Filipino Expats Community of Thailand Online - A 'Cinderella moment': Pacquiao and Filipino pride

A 'Cinderella moment': Pacquiao and Filipino pride

Friday, 27 January 2006

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DESPITE the Filipinos' own long love affair with boxing, it had to come from Hollywood. The late Fernando Poe Jr. did come up with a blockbuster hit with himself depicting the role of the man in the cordoned ring, but it was "Cinderella Man," starring Russel Crowe, that gave it heart, packed it with soul and a lot of punch.

Rising from then America's dark era of the Great Depression, the protagonist James. J. Braddock, of Irish descent, gave hope to his fellow down-to-their-last-luck countrymen. He was a slugger who was forced to work the docks when he broke his right hand as his family started to crumble; his wife had to send their three kids to her relatives when the going got too tough to keep everybody under one roof.

From nearly biting the dust of poverty, his hand healed, and The Bulldog of New Jersey lived to fight another day as a blue-blooded boxer, as did the rest of his countrymen.

Our own Manny Pacquiao rose from relative anonymity and grinding poverty associated with rural life. He was making his own "comeback" and did his homework this time with patience and plain old hard work. He is "masa" [of the masses] to the bone, just like most Filipinos who watched him fight, glued as the entire Philippines had become to their TV sets in a communal exercise of dread and anticipation. Just like in the movie, we are in our own version of The Great Depression, but the similarity with America ends there since ours had nothing to do with drought or luck.

Pacquiao helped rekindle the much-needed fire of courage, flicker of hope and triumphant spirit into the hearts of every Filipino, the way our victory in the Southeast Asian Games allowed us to lift our heads up high again before the world. Yet even before the fairy-tale dust has settled, the ugly smog of politics darkened our TV screens, with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's henchmen wanting their 15 seconds, hungrily stealing the limelight from Pacquiao, and leaving a very bad taste in every spectator's mouth.

This government will stop at nothing to promote itself, but ultimately becoming the biggest anti-climax in its attempt to cover for its ineptitude and crookedness, with its brand of lying and PR-hoodwinking as its only idea of strength. It is bent on killing people power and democracy as we know it, even as it calls for unity and economic take-off in a contrived disguise called Charter change.

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