We love you, Manny

Filipinos fawn over boxing champion and national hero Manny Pacquiao.

By Carlos H. Conde
Published: May 14, 2009 06:52 ET
GlobalPost.com

MANILA — In a nation starved of heroes, Manny Pacquiao has become what one writer called a “multi-tasking hero.” He is considered more than the world’s greatest boxer: He embodies, it would seem, everything that Filipinos are hankering for these days.

People want Pacquiao to run for public office — for president, if possible. Officials want him to be a peace negotiator with rebels. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo just appointed him an “ambassador for peace and understanding.” The Philippine justice secretary named the boxer his “special assistant on intelligence matters,” whatever that means.

A week ago in Las Vegas, Pacquiao demolished Britain’s Ricky Hatton in the second round of a 12-rounder, a fight now widely regarded as one of the best in the history of the sport. When he flew home on Monday, he received a grand welcome unlike any ever received by a Filipino: His motorcade paraded through the streets of Manila, blue, white and red confetti flying endlessly, Filipinos by the roadside stretching out their arms, almost in supplication. Not even the pope’s visits to this deeply religious Catholic nation elicited such displays of admiration.

“I love you, Manny!” became a familiar shriek, echoing the country’s sentiments toward a 30-year-old man who, when he was a teenager, sold cigarettes to commuters in the streets of General Santos City, trying to support a family wallowing in extreme poverty — the typical Filipino experience. As for many Filipino youths, boxing proved a way out for Pacquiao.

Today, Pacquiao wears Armani. He owns houses and properties here and abroad. He owns a basketball team. And his mother, Dionisia, sashays in front of television cameras glittering with gold and diamonds, wearing expensive clothes, clutching the latest Louis Vuitton purse.

People flock to his house in General Santos, a city in the south, and ask for financial help wherever he goes (he is now worth billions of pesos, having amassed more than $12 million from his recent fight). A recent report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer said that a woman shouted to him during Monday’s parade to please give her children.

One city wants to build a statue of him, which could be illegal in a country where monuments can only be dedicated to dead heroes. The Philippine postal system has printed his image on a stamp, making him the first athlete to be given the honor.

And Pacquiao’s singing career seems to be on the upswing: His CD is now a certified hit. When a Filipino singer was criticized for changing the notes of the Philippine national anthem he sang during Pacquiao’s fight, the boxer, as if to spite the critics, offered to sing it himself the next time he steps into the ring.

Pacquiao inspires as much hyperbole as awe. Lennox Lewis, the former heavyweight champion, wrote recently in Time magazine’s “100 most influential” issue, “The grip he holds over the Philippines is similar to Nelson Mandela’s influence in South Africa.”

Lewis added that Pacquiao, included on Time’s list, is “almost like a god” in the Philippines. Each time Pacquiao fights (he has won five titles from five different weight classes, a first for any Asian), soldiers and rebels stop fighting for a day, incidents of crime fall dramatically, and the streets stop heaving with traffic — stuff that otherwise happens only during Holy Week.

The Philippines has never had an athlete like Pacquiao. But many Filipinos contend that Pacquiao’s popularity obscures the problems that beset the country.

“Never in the history of boxing has a fighter been so admired and loved by his people and served as a single unifying force in a country that regrettably resonates with divisiveness,” sports analyst Ronnie Nathanielsz told Newsday.com.

Apart from possessing the world’s deadliest left hook — the one that landed on Hatton’s chin, knocking him unconscious before he even hit the canvas — Pacquiao also has a golden touch, politically speaking. Politicians swarm all over him; they take every opportunity to be photographed beside him. (These pictures later appear in campaign posters and literature.) The few politicians he has endorsed during past elections have won hands-down.

He is not just the king of the ring — he has become a kingmaker of sorts in a political landscape that values personality over ideology.

Pacquiao’s series of victories has provided the unpopular Arroyo administration with several public relations bonanzas, as the latest win over Hatton did this week.

“Did Hatton hurt you?” Arroyo asked Pacquiao during his courtesy call to the president on Monday. “Not so much,” Pacquiao replied, and quipped, “He could not take the punch of the Filipino nation.”

For a country enduring seemingly never-ending scandals involving corruption and politics, Pacquiao is a respite. Since his victory over Hatton, Filipinos have forgotten about these many scandals. He has dominated the press so thoroughly, boxing out other events, news and issues.

Most believe that it is impossible not to feel extreme pride about Pacquiao. “You can’t be a Filipino,” wrote the columnist Conrado de Quiros, “and not marvel at the marvel Pacquiao has become.”

Mall nation

Malls serve as cultural centers in a nation where many live on less than $2 a day.

By Carlos H. Conde
Published: May 2, 2009 08:42 ET
GlobalPost.com

MANILA — These days, there’s no escaping the mall. It used to be that Filipinos like Sheila Largoza went to the park during their days off. A maid, Largoza is not affluent enough to be able to spend a few hundred pesos a week at the mall. But come the weekend, that is exactly where she finds herself.

On a recent Sunday, Largoza, 23, and a friend were killing time at the SM Mall of Asia, the largest mall in the Philippines, which is located by the Manila Bay. “The parks in Manila are no good,” she said, looking below at the mall’s promenade, with its magnificent view of the setting sun. Despite having spent a good two hours inside the vast shopping center, Largoza and her friend hadn’t spent a single centavo on anything.

In many ways, the pull of malls in the Philippines goes beyond shopping, as Largoza, with her $90 a month salary, illustrates. These air-conditioned malls have become more than a substitute for public parks in this tropical country. They have come to define Filipino consumer culture and, to a large degree, the character of the modern-day, remittance-dependent Filipino family.

Eighty percent of Filipinos go to the malls at least once or twice a month, according to a 2008 survey by the Nielsen Media Research, even though nearly half of the population lives on $2 a day or less.

This data alone would seem to suggest a disconnect between consumer habits and economic reality, but consider this as well: Three of the world’s largest shopping malls, according to computations by Forbes magazine, are in the Philippines, for which the International Monetary Fund has predicted a poor performance of zero percent gross domestic product growth for 2009. It is topped on the Forbes list by only one other country: China, with four malls on the list and 8 percent forecasted GDP growth.

Moreover, families of overseas Filipino workers, whose billions of dollars in annual remittances help prop up the economy and encourage consumer spending, are a regular fixture at the malls, which now have foreign-exchange or remittance centers with lines so long that converting currency can often take between 15 minutes to half an hour.

It is easy to see why Filipinos are mall-crazy. One can practically spend a whole day at the SM Mall of Asia, which is the largest in Asia and the third largest in the world — it has 4.2 million square feet of “gross leasable area,” or a floor area of 148 acres, larger than the Vatican.

Here, Filipinos not only shop — they play, they stroll by the bay, eat at the numerous restaurants and cafes and the cavernous “foodcourt,” watch movies in the large cineplex that has an IMAX, or simply sit in the open parks outside and inside the mall and enjoy the breeze blowing in from Manila Bay. There’s even an ice-skating rink, where the best skaters in the Philippines have trained.

“It can be overwhelming,” Largoza, the maid, said of the mall. Often she and her friends just watch the shows at the “activity center” or hang out by the bay, fiddling with their cell phones and gossiping.

At a forum last year at the University of the Philippines on “mall culure,” sociologist Maria Rowena SA Briones addressed the Filipino fascination with malls: “The mall slogan ‘We’ve got it all for you’,” which the SM mall chain uses, “gives the impression that when you go to a mall, everything is easy and fanciful. It makes you feel so good about getting what you want/need — the distinction is quite blurry — so that even if you don’t have money or you need not buy anything, you will anyway.”

It is a compulsion that has made Henry Sy, the owner of the SM chain that has malls all over the Philippines, the richest Filipino and one of the most affluent men in Asia. It is the same compulsion, developed almost single-handedly by SM, that propelled other Filipino entrepreneurs — several of them titans of Filipino industry and business — to go into the mall business.

So what effect has this “mall culture” had on Filipino character and identity?

“Malls have become our parks and cultural centers,” wrote the author Antonio Hidalgo in an essay on the subject. These malls, he said, “exercise an important influence on the development of our culture and values.”

The rapid spread of malls throughout the country, Hidalgo added, “probably has the effect of providing common experiences to previously very disparate ethnic groups that had been sheltered in the cocoons of their sub-cultures. Put in another way, the malls can be seen as moving us towards a more unified culture by spreading the big-city values of Metro Manila throughout our archipelago.”