Filipino’s intensity of making somewhat feeble social connections seem stronger than they are, Americans might even call it social climbing, but what’s considered networking in the United States is merely a way of life for Filipinos; it is, in fact, a matter of survival.

In 2008, between April and September alone, there were approximately 2 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) total, according to government surveys. Many of those workers take domestic jobs, clean houses or act as low-level, live-in nannies in Asia and Australia, but a very high number in the Middle East and Europe as well.

OFWs are often treated as second-class citizens in their host countries, experiencing strained relationships with their employers, sometimes erupting into physical (and occasionally violent) confrontations. Additionally, Philippine newspapers have reported, one out of three HIV and AIDS cases in the Philippines were OFWs since 1984. In short, Filipinos working abroad endure great psychosocial distress and physical risk in order to fulfill their obligations to their families at home.

Though OFWs, who carry much more of the country’s real burdens, are seen by their extended families as local saviors, Pacquiao is seen as the redeemer of an entire nation. The magnitude of visibility and pressure might be different for Pacquiao and OFWs, but the cultural forces are the same—this longing (among those who have some opportunity abroad) to make the lives of people in the Philippines better. Filipinos call it “utang na loob”, debt from within, when you have a responsibility to family members or to those whose work you’ve been beneficiary to.

Pacquiao, to his credit (and perhaps his downfall), tries to live up to these impossible expectations with a great measure of dignity. He has taken on an unwieldy entourage throughout training, a dozen to twenty men who, according to a recent New York Times article, wash his socks, fetch his Gatorade, in all, compete for the fighter’s affections, hoping to sit next to him at dinner or sleep at the foot of his bed. I imagine they are family members or close friends, like Buboy Fernandez, a childhood buddy of Pacquiao, who was a janitor until the champ hired him. Fernandez can be seen translating Freddie Roach’s directions between rounds of all the Pacquiao matches. Even Fernandez himself has become an icon in their homeland.

And while many Philippine success stories have sent the country’s best talent to America for good, Pacquiao has built a home in General Santos, the rugged city where the boxer sold donuts in the street as a child.

Many may question Pacquiao’s personal ties with Chavit Singson, former Governor of Ilocos Sur who has a reputation among many Filipinos for egregious acts of corruption, but Pacquiao’s motives to run next year for a congressional seat seem, as a neophyte politician, earnest.

When the trio of typhoons tore through the Philippines during the southpaw’s preparations for the Cotto match, Pacquiao not only donated 1 million pesos toward aiding the storms’ victims, but broke training camp to help distribute relief goods in Manila and Baguio City. He is a man from common origins who wants to use his fame to help his people.

If Pacquiao wins tomorrow, which, according to odds-makers, is the most probable outcome, certainly, the sense of elation and pride will sustain itself in the Philippines. But with so much hype and so much hope directed toward Pacquiao as figurehead, what would a loss to Cotto do to the spirit of Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora? It would likely devastate their sense of faith—for now. Many Filipinos, I imagine, will badmouth and abandon him until the next fight or the next opportunity for worship. After Pacquiao, surely, another savior will come along, who will be the object of the country’s devotion, a figure to pour all their best gifts into, so they can finally see those gifts embodied in one man, which is to say, the soul of the Philippines perhaps is already epic and brave, but in the myths that capture the Philippine imagination, the Filipino people locate their most excellent destinies outside themselves. The truth is they are already heroic. And they are everywhere.