Playboy Magazine: Manny Pacquiao story

Can Manny Pacquiao save boxing? Can he save his home country? Here’s how he’s trying to do both The sun bangs down like lightning on General Santos City. Here on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, where the noonday heat hits 103 degrees, young men on motor scooters zip between rusted-out Fords and VWs, honking at graffiti-covered, fume-farting buses called jeepneys. A street vendor sells squid balls. A chicken eats a KFC wrapper. In GenSan City, men lucky enough to have jobs earn $3 a day while bare-chested boys beg tourists for pennies. “Penny penny!” A dollar sends them dancing away like shirtless millionaires. Twenty years ago Manny Pacquiao was one of those boys. That was before he ever heard of Las Vegas, before he went to America to make $30*million in an hour, before Pacquiao (say “Pac-yow”) became one of the top athletes on earth, right up there with LeBron, Tiger and A-Rod. Today, Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao gets mobbed when he walks the sun-scorched streets of his homeland. Politely mobbed, which is to say surrounded by hundreds, sometimes thousands of his fellow Filipinos, who wouldn’t dream of bumping or jostling their hero. Instead they make a path for him, reaching out to shake his hand or touch his sleeve. It’s like Muhammad Ali in Zaire in 1974, when crowds chanted “Ali bomaye”—“Ali, kill him”—except that the six-three Ali towered over the mob, while the five-seven, 145-pound Pacquiao, smallish even for a Filipino, blends in. All you see is a space in the middle of the crowd, like the eye of a typhoon, where they give him room. Watch: the sun pulling heat-mirage shimmers off the boiling blacktop, the little boxer moving Jesus-like through the multitude. Nobody chants or yells at him. The soundtrack is bouncy Philippine pop from car radios and open-air markets. Finally the champion reaches his destination: Starbucks. The place is far too small to hold the crowd, which politely disperses. A boy in a threadbare T-shirt runs to a friend, holding up one hand. He touched Pacquiao! The second boy reaches to touch his hand, to feel the magic. Read the whole story at http://www.playboy.com/magazine/playboy-profile-manny-pacquiao