EDITORIAL — Go Manny

Tomorrow, as had happened in the past, the entire Filipino nation will appear to go off on a self-proclaimed holiday. There will noticeably be a sharp decline in the number of people and vehicles in the streets. Most everyone will be indoors watching tv.

For tomorrow, Filipino boxing hero Manny Pacquiao will once again climb up the ring in Las Vegas (it will be Saturday there) for the third, and hopefully the last, of his storied megabuck boxing trilogy with Mexican counterpart hero Erik Morales.

Some veteran boxing buffs would love to draw parallels between the Pacquiao-Morales duel and the five-bout series in the 1960s between our own Gabriel Flash Elorde and Teruo Kosaka of Japan, whom the Cebuano bootblack from Bogo beat, 4-1.

But while aficionados who know their mitts insist Elorde was the greater fighter (he held on to his junior lightweight crown for seven long years ), the Flash just came too early for cable tv and pay-per-view, thus losing out to mass appeal and big money.

Besides, in Elorde's time, Filipinos can still hold their heads high and had relatively little need for heroes to latch their damaged egos to. Pacquiao came just in time for that. With a national pride scraping the bottom of the barrel, the boy from GenSan was just what we needed.

It is not so much Pacquiao's fighting skills that bring patriotic tears to our eyes than his big fighting heart. Each time he lunges forward to meet the enemy, the battered pride of a nation also surges forward seeking release and retribution in gore and blood.

We scream with every punch that Pacquiao throws, dedicated to all the times that we have been down, shamed before the eyes of a world that is fast leaving us behind. Morales is not the enemy. He just happens to personify the collective frustrations we desperately need to shake off.

That is why, win or lose, we reiterate our advice to Pacquiao to hang up his gloves soon. He has nothing more to prove yet risks everything to some perverted twist of fate. With his fate so intertwined with the national psyche, it should be clear to Pacquiao what his options are.