Pacquiao: Senator by day, boxer by nightv

By Al S. Mendoza

 

MANNY Pacquiao is back to where he does best: Training.

Yes, the People’s Champ is back on the road—literally.

He jogged morning of Monday.

Before lunch, he was at the Senate.

By nightfall, he was in the roped ring doing shadow boxing.

Why was he into all of that?

“I am keeping my promise,” he said in Tagalog.

And what was the promise?

“I promised during the campaign trail that if I win in my senatorial bid, I will devote all of my time to my duties as a senator of the republic,” he said.

He won, hitting mightily the Top 10 in a winning field of 12.

To those not yet in the know, Pacquiao has un-retired in boxing.

Last month, he broke his vow not to fight again after defeating Timothy Bradley Jr. in their third fight of a trilogy to seal a 2-1 victory.

It would have been easily a 3-0 finish for Pacquiao had the judges not submitted a scandalous split decision victory for Bradley in their first encounter some years back.

Pacquiao beat Bradley for the second consecutive time last April, almost a month before the May 9 elections that saw the PacMan emerging No. 8 in the senatorial race.

He had barely warmed up his seat in the Senate when Pacquiao announced he would resume his boxing career.

“I realized that it is really in boxing that I could earn enough money for my family,” said Pacquiao, who nets millions of pesos in every fight.  “I will not earn much if I would stick strictly to my duties in the Senate.”

To his credit, he has sponsored nearly 10 bills already—a far cry from his two-bill performance in his six years at Congress where he attended only four of the 200 Congress sessions in his second term.

But he said he was mending his ways with his entry into the Senate.

And it seems auspicious enough that on the first day of his training for his comeback fight—against Jessie Vargas of Mexico-Los Angeles—it coincided with the opening of the illegal-drugs killing probe in the Senate.

And he pleasantly surprised the country with his rather straightforward and sensible line of questioning he had fired to the resource persons presented in the Senate probe.

Afterwards, he told the media he was sticking to his new plan: Senator by day, boxer by night.

He will be training for the Nov. 6 fight in challenging Vargas’ world crown—mostly in the Philippines.

While his chief trainer Freddie Roach will not arrive in Manila until next month, his boyhood friend, Buboy Fernandez, will supervise his preparation.

He said his training will not disturb his Senate duties.

By Oct. 5, when the Senate goes into recess, Pacquiao said he will fly to Los Angeles where he will conclude his preparation for the fight.

We can only hope that his new regimen would produce wonders for our 8-time world division champion come November.

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