Will Manny Pacquiao’s political aspirations hurt his boxing?
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As a child, Manny Pacquiao slept on the dirt floor of a hut in the Philippines. The mythical painful story of his father eating the boy’s own dog still haunts.
Pacquiao, now considered the world’s top boxer, has earned tens of millions of dollars because of his athletic gifts. His U.S. business manager said Pacquiao recently purchased a $2.4-million home in Hancock Park with five bedrooms.
As his countrymen still navigate extreme poverty with flawed political leadership making things worse, Pacquiao feels their pain and wants to help. He plans to run for a congressional seat in his native country, where he is adored as ‘The People’s Champion.’ He will decide which seat he’ll pursue by the end of November, his business manager Michael Koncz said this week, and the election is in May.
Those closest to Pacquiao’s boxing activities, chiefly trainer Freddie Roach, understand the boxer’s mission to assist his country’s poorest -- he often hands out dollars to the needy outside his home -- but they would rather have him chase a politician’s seat when his fighting career is over.
‘Manny thinks differently, but I believe he cannot do both,’ Roach told The Times this week as he and Pacquiao resume training in Hollywood this week after 31 days of conditioning and fight-planning in the Philippines in advance of Pacquiao’s Nov. 14 world welterweight title fight in Las Vegas against Puerto Rico’s Miguel Cotto.
On HBO’s ‘24/7’ reality series documenting the Pacquiao-Cotto fight, it was notable that Cotto has spent more weeks training than Pacquiao and seems to be more focused on the task at hand. At one point in the show, Pacquiao blew off a strong Roach request to leave the Philippines earlier than planned because of another oncoming typhoon, forcing Roach to interrupt the boxer’s meeting with a politician the next day to insist it was time to go -- with an expletive tossed in.
I was talking with Roach on Tuesday about how his relationship with Pacquiao is beginning to rank among the most successful trainer-fighter relationships in the sport’s history, along with Angelo Dundee and Muhammad Ali, Eddie Futch and Joe Frazier and a few others, when Roach admitted the most significant divide is their disagreement over the boxer’s political future.
Roach worked to shield the sympathetic Pacquiao from the devastation of the typhoons that ravaged the Philippines while they trained. Although Pacquiao once made a long trek to visit survivors near Manila, Roach urged him to stay back at training camp as the trainer and a Pacquiao friend later visited La Trinidad-Biguit, where 325 died in a typhoon.
‘It was a farming area that was completely wiped out,’ Roach said. ‘I spoke to the kids there and told them Manny wished he could be there. We saw a lot of people and tried to make them happy, but there’s only so much you can do. All the men were out digging through the mud, because three people were still missing.’
Roach’s party came to the area with truckloads of wood needed to build caskets for the dead. At one point, he was taken into a funeral home and saw corpses ‘stacked 10 high. ... That’s why I went. I didn’t want Manny to see that. He’d get too upset.
‘He has this fight to think about. We want to keep him focused on that.’
That’s the ultimate test now as Pacquiao challenges the naturally bigger world champion.
--Lance Pugmire
