Sunday, May 08, 2011

Pride chicken, honor student

I know I'm going to get hate comments after this but I'm gonna say it anyway, the Pacquiao-Mosley fight is boring and predictable. Even days before, I couldn't bring myself to get excited unlike the previous fights, especially the earlier ones (Passing by Sarangani the other week I saw a Pacquiao-Mosley ad and just looked at it as if it was some blank plywood). Just before the delayed telecast started i dozed off and woke up by a jolt when my younger brother shouted Manny was down. But heck, I mean, c'mon guys, we don't just want Manny to win, we know he's gonna win. He's 32 and Mosley is 39. Mosley whose glory days in boxing are over; he's standing at the twilight of his boxing career, and he's not going to lose anything more if he bow down to this relatively young and persistent fighter who only wants to bring honor and glory to his third-world country whose semblance of unity can only be glimpsed at during his mighty fights; who wants to bring honor and glory like it was some long-forgotten Roman code that will lift his ailing kingdom to its heydays. It's not a question of brining honor, not even a gargantuan task of uniting a long-divided people, but this brazen act of gimmickry (what's up with those yellow gloves? shouldn't they be orange?). That stuff is said and done. It's the big-ticket fights that matter after all. It's entertainment (falling off, really?), it's a money-making machine. You watch Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull and there you have it, boxing summed up in its glory and ugliness. Crowds of people, some strangers huddle in covered courts, restaurants, cinemas, heck everywhere, yet they are united by this invisible thread of pride. Buf after it, what? Manny gets richer, he buys businesses, grows his empire and we go back to our same sorry lives, the ones we have before we sat, stuck and hypnotized in front of that screen watching our hero battle his opponents, fighting his way through, as if he was boxing out our own.

3 comments:

  1. I was hoping he'd lose. The yellow gloves, the fight poverty slogan, Jinkee's expensive face, everything about Pacquiao is starting to get tiresome. It's just so weird that one of the richest men in the country is pitching a fight against poverty which is just so typical of Filipino celebrities wanting to cover everything from sports, showbiz and then to politics. Why couldn't he just box and get rich and not wear gloves for poverty? His ego got too big.

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  2. I was hoping he'd lose. The yellow gloves, the fight poverty slogan, Jinkee's expensive face, everything about Pacquiao is starting to get tiresome. It's just so weird that one of the richest men in the country is pitching a fight against poverty which is just so typical of Filipino celebrities wanting to cover everything from sports, showbiz and then politics. Why couldn't he just box and get rich and not wear gloves for poverty? His ego got too big.

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  3. and here's his take on the RH Bill: "Sabi ng Diyos, go forth and multiply. Hindi niya sinabing, multiply pero hanggang dalawa lang. Ang sabi niya, magpakarami tayo." Puhleaze.

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