Manny Pacquiao is one clever animal.
A few years ago, roughly seven months before he would take on Timothy Bradley for the first time, Manny Pacquiao delivered one of his worst performances in recent years: a controversial, majority-decision win against Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012.
The reason, reported ESPN’s Dan Rafael, was a life that was “careening out of control” due to his addiction to alcohol, gambling and the worst of all animals: women.
“The fight was not that hard for me, but I was having some family problems,” Pacquiao said. “I was in 100 percent physical condition for that fight against Marquez, but I did have some family issues that I had to deal with.”
One of the highest paid athletes in the world, it seems, could not overcome his own humanity.
After making a ton of money, he could only helplessly accept the amount of booze, gambling and the number of women that were practically being thrown at him.
I’m sure he wrestled deeply with the problem of whether or not he should have slept with all those women, being such a rational human being—the kind that thinks deeply before he lets his instincts take over.
However, going into the first of his fights with Bradley, Pacquiao claimed to have become a new man. A new devotion to his Catholic faith, Pacquiao claims, set his life in order, helped saved his marriage and, most importantly, ensured that his fans wouldn’t be wasting their money on another terrible performance.
“Pacquiao, boxing’s only eight-division world champion, credits the new calmness in his life–calm, at least by his standards, because the entourage is still massive and the schedule still packed–to what he calls his ‘manual of life,'” writes Rafael.
“He’s talking about the Bible, which he has turned to in recent months,” Rafael continues.
Instead of gambling, drinking and spending time with other women, Pacquiao now spends time with his family and attends regular Bible study sessions.
Pacquiao, that clever animal, finally found a sustainable foundation upon which to arrogantly affirm his humanity–an existence that he believes is better because he no longer allows himself to be overcome by worldly urges.
Indeed, earlier today, this arrogance allowed him to make the following statement:
“It’s common sense. Do you see animals mating with the same sex? Animals are better because they can distinguish male from female,” said Pacquiao. “If men mate with men and women mate with women, they are worse than animals.”
Despite the fact that his claim about animals is false, the bigger concern is the way a man with such a voice can display such arrogance, intolerance and a lack of memory.
For Pacquiao, people in same-sex relationships are worse than animals because they don’t live up to the standards of humanity he suddenly became aware of just a few years ago. But maybe the bigger concern is how he can use a set of ideas to support a prejudice he already had.
This, it seems, is the only thing that separates us from the animals, if we could entertain such a separation. It’s important to remember that human beings are animals too, with the power to use language to construct differences and to impose prejudices with these differences.
Pacquiao later apologized, but I’ll take it with a grain of salt.
I’ll just leave our readers with a word from a dear friend, Friedrich Nietzsche:
“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.”
“One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened,” continues Nietzsche, who then compares our knowledge to a mosquito’s, which allows it to fly around as if it itself were center of the universe.
“But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world,” Nietzsche writes.
Pacquiao, with the help of a few books, is a clever animal–capable of supporting an intolerable prejudice with a set of dogmatic ideas.
I'm sorry for hurting people by comparing homosexuals to animals. Please forgive me for those I've hurt. God Bless! pic.twitter.com/bqjRcWqp8R
— Manny Pacquiao (@mannypacquiao) February 16, 2016
Photo by Marilyn Paulino/RBRBoxing
