Pacquiao: Another Villa? / Tyson was a titmouse

They were the "little brown dolls" of yesteryear. These were the diminutive Filipino fist-tossers who invaded America in the 30s and 40s with nothing in their bodies except a prayer and fists that clawed at the air like bursts of shrapnel. Let me see if I remember some of them. Yes, Small Montano, Little Dado, Speedy Dado, Clever Sencio, the Cabanelas Speed and Dencio, Pete Sarmiento. Two of them, Little Dad and Small Montano, got to be world flyweight champions. But the greatest of them all was Pancho Villa. He was the namesake of another immortal Pancho, namely Mexico’s Pancho Villa, who preceded Che Guevara as Latin America’s most famous guerrillero. Pancho Villa transformed the hills of Northern Mexico into rebel fortresses from which spewed the revolution that bloodied the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in 1909-1913.

Our Pancho Villa who presumably got his ring name from the great Mexican rebel was nothing less than spectacular. The redoubtable Jimmy Wilde was invincible in the 30s as world flyweight champion until he came upon Villa. The latter had the habit of literally leaping into the ring like a full-bodied typhoon. He was the hungriest of hungry fighters. He ripped into Wilde and in no time at all, Pancho Villa stood triumphant over his fallen foe. He was the first Asian to ever win a world boxing title. He was certainly the first and last Filipino to ever blaze into world fistiana with the speed of a sudden beam of sunlight, the crushing weight of ironball and the thunder of Thor. Top of the line.

Pancho Villa stood all alone, that is until last Saturday evening in Memphis Tennessee, when another Filipino flung a gauntlet. His name was Manny Pacquiao. Soggy-haired, whose forelocks swept down like forlorn eyebrows of Joe de Venecia, almost gamin-faced, with bland, mildly staring eyes that hardly betrayed the explosive power stored in his fists, Pacquiao demolished former world bantamweight champion Jorge Julio in less than two rounds. Two rounds! You had to see it to believe it.

It’s almost bizarre the way Manny Pacquiao fights. His eyes have the concentration of a masseur in a barber shop. Not once do they light up with fury as he proceeds to destroy his foe with the wicked precision of a devil wielding his pitchfork. He never gave the Colombian a chance to get untracked from his stool. Yes, he was exactly like Pancho Villa who never bothered with the niceties of circling, jabbing and feinting for leverage, sizing up. Pacquiao in another way was an infantryman charging into enemy ranks with all barrels blazing, not counting the risks of counter-fire. His was the initial fire, the continuing fire, the consuming fire, the lethal fire. He threw fists as though they came out of a machinegun’s bottomless maw…

Julio never knew how to fight back. If he was Colombia’s El Conquistador his favorite conquering place was the deck. There twice, Pacquiao sent him sprawling like a discarded pomelo. In the second, Julio slumped to the canvas after a Pacquiao left straight. That was it. As the Colombian got up after the count of four, eyes glazed, knees buckling, heart shredding, Manny Pacquiao was all over him, like a police posse finally cornering a fugitive and giving it to him in spades, shovels, hortatory police jargon and handcuffs. Of course, referee Bill Clancy stopped the fight.

Now for a post-mortem.

I’ve seen almost all of them except of course Pancho Villa. In my book, Gabriel (Flash) Elorde came next. The ex-Bogo bootblack had the hand and arm speed, the legs that never bore him back but only forward, the big heart, the steel discipline, versatility, trigger-quick reflexes. Elorde too was a southpaw, who could cross that left, or abbreviate it into a hook that had all the numbing effect of a cobra bite. If Manny Pacquiao holds, continues his present course, perseveres, and doesn’t get spoiled, he could very well be the 21st century replica of the immortal Pancho Villa.

Pacquiao has everything or almost. The speed is there, the mercurial reflexes, the ability to measure distance. Without looking it, he is a killer with no fear. For a bantamweight he packs the punch of a featherweight. Pacquiao knows the grammar of boxing–destroy or be destroyed. And he doesn’t wait for the foe to come to him. This was the military wizardry of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Napoleon who invented the blitzkrieg in military warfare. The central idea was to advance suddenly in great strengths, swift, create a moment’s panic in enemy ranks, take advantage of that panic to create fear in the enemy, unsettle him, then pour through as floodwaters pour through, as the thousands of horses of Genghis Kahn poured through, as Gen. George Patton’s tanks poured through.

Pacquiao is a natural fighter. Why do our best fist-tossers come from the south? Pacquiao hails from General Santos in South Cotabato, where rumbles are a baker’s dozen a day. Maybe the kids from the South learn to fight at an early age, particularly in the sugar plantations, where their arms swing forward and upward in the cutting of cane, where grinding poverty is the booster rocket in the seat of their pants. The city beckons. And with the city, gold if you know how to box, the lure of world championships if the sheer magic of pugilism is in you. And its overpowering mystique of civilized slaughter. Kill boy, maim and destroy.

Manny Pacquiao is that rare Filipino who was born to fight, get into every ring as though he owned it, and pounce on the enemy with killer hands before he can hitch up his pants.

* * *

He was madman to the world, monster to everybody. He was an ugly, malevolent Piltdown pug who could pulverize everything he touched. Mike Tyson had built such an awesome reputation his foes shivered and sank even before they entered the ring with him. And so it was in the fight with Lennox Lewis, the world heavyweight champion. It was to be the world’s biggest fight audience, the biggest purses, $17.5 million each that could reach $50 million per with endorsements and bulging spectators all around the world. Lennox, many critics said, would come down like the Berlin Wall once this savage got to him. Savage? Mike Tyson once boasted the best blow he had ever thrown landed on wife Robin Givens when he got sore. "She really offended me," he said, "and I went bam, and she flew backward, hitting every f–king wall in the apartment."

And then again, he said: "I like to hurt women when I make love to them. I like to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed, it gives me pleasure." Three years ago, or was it four, Tyson, in a fit or rage, spit out his black mouthpiece and started to bite off Evander Holyfield’s ear. Mind you, that was during a "civilized" prizefight. During a pre-fight presentation just months ago, Mike Tyson waded into Lennox’s entourage and bit off-so Lennox said – a chunk of his thigh during the melee.

In a civilized world, this man should be behind bars.

But boxing is not "civilized." It is not despite all the efforts of the Marquis of Queensberry to root out is savagery by riddling this most brutal of all sports with rules, rules, rules, the most famous of which is not to hit below the belt. Mike Tyson knew this. Prizefighting was blood-curdling. The audiences keened to it. And it came as no surprise at all that the uglier and the more detestable Tyson became, the more they wanted him in the ring, and to hell with it if he raped women, bushwhacked men in bars, expelled profanity from his mouth, told women journalists if they wanted to interview him, they should fornicate with him.

So the beast was now in Memphis. To the tune of gangsta rap, he mounted the ring, everything about him black, his shoes, his get-up, his mouthpiece, his slit, glowering eyes. The features of his face told it all – a stab from a prehistoric mountain rock, teeth and mouth that moved like a crocodile’s, shoulders with the wing span of giant bat, a torso that sloped down to a funnel like a tornado’s. He would kill Lennox Lewis. He was the greatest ever, the youngest at 19 to ever win the world heavyweight championship, the meanest, orneriest, deadliest of them all.

Well, Mike Tyson couldn’t kill any respectable heavyweight that evening.

Lennox Lewis completely dominated him. It was a mismatch. It was only in the first round that Mike Tyson crackled with jabs and an overhand right. The rest of the fight, until Mike Tyson got knocked out in the eight, Lennox Lewis held him off. The first four rounds were an endless tattoo of jabs, clinching. Then in the fifth, Lewis started pushing Tyson back. Push the monster back? Yes. The fight was going out of Mike Tyson, his eyes dumbed by Lennox’s jabs, cut and puffed at the ends and blood started to come out in a thin trickle.

Know what? This man who scared the hell out of everybody was now scared. You could see it. By the sixth, the roar normally associated with his presence in the ring, was now a mincing, painful moan, as of a hold-up thug suddenly feeling a cop’s gun on his neck and beginning to pee in his pants. This time Lewis took complete control of the right, which he started in the third when he opened cuts in Tyson’s left and right eyes with jabs that spat jungle venom. Then came Lennox uppercuts and overhand rights. And pretty soon, Mike Tyson was a man lost in the subway, stumbling, then sprawling after Lewis got him with roundhouse right to the chin. You could almost hear the sound, a rifle crack.

What a fight, what a sight, what an ending! There was Mike Tyson on his back, dead to the lights, dead to the world, dead to everything that once made him the greatest draw in prizefighting. He wants a rematch with Lennox, but Mike Tyson is finished. Fear made him, public loathing and revulsion. Tyson was mean and cruel and ruthless–and he could maim, mutilate and destroy better than anybody in the ring. Bam, bam, bam.

Now that is gone. And Mike Tyson is gone.