A few weeks ago, I filed a column for Yahoo’s Ringside with Manny site killing pound-for-pound champion Manny Pacquiao for his awful singing. The very next day, the site bannered the video above of Pacquiao doing a song number, exclusively for Yahoo’s cameras. A couple of days later, Manny was back on Jimmy Kimmel Live, turning the show into a videoke session.

Meanwhile, my story was posted a couple of weeks ago, but wasn’t linked from the front page up until this week.

Speaking of which, my Pisay batchmate and hotshot NCAA announcer Toff Rada also dissected Pacquiao’s singing skills – Toff apparently has prior weird experience with “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You” so he knows whereof he speaks – as well as the champ’s chances in the ring against Joshua Clottey. And yes, it’s telling that Clottey’s name wasn’t mentioned in this post until the second to the last sentence.

At some point, someone’s going to have to tell Manny Pacquiao that people are really laughing at him, not with him. Case in point: The box-office performance of his movie Wapakman.

For now though, we get to enjoy this:







Don’t worry though, Pac-man. You’re still my idol.

I mentioned before that I laugh at the most inappropriate things, so when I saw the latest chapter of Nonito Donaire Jr.’s feud with his father on Jude Turcuato’s blog, I cracked up. It’s a serious matter, and I shouldn’t really be laughing but I can’t help it. Jude’s somber take on it is appropriate, and perhaps you should read that first.

Now, I’m assuming you’re still here and you want to find out what’s so funny. First, I guess we need background on everything that’s happened between Nonito Jr. and Nonito Sr. A couple of years ago, Donaire fired his father as trainer. The old man has been bitter about it ever since, blaming the influence of Donaire’s wife Rachel, for the estrangement.

The elder Donaire has been yapping at his son ever since. Last year, when asked to compare Nonito Jr. to his latest protégé, Marvin Sonsona, he said, “[Sonsona] is ready to fight [Donaire] now.” That tipped everyone off that, Hey, maybe this old guy is just bitter, and maybe a little off his rocker. Nonito Jr. is, after all, a top pound-for-pound boxer, while Sonsona was a raw teenager. Incidentally, Sonsona was knocked out badly in his title fight this weekend and is reportedly considering retirement, because he never liked boxing all that much.

Last week, before Sonsona’s fight, Nonito Sr. took time out from his busy training schedule to disparage his son once more, speaking to Dennis Guillermo of Examiner.com.





Nonito Jr. found all this a little too much, and decided to release a video statement of his own. The funny part comes… oh, just watch the damn thing!



I suppose this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since Nonito Jr. is pretty showbiz himself. It should be noted that Jericho Rosales also once played another great Filipino champion, Manny Pacquiao in a biopic. That’s one more thing the two of them have in common.

The Cuneta Astrodome was barely half-full, but you wouldn’t know it from the cheers of the audience. I went to the card with two of the biggest boxing nuts among my friends, Alekos Orendain, whom you might remember as the resident reviewer of the HBO 24/7 series on the site, and Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague who “has been punched in the face more often than any of [his] closest friends.” Each of them had to travel halfway across the metropolis on a fine Saturday morning in January just to spend the next several hours watching skinny men pummel each other.

It was no surprise to us, therefore, that the crowd was composed of fellow boxing nuts who, when not screaming at the action in the ring, were busy hooting and hollering at, and pretty much sexually-harassing, the round girls during breaks. Testosterone dripped heavily in the air.

Brian Viloria, the IBF Junior Flyweight champion who headlined the card, gave the crowd plenty to cheer for early in his bout against Colombian challenger Carlos Tamara. “The Hawaiian Punch” took the action straight to Tamara, all but erasing his previous reputation, which he got during his first title reign four years ago, as a disappointing fighter who relied solely on his skills and talent but failed to show courage or heart.

Viloria held steady in a slugfest early in the game, to the delight of the crowd who chanted his name. “Brian, take it in the warehouse!” screamed a well-meaning fan, whose message was lost in translation; literally, it means “Brian, kunin mo sa bodega!” They were instructions, in colloquial Tagalog, for Viloria to keep taking it to Tamara’s body. Viloria complied, despite the mangled commands, shaking the challenger with furious body blows.

Then, all of a sudden, in the ninth-round, Tamara unleashed a 1-2 combination, and Viloria got hit. And hit. And hit. And hit. And hit. And hit. And hit. And hit.

You get the idea. For the next four rounds Viloria, who had been controlling the fight, looked dazed and exhausted. Finally, referee Bruce McTavish mercifully stopped the fight as Viloria showed signs of having trouble staying on his feet on his own. Tamara, himself a former Olympian like the fallen champion, celebrated the biggest victory of his career. The crowd, meanwhile, applauded both the conqueror and the fallen hero.

It was a terrible loss for Viloria, to be sure, although I’m sure fan sympathy remains with him for his gallant stand. Filipino boxing fans, especially the kind of nuts who were in attendance last Saturday, would much rather see their champions carried off their shields rather than coasting through to questionable victories. Viloria had a lot to be proud of in his performance this weekend.

I don’t know if Viloria has what it takes to climb the mountain once more. A lot has been made of his remarkable comeback after losing to his first world title to Omar Niño Romero, and then falling short in two attempts to regain a title, in a rematch against Romero and a title fight against Mexican champion Edgar Sosa. He toiled in a series of low-profile bouts before getting a shot against Ulises Solis, whom he knocked out at last year at the Araneta Coliseum. It was the best performance of his career, and he admitted afterward that had he lost, he would have contemplated retiring from the sport.

I also don’t know if Viloria would quit now; when was the last time a boxer retired young and stayed retired? But then, the knock on him during his entire professional career had been his desire, and the lack of it might just be enough to keep him away from the ring, if he does end up hanging up his gloves.

But the real big loser over the Viloria upset has to be Solar Sports, who ended their deal with Top Rank boxing to concentrate on building up the “Boxing at the Bay” series as a franchise. But without a big draw like Viloria, you could say Solar is up the Manila Bay without a paddle.

Meanwhile, Top Rank has signed a deal with Solar’s rival, ABS-CBN, who will be broadcasting all the big Top Rank cards that do not involve Manny Pacquiao. This includes next month’s Pinoy Power/Latin Fury card, which will feature Nonito Donaire, Gerry Peñalosa, and Bernabe Concepcion.

It’s a stunning turnaround for Solar, who only a year ago co-produced with Top Rank the highly-successful “the Flash the the Furious” card featuring Donaire and Viloria. It’s amazing just how they squandered all of their momentum from that event.

In the undercard, WBO minimumweight champion Donnie “Ahas” Nietes was very impressive in his non-title fight against Mexican Jesus Silvestro. Despite being a last-minute replacement, Silvestro bucked an opening-round knockdown to give a very competitive fight for Nietes, who displayed all of his skills. The match was fun to watch, with the two little guys going at it at warp-speed, but it ended weirdly in a technical knockout after Silvestro spat out his mouthpiece intentionally to buy some time in his corner.

Veteran Jimrex Jaca came off an almost two-year layoff to knock out Indonesia’s Ramadhan Weriu in the fifth round of their scheduled 10-round bout. Most casual boxing fans remember Jaca as the victim of Pacquiao’s rival, Juan Manuel Marquez, in 2006.

20-year-old lightweight prospect Jason Pagara survived in a majority decision against Indonesian Eddy Comaro in their ten-round bout. The first judge saw the fight as a 95-95 draw, while the second gave it barely to Pagara, 96-94. The crowd was stunned when it was announced that the third gave a lopsided 98-92 score to Pagara, and roundly booed the decision. The audience cheered roundly for the losing Indonesian fighter, proving indeed the crowd was full of knowledgeable boxing nuts.

A story in the Malaysian publication New Straits Times details the draconian measures that the Malaysian government imposes to weed out material that could be “prejudicial to public order, morality and security” or “alarming to public opinion.” Local printers and distributors in Malaysia take it upon themselves to comply with the government when it comes to international publications, to hilarious results.

Someone in a printing plant in Shah Alam must make a call on pictures of Manny Pacquiao weighing in, or a tutu’ed ballerina in a grand jeté, or Nicolas Cage smoking a cigarette that looks suspiciously as though it might contain something other than tobacco.
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Asked to jump, they leap tall buildings in a single bound and deliver to Manny Pacquiao, welterweight boxing champion of the world and prospective candidate for the presidency of the Philippines, a bra.

If Pacquiao had been Malaysian, and the Krista Ranillo controversy exploded, what would the Malaysian government have done, cut his balls off? Or would his managers have been the ones to do that?

[H/T: #TeamKris zealot Blue Arden on Twitter]