“Pacman” Pacquiao…again!

Last night, I watched the Pacquiao-Cotto fight in a neighbor’s house.

PPV (“Pay Per View” TV), at $54.95, was too expensive to watch alone. So I was glad when neighbor Sunta Pascual called and invited me to watch together with her daughter and her son-in-law and a couple of other friends.

By 6:30,  Sunta was calling — she didn’t know how to order PPV using her remote.  I sauntered across the street to her house.  For some reason, her remote was different from mine, though we both had DirecTV, so we ended up calling the 800 number instead.

After getting the fight channel on the TV, I stepped into the kitchen cum dining room.  Everything was laid out neatly — grapes, strawberries, manggang hilaw with bagoong.  She also had bags of chips, cans of peanuts, coolers, and sodas.  Her daughter, she explained, was bringing pizza and salad.  Altogether, there would be food for 20 at a boxing party with five or six guests.

Miguel Cotto vs. Manny Pacquiao.

The fight was between welterweight world champion Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico and challenger Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines.  Could Pacquiao add a seventh championship belt to his collection?  Odds were 2.5:1 that he could.

La Diva sang "Bayang Magiliw" athe the start of the Pacquiao-Cotto match.

“Lupang Hinirang” — the Philippine National Anthem — was sung by La Diva, a popular pop song trio in the Philippines.  It was a beautiful rendition — definitely much more uplifting than the national anthem as sung by Martin Nievera at the last Pacquiao fight.

The first round was admittedly Cotto’s.  The Puerto Rican actually dominated the first two rounds, although the judges gave Pacquiao the second round

It was Pacquiao’s fight from the third round on.  He scored two knockdowns between the 3rd and 11th rounds, and won by TKO in the 12th round.

Scenes from the Pacquiao-Cotto fight. Photos from Sports Illustrated.

Now, to another aspect of the fight.  How many Philippine officials — governors, senators, congressmen, et al. — were at the fight?  I’m sure those who attended came under the guise of “official business” and used public funds, timing their “official” junkets to coincide with the fight — the “we were just in the neighborhood” defense.

We know Luis “Chavit” Singson was there, but he does not have access to government travel funds to spend.  The First Gentleman Mike Arroyo was there, but neither does he have access to government travel funds, though the money he spent there was probably the “people’s money,” too.

Thank your constituents, as well as the Filipino people, all of you who came on government money.  If not for them, you’d be pitifully curtailed to watching the fight on your own large-screen HD flat screens in your private home theaters.  Poor you…