GQ Magazine: Biggest Little Man in the World

**hugh grant** · 03-13-2010, 08:05 PM

Didnt realize it was so long. I just read the first page. I will have to come back to the rest and that is why im posting a comment on this thread so it will be easier to find for me.

**Ivansmamma** · 03-13-2010, 08:07 PM

"After takeoff, Koncz opens the package. It's Manny's dinner. Koncz presents the dish to Pacquiao and, in a tone born more in sorrow than in anger, announces that something has gone terribly wrong; instead of rice, the chef has accompanied Manny's meat with mashed potatoes. Manny nods. "I'm so sorry, Manny," Koncz says as he begins to cut Pacquiao's steak and season his cooked vegetables for him. "The bread is very soft, though." Manny prays, eats. After, he reposes on a couch. As one member of Team Pacquiao begins to massage his feet, calves, and thighs, Koncz d****s him in a blanket, methodically but gently tucking its edges in."

Seems like he is more like Mayweather then you would first guess

**SusieQ.** · 03-13-2010, 08:09 PM

wtf?? manny gets 3 hours sleep a night? is that true?

**Roy Hobbs** · 03-13-2010, 08:09 PM

Originally posted by hugh grant

Didnt realize it was so long. I just read the first page. I will have to come back to the rest and that is why im posting a comment on this thread so it will be easier to find for me.

yea i know. its worth it. gq always has great in depth articles. i especially enjoyed the marvin harrison article where they described the quiet, humble, private wide receiver as a gun toting club owner in the mean streets of philidelphia.

very well written article.

**Roy Hobbs** · 03-13-2010, 08:15 PM

He stops singing only when the priest arrives to conduct Mass. During the prayers, Manny does not petition for a victory� only for a good fight, and for the safety of his opponent and himself.

"Manny has never needed to hate his opponents," says Miles Roces, a former Philippine congressman and current member of Team Pacquiao. "There's no chip on his shoulder. He just wants to play."

Once the priest departs, the singing resumes. He sings his way out of the dressing room and into the arena, and the music doesn't stop until he's in the ring and the mouth guard goes in.

"Manny Pacquiao likes to be happy," Roach explains. "And when Manny Pacquiao is happy, that mother****er can fight."

**Roy Hobbs** · 03-13-2010, 08:28 PM

You're talking about a man who spent every hour of his childhood stomach-hungry, shoeless, and stinking. A man whose father abandoned the home when he was a toddler, stayed away for many years, showed up one day for several hours, just long enough to cook and eat his son's dog, then vanished again. A man who never finished school and left for Manila as a teen not because he was pulled, not because others sensed a destiny in him, but because he felt duty-bound to decrease the mouths under his mother's roof. This may be the strangest twist in Pacquiao's athletic history: He grew up in a nation where the cultivation of boxing talent amounts to a civic duty, yet those who saw him compete as a boy considered Pacquiao, at best, a local talent. After arriving in Manila at the age of 14, he spent a year selling doughnuts in the street, working construction, training in a gym, at times sleeping under a bridge swaddled in newspapers�and fighting for one-hundred-peso purses (about two U.S. dollars) in illegal back-alley brawls. You're talking about a man whose consciousness was reduced to the purely physical by the time he hit puberty, a nasty little fighting ****, everything about him that could have been supple and imaginative sc****d down to and off the bone�yes? Well, no. By all rights, that's how this guy's life should have unfolded. But then that other element, the strange�which meant this was a fighter who often subjected the gym where he trained to�speeches.

and i thought my father was a jerk.

**Carpe Diem** · 03-13-2010, 08:34 PM

Originally posted by Roy Hobbs

You're talking about a man who spent every hour of his childhood stomach-hungry, shoeless, and stinking. A man whose father abandoned the home when he was a toddler, stayed away for many years, showed up one day for several hours, just long enough to cook and eat his son's dog, then vanished again. A man who never finished school and left for Manila as a teen not because he was pulled, not because others sensed a destiny in him, but because he felt duty-bound to decrease the mouths under his mother's roof. This may be the strangest twist in Pacquiao's athletic history: He grew up in a nation where the cultivation of boxing talent amounts to a civic duty, yet those who saw him compete as a boy considered Pacquiao, at best, a local talent. After arriving in Manila at the age of 14, he spent a year selling doughnuts in the street, working construction, training in a gym, at times sleeping under a bridge swaddled in newspapers�and fighting for one-hundred-peso purses (about two U.S. dollars) in illegal back-alley brawls. You're talking about a man whose consciousness was reduced to the purely physical by the time he hit puberty, a nasty little fighting ****, everything about him that could have been supple and imaginative sc****d down to and off the bone�yes? Well, no. By all rights, that's how this guy's life should have unfolded. But then that other element, the strange�which meant this was a fighter who often subjected the gym where he trained to�speeches.

and i thought my father was a jerk.

He has come a long way, and he truly deserved everything he has accomplished.

**Roy Hobbs** · 03-13-2010, 08:40 PM

Consider that Manny Pacquiao, whom one former Philippine congressman describes as the country's "most important source of social welfare," is also its most enthusiastic ****fighter (it's a legal and beloved pastime there) and has constructed a private training compound for his warrior birds. Consider that Manny Pacquiao is… you surely saw this coming…a pop singer with two platinum albums in a nation in which karaoke singing is serious ****ing business—in which breaches of karaoke etiquette actually get people killed, and where over the past decade poorly received karaoke performances of Paul Anka's signature tune have generated half a dozen murders now known as the "My Way" killings.

what the hell?

**Roy Hobbs** · 03-13-2010, 08:46 PM

This cognitive dissonance, the way Manny Pacquiao channels two mutually contradicting national narratives�it's not academic. Manny himself concedes that last fall, a Philippine mayor named Andal Ampatuan enjoyed a ringside view of his demolition of Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, Ampatuan's father, a former provincial governor irked by a political challenger to the Ampatuan clan's long-standing dominance, allegedly decided enough was enough and ordered his son to "take out" the man that very day and, if necessary, anybody "with him." There turned out to be quite a few "withs" on November 23, the day Ampatuan allegedly carried out his father's order�fifty-seven in all, including thirty journalists. (Though not the target himself, who knew he was in danger and had sent his wife and daughter, whom he presumed would be considered untouchable, to register his candidacy.) According to survivors, the mayor "thoughtfully" considered each plea for mercy, then laughed "at the top of his voice" as he delivered his verdicts at close range.

Take Luis "Chavit" Singson. The Governor, they call him, though he no longer holds that office. He's a 68-year-old tobacco magnate and one of the most powerful men in the Philippines. He's Manny's main political sponsor and a close friend�the kind admitted into the ring after fights. The Governor takes care of things for Manny. Actually, the Governor takes care of all sorts of things, some of which he speaks about with surprising candor. Say, the millions of dollars in ******** kickbacks he gave to former Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Or beating up his mistress. Last summer, the Governor found her with a younger man. He and a number of cohorts allegedly rectified this situation with (among other implements) a tiger whip.

"I beat up both of them!" the Governor cheerfully told a radio interviewer in September, after a picture of the mistress, her face looking like a lasagna, appeared on the front page of The Philippine Star. "It's good I'm not ruthless," he added. "I didn't kill them."

The Governor was gracious enough to fly me and some two dozen other members of Team Pacquiao from Manila to General Santos for Manny's birthday party. We sat together. Later, one Team Pacquiao member expressed surprise that the Governor hadn't shown me the picture in his wallet.

"Who's it of ?" I asked.

"That guy's ****."

"What?"

"After the Governor's guys had laid it on a table and whacked it with a hammer. It had to be surgically cut off after. Too mauled."

On the plane, I asked the Governor about Manny. "Girls squeal" in Pacquiao's presence, he remarked. "Like the sound of a pig being slaughtered!" But after a few minutes he changed the subject. "I have twelve tiger. When I home, I swim with them every day. But now I want to make liger, yes?" The product of a lion and a tiger. "So I bring lion in, and he do this, yes?" The Governor made a ****y-****y motion with his right index finger and his closed left fist. "And he do, and he do. No liger. And so I make him do, and do some more. And then�acchhhhh!"

The Governor clasped his hands to his heart and rolled his eyes back in their orbits; his lion stud had literally died of a cardiac infarction while being made to copulate for the umpteenth time with one of his tigresses.

"No liger," the Governor said dejectedly.

for a nice, humble, individual, pacman hangs out with some very unsavory individuals to put it lightly.

GQ Magazine: Biggest Little Man in the World