Boxing: From slums to sensation

Manny Pacquiao lived on the streets as a child in Manila, fights for a living today, visited President Obama recently and will inevitably upgrade from congressman to presidential candidate in the Philippines in the next 10 years.

His days under cardboard on the streets of the sprawling city, after leaving home when his father allegedly slaughtered and cooked his pet dog, and his improbable rise to the Philippine congress, where he is the architect of new anti-sex slave legislation, make his story one of boxing's most amazing.

Pacquiao will defend his WBO welterweight title today in Las Vegas against the once-brilliant but now slightly jaded Shane Mosley. He is unbeaten since 1995 and has added world titles at five weights since his last loss.

As a fighter, Pacquiao has won world titles at seven different weights and has a remarkable history of startling finishes in brutal fights. His savage series of meetings with Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez, the finest Mexicans of this and arguably any generation, and his cold-eyed destructions of Ricky Hatton and Oscar de la Hoya guarantee Pacquiao a special place in boxing's history books.

Last May he won a seat in the Philippine congress and has taken his congressional duties so seriously that his trainer, Freddie Roach, was convinced he would walk away from the sport. However, Pacquiao is skilled at manipulating time and his entourage, which is a staggering moving, cooking, laughing and singing gang, and now includes his political chief of staff.

At his last fight in November against Antonio Margarito, he hired a 747 and flew in more than 200 people from Manila to Dallas. They disembarked to join his retinue in several plush suites, where Pacquiao always sleeps with a dozen or so close friends. His wife and any other women have their own rooms.

As a child in the Manila slums, Pacquiao slept on the floors in gyms with dozens of other homeless and desperate fighters. His passage from six-stone anonymity, fighting for peanuts in long forgotten Filipino outposts, to the smiling, bilingual boxer with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at US$70m is one of the legends of the boxing business.

He had over 30 fights before turning professional, weighed less than 90 pounds and was unbeaten, always winning about $3 and enough rice to feed the other dwellers in the gym's filthy bunk beds. He was just 16 when he turned professional, often having to weigh in with lumps of metal in his socks. The $40 purses he received for his fights meant he could eat and send money to his mother.

After 24 fights, and still when he was only 19, Pacquiao won and then lost the flyweight world title. In 2003, he arrived on the true international stage when he ruined Barrera in a non-title fight at featherweight.

Mosley will be Pacquiao's 18th opponent since the night he dismantled Barrera; the list includes De la Hoya, left stunned on his stool at the end of seven rounds. Hatton went down and out in two rounds and the Mexicans succumbed in slugfests that continually wrote and rewrote their way into the pantheon of great fights involving great fighters.

He is one of the best boxers of the last 50 years.

Bob Arum, the promoter who travelled with Muhammad Ali and promotes Pacquiao, is convinced that he is a bigger star. "Ali never had this level of devotion," Arum said.

Pacquiao is serious about his political career.

"I want to achieve the same in politics that I have in boxing," he said. At the same time, the 32-year-old has unfinished business inside the ring and is still hoping for a showdown with the evasive American Floyd Mayweather in a fight that would guarantee the pair US$50m if a deal can be done. The partial motivation for fighting Mosley is to try to beat him inside the distance and improve on the points win by Mayweather against Mosley last year.

All planned attempts to get them together have sadly faltered, the main stumbling block being the American's insistence on Olympic-style drug tests before and after the fight. Pacquiao has passed every drug test he has ever taken.

- INDEPENDENT