If nationhood was an imagined community, it was imagined with much passion that day. Everybody wanted to identify with every symbol of nationality available. Gladiators had fought and something abstract called "national honor" was redeemed.
The man from what should better be named back to Dadiangas stood triumphant as his Mexican nemesis crumbled to the canvas. He fought bravely and battled methodically. He deserves every accolade that came like a flood when the nation broke out in cheers with the force of a dam breaking.
We all needed a moment of collective joy amidst all the bleakness we shared. Manny Pacquiao gave us that moment. If it was therapy, its effects were magical.
I never really liked boxing. It is a blood sport. It is raw and cruel and primitive.
But it is also the sport of the poor. We do not need fancy tracks, manicured lawns and expensive equipment to build champions. If it were a business, it required small investments for big returns.
And so we excel in this sport. It has been the gateway out of poverty for our champions. Those who were wise invested their purses and averted returning back to poverty after their time in the ring was done. Those who were unwise soaked up the glory and died poorer than rats.
It is also a sport with a useful narrative for the national community. That narrative changes with the times.
When Gabriel "Flash" Elorde was our boxing hero, the national narrative was that of a poor boy defying the odds through sheer grit. Courage and kind-heartedness were the virtues of this hero.
He carried the flag to foreign capitals and slaughtered their champions. Then he came home and used his winnings to train other poor boys looking for a door to quickly step out of poverty by their very willingness to take pain and dish the same on their opponents.
The narrative perceptively changed in Pacquiao’s last outing the other day.
In all the commentaries I listened to as we all soaked up an imagined glory we all wanted desperately to share, the operative word is no longer "pure grit." The new operative word is "discipline."
The "People’s Champion" trained hard and studied well. He maintained a punishing regimen and worked with a team that transferred technology and devised a clear plan.
Pacquiao was a different man from the one who lost to the Mexican champion last year when he stepped into the ring last Sunday. His physique spoke of the rigid training of the program he undertook for months before the fight. He resisted the temptation to brawl and stuck to the strategy. If there ever was a boxing textbook, Manny personified it.
No one spoke of this last match in terms of "pure grit." Now everyone spoke of discipline and method.
From brawler, he metamorphosed into a specialist. He transformed into a technician of the sport. He was no longer the image of peasant boy out to make a quick buck by just being brave. He was now a yuppie personification.
The southpaw held his left arm in reserve, defending against his opponent’s wicked right hook. He attacked most of the time with his right fist, dismantling his opponent’s capacity to fight. When he finally used his left fist, it was to settle the battle decisively.
Boxing is like putting out fighting cocks to kill or be killed, only worse. In this sport, we pay poor boys a tidy sum to step into the ring for a bloody battle.
Notwithstanding my politically correct view of the sport, I would not let the opportunity of a magical moment of national reconstruction pass without being in one of the hundreds of technological cathedrals where Filipinos crowded to rededicate themselves to their nationality.
My excuse for being in a mall early Sunday, dragging myself from bed early despite all the aches from a long bout with golf the previous day, was to undertake a sociological study of the event. The ticket said I should be in the theater at 7:30 and so I was – telling friends I was there as a participant-observer in a major national event in order to avoid being tagged a mere "boxing fan."
A television crew spotted me anyway as I enjoyed a large cup of coffee in such an unlikely time and place. Seeing through my excuse, they instantly reinvented me as a "boxing analyst."
True, I was there to savor the moment. But I was also there to understand a phenomenon.
Citizenship is a civil religion. We need rituals to reaffirm and consolidate our faith in nationhood, our membership in a political community that often seems to take much more from us than it gives.
If our citizenship is a civil religion, it has teetered on the brink of faithlessness recently. Many of us have become cynical of nationhood as the means to achieve a better life. They feel betrayed by the political class. They want to downgrade membership in national society by reducing it to a loose federation where the nation-state should matter as little as possible to the lives of actual communities.
Because our politicians could not restore the faith, our athletes are forced to step up to the plate.
But athletes can never substitute for governments as the foci of patriotism.
They can make us cheer and wave the flag to partake of the pride they justly deserve. It will be unjust, however, to burden our athletes with the responsibility of restoring our belief that nationhood is good for us all.
That is government’s responsibility – even as governments have become incapable of producing moments of joyous contagion such as our sportsmen now do with regularity.