Pacquiao Says Goodbye to Boxing

Manny Pacquiao is finally hanging up his gloves, capping a phenomenal two-decade career that swept him from being a hardscrabble, odd-job worker at a poor coastal town in war-torn Mindanao to a superstar boxer known all over the world and, possibly, to becoming the Philippines’ next president.

“It is difficult for me to accept that my time as a boxer is over. Today, I am announcing my retirement. I never thought that this day would come… Goodbye, boxing… I just heard the final bell,” he said in a 14-minute video released on his Facebook page on Wednesday.

Now 42, he finishes his 26-year, 72-fight career with 62 wins, eight losses and two draws. He won 12 world titles and is the only fighter in history to win titles in eight different weight classes.

“I’m amazed at what I’ve done,” he said.

What he has done is rise from being a fishmonger moonlighting as a boxer so he can earn an extra peso to buy a sack of rice for his mother, to a boxing demigod who can rake in US$100 million (S$135.8 million) for a day’s work.

“He is the ideal aspirational model for ordinary Filipinos, the underdog who, through perseverance, manages to make it to the different portals of power: cultural, political, economic,” said pop culture expert Rolando Tolentino, of the University of the Philippines.

Pacquiao was born in 1978 in Kibawe town, in the southern province of Bukidnon. He grew up dirt poor.

He once recalled sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes stacked together just high enough to provide some cushion from the hard floor.

He said he was always in rags, and his mother’s shack was the only one in his village that did not have a television.