By Ronnie Nathanielsz

Pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao is resting in his home in General Santos City after scoring a stunning victory over Roy Chiongbian in the battle for the lone congressional seat in Sarangani province.

There were many who didn’t believe Pacquiao could overcome the well-entrenched Chiongbian clan and a solid political organization that backed him up but like the many spectacular victories in the boxing ring against such hugely favored fighters like Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and earlier in his career Marco Antonio Barrera, Pacquiao silenced the non-believers with what amounts to a landslide victory.

Longtime friend, businessman-sportsman Rey Golingan told us early Tuesday morning that Pacquiao was winning in every municipality.

Pacquiao’s adviser Michael Koncz said “Manny went to sleep at 4:00 a.m. He is a very happy man. This is a bigger honor than anything he has achieved before. It’s a personal achievement of which he can be proud.”

 Pacquiao put as much into his electoral campaign as he had put in training to face some of the toughest foes in the ring and duplicated his triumphs in the same awesome manner.

Michael Marley of examiner.com who has spent several days with Team Pacquiao reporting on the campaign in his own inimitable style said that Pacquiao’s charming wife and indefatigable campaigner Jinkee sent Koncz a text message some thirty minutes after midnight saying “we won, all the stress was worth it.”

Voting day, May 10, was their wedding anniversary but for the time being Jinkee allowed her famous husband and national hero to continue his romance with politics and the poor people of Sarangani whom he has vowed to help in any way he can.

An ecstatic Bob Arum, the astute Top Rank promoter who went against the wisdom of many experts in the region and from outside who figured Pacquiao couldn’t buck the system and the wealth of the Chiongbian clan by predicting a “landslide” victory  for Manny on the eve of the polls at a dinner hosted by Golingan,  left General  Santos City for Manila where he is scheduled to take a connecting Philippine Airlines flight to Las Vegas.

Arum is proud of Pacquiao’s achievement which to him is more important than the cracking left hooks or right crosses that he throws in the ring and with which he has demolished the likes of De La Hoya, Hatton, David Diaz and Miguel Cotto. But to Arum, Pacquiao’s congressional victory was the most spectacular  achievement in his amazing career – that’s until he gets Floyd Mayweather Jr in the ring and trounces him like he did Chiongbian, the  money man of Sarangani.

As Arum told Marley, “the whole thing is just so wonderful.”