Am I The Only One Who DISLIKES Manny Pacquiao?

Not hate. Hate is too strong a word. I don't hate him. I barely know the guy. Still, for someone I hardly bother an iota about, he sure has managed to rain down on my parade once too often.


The international pugilist franchise that is Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao has single-handedly managed to lure my husband away for whole days at a time during each televised fight, my considerable charms notwithstanding.

The potent PR locomotive that carries his label is such that previously respectable and dignified citizens (e.g., my Atch, his parents, my parents, the neighbors....darn it, the whole *meeping* world!) are moved to yodel and yowl and leap up in the air throwing right hooks and left uppercuts, as if they could propel the very brunt of their enthusiasm in aiding the Pacman to a TKO victory.


And yesterday, of all the days Atch couldn't pick me up from work because he had a meeting with the bosses, was the very same day Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao's publicist penned in his appointment book the much-awaited, much-ballyhoo-ed visit to a city that had claimed him as its adopted son. My city.

*Meep*

Earlier in the day, the office was a-buzz with excitement. It was Pacquiao-this and Pacquiao-that and Pacquiao-will-they-please-just-shut-the-*meep*-up.

I dashed out the door right after closing time. I had heard the Paquiao caravan was planning to wind its leisurely way all across downtown and I wanted to miss all the action. I boarded the first jeepney at the dispatch area and impatiently waited for it to fill up. Across the way, sidewalk vendors were twitching with excitement, clutching at their makeshift cardboard posters declaring that they were totally proud of the Pacman, that they totally loved the Pacman, and would the Pacman please totally sleep with them, just for one night.

Too late for me, the sirens and drumbeats started. Traffic cops on motorbikes quarantined the road. People started screaming and waving their placcards. Camera phones were held up in readiness. Our driver and the rest of the other passengers craned their necks and bodies as far out the window as they could without actually spilling down into the street. One would have thought the Beatles had reunited for one last concert.

I counted the lead car with the sirens, a truck with masked costumed dancers and two trucks with the drum-beaters. A host of other vehicular hangers-on. Then the frenzied crowd screamed even louder, lauding the Pacman's coming. He was atop the tallest truck, a nondescript man in a nondescript tan shirt, waving to the crowd.


“It's only fitting”, my officemate M.B. had declared earlier, tongue-in-cheek, “that his name is 'Money Pakyaw'”. She was referring to the term “pakyaw”, which in the local dialect means 'to acquire in large quantities”.

“And his middle initial 'D' stands for “dollars”, she continued, “so it is a good thing he is giving all this money away, since he has pakyaw'd a lot of it.”

One of the reasons the reigning WBC lightweight champion of the world was gracing the city with his presence was to hand over a donation of one million pesos intended for victims of typhoon Fengshen. Notice, I use the word 'intended'. What percentage of that amount will actually trickle into the outstretched palms of the beleaguered? But that is another story...which I'm sure will be dismantled to death in local coffeeshops and corner sari-sari stores all across this benighted land for months to come.

Squeezed nauseatingly close under Pacquiao's armpits, the mayor and some minor politicians held aloft his various championship belts, grinning even wider than the owner of the belts himself. 2010 was a long way off, and already they were working at cementing the deal on their re-election bids. But as politics and I haven't been on speaking terms in ages, I shall leave this topic alone.

The following day, Pacquiao would be photographed distributing relief goods to people in depressed areas of the community, again with his contingent of local political...erm...friends in tow. If I wasn't so irritated by his presence, I would have felt a tinge of pity that he was being thoroughly utilized to serve other people's quests for publicity. In exchange, he got to inaugurate a new traffic light and had a day named in his honor. Quid pro quo.

And so the Pacquiao caravan slowly made its way down the street, followed by his crazed legion of cheering fans. I let out a great sigh of relief, peering anxiously at a sky that was graying with approaching rainclouds.

But when I looked expectantly at the driver, he said, “wait Miss, the parade's going to make another turn.” His jeepney was full to bursting and he was next in line to go, but the *meeping* man wanted a second look. And so gritting my teeth against the humidity and overpowering stench of humanity, I waited for round two.

By the time I got home, the sky was fully dark. It was exactly two and a half hours after I had stepped out of the office doors. Two and a half hours of waiting for the parade and the traffic to pass in what would have been a thirty-minute ride home without a certain someone's *meeping* state visit. I was tired and dusty. My stomach was growling. My children were bathed and droopy-eyed for bed.

And to dip my raw-skinned psyche in a figurative vat of vinegar, my husband, the husband who was supposed to be in a conference with the bank's Ay-Vee-Pees, called to tell me he had walked to the nearby mall where the Pacquiao caravan had landed amidst another horde of waiting worshipful fans. “Aifee, he grew some whiskers,” Atch confided in an awed voice, “and his skin seems lighter than usual. You think he's had it professionally bleached?”

All this the husband had spied at a distance of more than a hundred yards, scrunched elbow-to-rib with the rest of the Pacquiao cult followers, when he hadn't even noticed that his wife, less than a foot away, had worn her hair differently that morning. Tresses shiny with a scented hair-sculpting serum, no less.

I fell to my dinner like the starving person that I was. Crunching bones between my teeth and imagining this was Pacquiao's tibia, or that other his sternum. I ate a lot that night.

If my waistline expands beyond my usual 30 inches, I am totally going to place the blame on his head.