It’s always a treat when Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, perhaps my all-time favorite Filipino writer, delves into sports. He doesn’t do it often, seeing as, with the state of our country, he really needs to be writing about other things, but when he does it, the results are almost always excellent, like the two articles he wrote about pound-for-pound champion Manny Pacquiao over the last couple of weeks.

The first one was about Pacquiao’s otherworldly confidence, as he notes that the Pac-man was just “as fearless facing his interviewer as he was facing Ricky Hatton.” He then wonders if Pacquiao’s extraordinary success is something borne of his extraordinary confidence, something that is frowned upon in our country’s culture:

Pacquiao has sometimes been seen, at least locally, as being too self-assured to the point of cockiness, but I don’t know that that is necessarily bad. Certainly, I don’t know that he doesn’t need it. You can’t get far without those levels of self-assurance, or cockiness, particularly when facing foes in the ring who look like executioners. Wrestling of course has driven the idea to satirical or self-parodying levels. But you need to feel bigger, better, larger-than-life to not be intimidated.

I’ve often wondered if that is not Pacquiao’s biggest strength. Of course he is vastly talented; self-assurance alone will get you nowhere. But I’ve also seen deeply talented athletes fall by the wayside. Many Filipino boxers lose while fighting abroad because they are not just fighting one enemy but several enemies. Quite apart from their foes, they are fighting a hostile crowd, an alien culture (including an alien language), themselves. Or their shyness, their sense of inferiority, the reflex of “knowing their place” that has been drummed into them their whole lives.

Not Pacquiao. From the first, he exuded pugnacity not just inside the ring but outside of it. Though his answers were humble, his demeanor was not. He was unfazed by the crowd, he was unfazed by the cameras, he was unfazed by his English. They were merely of the order of facing another foe, not unlike the one in the ring, and vanquishing them.

Today’s column, meanwhile, discusses Pacquiao’s turn on the cover of Time Magazine. While he is proud of the honor bestowed on his countryman, de Quiros also rues the implications of the achievement and how miserable the country has become:

The reason this country worships Pacquiao the way humankind’s ancestors worshipped the sun is out of sheer need. The reason this country grinds to a halt every time Pacquiao fights is out of sheer hope. Having nothing to be proud of, having indeed everything to be ashamed of, we look up to Pacquiao’s fights as something to prop us up, as a source of replenishment. His victories aren’t just our victories, they are our very survival. Man does not live by bread alone, he lives by circuses too. Lacking the one, we make do with the other.

Truly, heaven forbid Pacquiao loses.

I am proud of Pacquiao being on the Time cover. But I am also bothered by the thought that it represents a decline in the national stature, driven home by the fact that not too long ago a Filipino did so as well for a far more epic achievement. That was Corazon Aquino who made it there twice for having fashioned stouter wings than Icarus in the form of People Power. It’s not just that boxing is a lesser achievement compared to the liberation of a country. Tiger Woods will never be Martin Luther King. It’s also that Cory’s achievement enriches the people rather than pauperizes them by contrast.

It all fits in with the ongoing theme in my past posts, about how awesome it would be if there were better writers writing about sports in the country. I sincerely hope that our country turns it around, and not least because writers like de Quiros would then have more time to write about sports.

In the US, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam made his name covering the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, among other more serious topics. But later in his career, he devoted a lot of his time on sports, and his work in the field is considered some of the best sports journalism ever written. His seminal 1981 book The Breaks of the Game, about the Bill Walton’s Portland Trailblazers, was so influential that Bill Simmons still name-checks former Blazer Billy Ray Bates (the PBA’s Black Superman) in his columns, just because of the richness of Halberstam’s profile on Bates. Halberstam’s column about Allen Iverson from the 2001 NBA Finals still remains one of my favorite pieces ever.