Boxer Manny Pacquiao's incredible rags to riches story
Manny Pacquiao's family were once so poor they often had to go without rice. Ahead of the Philippine hero's big fight with Floyd Mayweather, Simon Parry traces the boxer's story back to where it all began
In a potholed neighbourhood of the dusty southern Philippine city of General Santos, Sardo Mejia will be living every punch and shimmy, and yelling imaginary ringside advice as the man with the expectations of every Filipino on his shoulders slugs it out with Floyd Mayweather Jnr in the US$300 million boxing match billed as the Fight of the Century.
More than almost every other one of his countrymen, the man known affectionately as Uncle Sardo has reason to hope that Pacquiao prevails. It was this maternal uncle who introduced Manny to boxing when the 12-year-old dropped out of school, in 1990.
Surrounded by chickens in the yard of his simple one-storey home in the city where Manny lived between the ages of 10 to 15, Mejia reverentially retrieves two moth-eaten lumps of cloth that he keeps like a holy relic in a glass cabinet in his living room: Pacquiao's first pair of boxing gloves.
"If it wasn't for me, there would be no world champion Manny Pacquiao," says the 67-year-old, with a proud smile.
As he reflects on the role he played in turning a skinny rural boy into one of the world's wealthiest sportsmen, who will earn US$100 million from the Las Vegas fight alone, he talks of the boxer's boyhood as if it were yesterday.