Word: fighters
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...Face for the Selfless Manny Pacquiao, now 30, is the latest savior of boxing, a fighter with enough charisma, intelligence and backstory to help rescue a sport lost in the labyrinth of pay-per-view. Global brands like Nike want him in their ads. He made the TIME 100 list this year. West Coast baseball teams invite him to throw out the first pitch in order to attract the Filipino-American community. He has even become an object of desire: ESPN the Magazine has his naked torso in its Body Issue, which explores the engineering of several athletic physiques...
...abrupt pause, then a slurring. Roach, who is not yet 50, has Parkinson's disease, most likely the result of his own boxing career. But it has not stopped him from taking Pacquiao's energy and giving it strategy. Their partnership has created one of the most riveting fighters in boxing history. Roach seems prouder of Pacquiao than of almost any of his other famous trainees. He sometimes talks as if the fighter has already reached his peak. Manny, he says, "has nothing more to prove." He predicts a first-round knockout of Cotto but, even as people are already...
Will His Kingdom Come? Pacquiao crosses himself before digging into dinner amid the Corinthian columns of Capitale, an old bank turned party space, just about where Chinatown starts in Manhattan. It is early June, and he is there to receive his second Fighter of the Year award from The Ring magazine. Even as old palookas cuss up a storm, he prays before his meal. His mother says he was always "very disciplined and God-fearing" - taking after her, of course. Her front garden features a coral-lined altar to the Virgin Mary, and an entire shelf in her living room...
...ultimatums against Manny's "playboy" ways, but tonight she says only a couple of sentences and even those guardedly. She speaks mostly to the other man seated next to her, Mike Koncz, a Canadian who takes care of the little details that matter to Pacquiao and his wife. The fighter, for example, must have white rice with his meals (a hard habit to break for all Filipinos), so Koncz goes scampering for a plate of it. The slightly fusiony menu lists a side of wild rice with the entrée. That will not do for the Pacquiaos...
...fighter appears anxious as the evening wears on. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out sheets of paper - his acceptance speech, in English. While Pacquiao has no problem understanding English, which is widely used in the Philippines, he is much more comfortable speaking Tagalog, the national language, and Cebuano, the dialect he grew up with. But he is a hit with the New York City audience. All he really has to do is grin, and they are in his hands. A Filipino listening to the speech, however, senses the trouble Pacquiao will face if he decides...