Pacquiao, Onyok, Ali and life

I am not a boxing fan but I did wait with bated breath for Manny Pacquiao’s Sunday confrontation with Mexican legend Eric Morales. And I did let out some expletives with some punches from either side.

The closest I have been to boxing is in our weekly taebo sessions at the Inquirer. When our trainer John Q yells ``Attack!’’ we demolish imaginary foes and when it is ``Defense!’’ we duck under our fists. You have to be fully focused and cannot allow the mind to wander otherwise you’d get lost in the footwork. It is during the post-taebo crunches and push-ups that I do my out-of-body flight that helps me make it (arrrgh!) to the last count.

The last time I wrote about boxing was 10 years ago when Mansueto “Onyok” Velasco Jr. won the silver at the Atlanta Olympics. (Onyok is Ilonggo endearment for Junior.) The Inquirer's banner photo of our champ on the podium waving a Philippine banderita and wearing that gentliest of smiles brought tears to my eyes. I remember that look that outshone his silver medal. After having been brutally battered by the judges (but not by the Bulgarian) Onyok emerged unbowed, with a countenance so serene, so beautiful, so gently Ilonggo. That photo spoke a thousand words.

That is why I wrote about it. The human side of it, not the brutal sport. But how does one separate the two? Our sports guru Recah Trinidad will tell you, you can’t. And where is Onyok now, I want to know.



Boxing is the sport of the underdog. I have yet to know of a boxer who was born rich. But they could die rich, that is, if they use what they know of boxing in navigating through later life.

Like boxing, long distance cycling is also for the anak pawis. Although every other rich kid now owns a mountain bike, I have yet to know of one that would want to join The Tour. In boxing and long-distance cycling, one has to have a high threshold for pain. They are not for the faint of heart. In golf (which also needs discipline), you take your sweet time walking and you have to have lots of money too, unless you are a caddy with access to the green.

Much has been said about Pacquiao, how he made the nation rise as one in jubilation. What he said, thought and felt; what he wore and ate and his hopes for this fractured nation. Pacquiao’s famous victory quote: “Sana magkaintindihan na tayong lahat.” (Literal translation: “I hope we would now understand one another.”) But we all know that magkaintindihan (from entiende) means more than just understanding, it means settling differences and living in peace and harmony.

Being mainly a feature writer, I am interested in knowing more about the so-called “Pacquiao Team” that got a little of the limelight. Who are they, what are they?

I have kept all these years the April 25, 1988 issue of the Sports Illustrated magazine with “(Muhammad) Ali and His Entourage” as cover story. It is about “The Greatest” and the people who waited on him when he was the greatest. The story by Gary Smith is a great one. “The champ and his followers were the greatest show on earth, and then the show ended. But life went on.” The gleaming black-and-white photographs by Gregory Heisler are probing. It is a story about greatness and decline. It is also about moving on.

Here again are the men and woman who doted on the champ long after the show had ended. All together, they paint a portrait of Ali, even as they paint a portrait of themselves.

Of Ferdie Pacheco, the doctor: “The first signal of decline was in Ali's hands. Pacheco began injecting them with novocaine before fights, and the ride went on. Then the reflexes showed, the beatings began, the media started to question the doctor. And the world began to learn how much the doctor loved to talk...The slower Ali spoke, the more frequently spoke the doctor.”

Of Gene Kilroy, the facilitator: “He has covered the walls of his rec room with 50 Ali photos. He reminisces every day. He watches videos of old Ali interviews he helped facilitate....”

Said Lana Shabazz, the cook: “I call him, ask him what he's eatin'. People ask me all the time how he's doin. Know how that feels, when people ask you how's your child, and you don't know what to say?”

Of Luis Sarria, the masseur: “I remembered (those hands), working endlessly up and down the smooth ripples of Ali's body until he drifted off to sleep. His hand I remembered, but I could not remember him.”

Of Pat Patterson, the bodyguard: “(He) had to sit on the corner stool and watch helplessly when his man needed protection most, in the ring when the end was near. `Watching him get hit was like watching someone stick my mama with a knife.'”

Of Herbert Muhammad, the manager: “His dream of building 49 more mosques like this first one, using the money Ali and he could generate, was drifting further and further from his reach. Ali slurred words and shook and didn't want to be seen on television.”

Of Drew (Bundini) Brown, the motivator: “...the ghetto poet who motivated Ali and maddened him, who invented the phrase, `Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'...who licked Ali's mouthpiece before sliding it in but never said a yes to him he didn't mean; who could engage the champion in long discussions of nature and God and man, then lie in the hotel pool before a fight and have his white woman.”

Despite his immense wealth, Ali remained trapped in a ghetto.

The world of boxing is a surreal world, a gold mine for stories. Consider the many movies (``The Champ’’, ``Raging Bull’’, ``Million-Dollar Baby’’) and novels--Norman Mailer's among them. I don't like boxing but I like boxing stories.

Santo Ninos, rapture and tragedies

Another religion-related tragedy has claimed the lives of at least 20, the majority of them innocents who, when they set off, had no idea that their foolhardy elders were taking them to their watery graves.

Last Sunday, the feast of the Holy Infant Jesus or the Santo Nino, a boat overloaded with devotees and their children capsized in the waters off San Ricardo town on Panaon Island in Southern Leyte. The boat named ML Jun Jay was part of a fluvial procession, a festive display that often highlights religious feasts in places that are near bodies of water.

Overcrowded boats, uncaring public officials, unmindful church officials, fevered rapture and carefree abandon on the part of devotees—all these are the ingredients of impending disaster. It had happened several times before, it happened again on one of the Filipinos’ beloved of feasts. And most of the victims were children like the Santo Nino.

But if ill-managed fluvial processions are the recipe for tragedies, they also say a lot about the Filipinos’ penchant for public display of religious fervor that borders on fanaticism and recklessness. No one could say what spiritual merits or demerits could come from all these. I leave that to God to decide.



It is hard to fathom the motives, the reasons and the urgency that push people to participate in these life-threatening faith-related activities, such as getting crucified while roasting in the deadly summer heat, risking being trampled on during the feast of the Black Nazarene or squeezing into overloaded boats. Two people died during the Black Nazarene ``surge’’ (human tsunami is more like it) last week that is not seen anywhere in the world.

Some do it as panata (a vow) because of prayers that have been granted, others do it to buttress pending petitions, and there are those who simply feel good being there with the hope grace would rain down on them.

With the exception of the messy crucifixion, the other religious-cultural festivities aren’t supposed to be life threatening if only these are properly organized and controlled. But we never learn.

In 1993, 269 perished in the murky river in Bocaue, Bulacan when a pagoda-boat packed with devotees capsized. Similar tragedies happened in Lumban, Laguna; Butuan City and Pampanga in the past decade. These are all so relatively recent that after a few clicks of the computer keys by the Inquirer research staff the news stories on these tragedies quickly tumbled out.

And was it at the Penafrancia feast that a makeshift structure, from where people watched the fluvial procession, collapsed?

Grim and determined Bible-thumping purists will easily dismiss all this Pinoy frenzy as plain idolatry. As a Christian and Catholic, I have never felt inclined to make such practices part of my spiritual itinerary. But as a Filipino, ah, I love watching this faith-filled cultural display. Who am I to judge the state of the soul of those who practice this type of popular religiosity?

Beholding the faith and fervor of the masa could be a confounding experience. And it would be good for those who seem to have had their faith all theologically and biblically figured out to come down from their perch. There is a lot to learn from hobnobbing with the hoi polloi for whom spiritual ecstasy might come easy with only the Marian hymns in Baclaran on Wednesdays. Or in being lost in the heady mist of incense in Quiapo church and knowing in their heart of hearts that God listens and has mercy.

Still it wouldn’t hurt if the church hierarchy would do something to rein in the excess fervor even for the simple reason that God does not want to see the multitude falling all over themselves and to their deaths. But that is the Pinoy, one might argue, and this trait is perhaps what keeps many from choosing death by suicide.

This affection for the Santo Nino, academics would say, is reflective of the Filipino’s amazing childlike faith that also often borders on the childish. How do you explain the transmogrification of the image of the Infant Jesus of Prague into a nino with multiple personalities?

If the parish you went to last Sunday was one attended by people from all walks of life, you would have seen Santo Ninos also from all walks of life and dressed according to their owners’ taste, inclination and predilection. The Santo Nino has now become a doll to be fancily dressed up like a Barbie or an infant transvestite. But macho Santo Ninos in police uniform are now also fairly common.

At Mass last Sunday I saw a Santo Nino in denim overalls carried by a young woman who was wearing the shortest denim shorts. (Only in Catholic churches. You don’t see this kind of Sunday wear in the Iglesia ni Cristo.) Well, in order not to be discomfited and discombobulated by the surreal-ness of it all I chose to be amused.

Elsewhere that day, while ``Pit Senor!’’ exploded in Cebu and the ati-atihan thundered with ``Hala Bira!’’ in Kalibo, ninos and ninas drowned in Southern Leyte.

It’s real and it’s surreal. As the great Nick Joaquin wrote: ``So how much more manifold do you want the Philippines to be? From orgasmic Kalibo to tranquil Boracay. Or from the hot mystic lowlands of Pangasinan to the cold mystic highlands of Baguio. From the mega that is Manila to the mini that is a Ma’i village. Within this archipelago you commute between the 20th century and the prehistoric, between 13th century gothic and baroque, between the Islamic and the Hispanic, between the East and West, here met and mated.

``Hala bira! Which means: Sock it to me!’’

Female feticide

How would those who champion women’s rights to choose (what they want to do with their bodies and the babies in their wombs) handle this mutilation of future women? If there is an issue that makes the pro-choice advocacy in the women’s rights movement stand on its head this is it.

I am not twitting, I am saying that this issue is important for the pro-choice advocates to address.

In the Reuters news two days ago, and which the Inquirer carried, was the recent published research on fertility figures that showed that about 10 million female fetuses may have been deliberately aborted in India over the past 20 years.

This practice was not discovered just yesterday. It has been going on for some time since the technology for sex determination (amniocentesis, ultrasound, etc.) became available. But when a science research team gets down to the bottom of it, comes up with numbers and publishes the findings in the prestigious The Lancet medical journal, the world takes notice.



This massive selective abortion of female fetuses, the report said, must be the most plausible explanation for the skewed male to female ratio. Dr. Prabhat Jha, of the University of Toronto, who headed the research, said that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion account for half a million missing girls yearly. Multiply that by 20 years and you have 10 million missing girls. The Indian Medical Association has a more shocking estimate—five million female fetuses are killed in India each year.

A lot has been written about this criminal practice of killing female fetuses in India where sons are deemed more precious than daughters, where tradition that has perpetuated this preference dies hard.

There is a big uproar over this among Indians themselves. Sure, the women’s movement is alive and well in India, NGOs working for the welfare of women thrive there and yet they could only do so much in preventing the killing of female fetuses.

As I said, this issue surely makes the pro-choice in the women’s rights movement stand on its head. One cannot defend the rights of female fetuses and not defend the rights of any fetus. One cannot raise an outcry over the killing of these supposedly unwanted female fetuses and not raise an outcry over the killing of fetuses in general, they be female or male.

What makes for a less-preferred or an unwanted fetus? It’s being female (as in the case of India or China)? The fetus’ mother’s preference as dictated by culture? The circumstances and context of its conception? (Rape, poverty, too many children already.)

I bring up this scenario because, in India where abortion is legal, abortion becomes illegal if it is sex-determined, meaning that abortion is based on the fetus’ sex. But it is legal if the reason is not the baby’s sex but some other.

India’s Pre-natal Diagnostic Technique Act of 1994 criminalizes sex determination tests with the motive of female feticide. Doctors in India are prohibited from disclosing to their patients who undergo ultrasound procedure (for whatever reason) what their babies’ sex is. But everybody knows that speech or the written word is not the only means of communicating.

The Indian government even launched a series of ads against rampant killing of unborn girls. This practice is rooted in the cultural preference for sons and the exorbitant dowry demands on the families of brides.

In India there is this saying ``Raising a girl is like watering the neighbor’s garden,’’ Jeremy Copeland of CBC News wrote. ``In a country where sons have far more status than daughters, Susheela did what many Indian women are too afraid to do: she gave birth to a baby girl. Twelve weeks into her pregnancy she went for an ultrasound test and the doctor accepted a bribe to reveal the sex of her fetus. When he announced Susheela was carrying a girl, her husband and mother-in-law tried to force her to have an abortion.

```They didn’t let me eat food. There were times when I went hungry for as many as to to three days,’ Susheela says. `They used to beat me. On two or three occasions my husband kicked me very hard in the stomach.’

``There are also religious reasons parents want a son. More than 800 million Indians are Hindu and their faith says only male children can perform the last rites for their parents.’’
The selective abortions and the skewed male to female ratio have alarmed Indian society. Religious groups recently held a conference with the theme ``India’s missing daughters: Faith for Action Against Sex Selection.’’

A 2001 census showed that in four states, the ratio has dramatically declined to less than 800 girls for every 1,000 boys. The ratio is still highest in Christian communities.

The study published in The Lancet showed that fewer females are born as second and third children if the first child in a family is a girl, the Reuters report said. This could be interpreted as a-boy-or-nothing effort on the part of families. No to another girl, the second one has to be a boy. Where did those missing second or third daughters go?

When I first learned about female feticide and the declining ratio of girls to boys, what played in my mind was a scene from a futuristic fiction where boys dramatically outnumbered girls, say, 10 to one. And there was this surreal stampede and panic among scientists to correct the situation by whatever means, including multiple births and cloning. Men were marrying men, women chose only the best and the brightest of men and the women who gave birth to daughters were to be envied.

Google for ``female feticide’’ and you’ll get plenty of eye-openers.

Justice Cecilia Munoz-Palma: Beloved ``ingrata’’

To honor Justice Cecilia Munoz-Palma (a fellow Scholastican) who passed away at 92 two days ago, I re-edited the piece I wrote in 2001 when she launched her book ``The Mirror of My Soul’’. Here it is.

Ingrata. That was how Munoz-Palma had been harshly called by a high government official. Ingrate. Ungrateful. The Spanish word reeks of contempt and condescension. You do not bite the hand that fed you.

It sounds even harsher in Filipino. Walang utang na loob. A person who receives help or is accorded honors, even if she deserves them, is presumed deeply indebted and when the time comes, is expected to stand by the favor- or honor-giver. Only the brave in our culture would dare go against this onerous unwritten contract.

But we are not wanting in brave and debt-defying civil servants, one of whom was Munoz-Palma, the first woman to sit in the Supreme Court (1973-1978). Although the appointing power in her case happened to be a dictator, a.k.a. Ferdinand E. Marcos, she showed him and the sycophants that she owed him nothing. She owed only God and the Filipino people whom she had sworn to serve. By defying expectations and pursuing the rule of law as her conscience dictated, all the more it was evident that this gentle and soft-spoken Batanguena was destined to sit above the throng.



Well, ingrata because as an associate justice speaking before her peers and members of the bar on the occasion of Law Day, she pleaded for the return of the rule of law. That was in 1975, the third year of martial rule and the lady told her audience: ``We shall be judged by history...not by what we want to do and can’t, (but) by what we ought to do and don’t.’’

For her guts, she received a five-minute standing ovation. But Justice Secretary Vicente Abad Santos was neither pleased nor amused. He remained seated. Ingrata, he called her. She took that as a compliment, a badge of courage.

Ingrata because she wrote a dissenting opinion on the habeas corpus case of former senator and nationalist Jose W. Diokno. Her opinion would have had embarrassed Marcos but before it could be presented, it was ``frustrated’’. Munoz-Palma’s written opinion (that had leaked) jumped the gun on the other justices and Marcos too, and paved the way for the release of Diokno who had been detained for more than 700 days without charges.

Munoz-Palma called the Diokno case her baptism of fire. And although her dissenting opinion did not see the full light of day as the habeas corpus petition became moot and academic with Diokno’s sudden release, it illumined the legal path during those dark and dreadful days.

Munoz-Palma’s ``frustrated dissenting opinion’’ could be read in full in her book ``The Mirror of My Soul: Selected Decisions, Opinions, Speeches and Writings’’ (883 pages!) which she gave away for free on the occasion of the Supreme Court’s 100th anniversary. Her opinion on the Diokno case (with which Associate Justice Calixto Zaldivar concurred) is simple enough for non-lawyers but it emits a luminous glow if read in the context of those dark years.

She ended that opinion by defending woman power thus: ``In closing, I am bothered by the thought that some of my colleagues may attribute my approach to Diokno’s petition to my being a woman, and I may even be accused of allowing my emotions to overpower my reason. If there is such an assumption, I would say that it is incorrect. However, if it is indeed true that my being a woman led me to take this stand...then I am happy and proud that I was born a woman.’’

More riveting is the intro to that case where Munoz-Palma describes how she wrote it while in hiding and how she later cloistered herself among the Benedictines of St. Scholastica’s College, her alma mater. (She was valedictorian of H.S. 31, after which she went to UP for law studies. She passed the bar in 1937.) If at all she gave in to a colleague who knew what she was up to, it was to erase the words ``arbitrary and oppressive’’ in her dissension.

There was life after the Supreme Court. Munoz-Palma led the anti-Marcos opposition and ran in the 1984 Batasan Pambansa elections and won by a landslide. Her battlecry: ``One Marcos cannot stop us all.’’ She later became the president of the Constitutional Commission that drafted the 1987 Constitution. She headed the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office where she again displayed her being ingrata when she did not cover up for the alleged wrongdoing of the president who appointed her.

``The Mirror of My Soul’’ packs courage. Said the late Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan: ``I can still see her standing on the floor of the Batasan...No one can equal the passion with which she fought Amendment No. 6--that curse of presidential usurpation of legislative powers. She was also one of the few among us who dared file articles of impeachment against the then head of government.’’

Munoz-Palma tells readers that they ``will not find literary gems or grandiose or loftily-worded judicial and legal pronouncements’’ in her book, only ``plain words...thoughts and ideas and principles emanating from my conscience and reason on faith, truth, justice, freedom and the Rule of Law.’’

The rule of law--these words were like her mantra. Her ``A Plea for the Rule of Law’’ that earned her the ingrata label(and where she also said much about womanhood) is a good read. But one can’t miss the spiritual theme that also runs through her writing. Indeed, this woman had always hearkened to a higher power, a higher law.