SKIRMISHER

I’m not really a faithful follower of boxing, but I think Manny Pacquiao is the only boxer I’ve seen wearing a jersey so completely smothered with the logos of half a dozen sponsors.

The jersey was screaming: Motolite! McDonalds! No Fear! More exclamations!!! Now!!!

And with a shining bling, too, dangling from his neck.

Wow. If only I could wear things like that. He reminded me of Formula 1, or an old Wayne’s World joke. Or a dressed-up jeepney.

Yesterday’s match was also a marketer’s greasy wet dream: it should be included in the annals of target marketing. Where else in the world can you see this phenomenon: Manny Pacquiao is the personality in his very own show’s slew of advertisements. You have this globally famous boxing match, and in the gaps, the star boxer is also in almost all the TV ads, endorsing to death things like painkiller, canned fish, sport socks, Magic Sing, beer and liquor, a foreign fastfood, vinegar, ice cream.

That McDonalds TV ad?: Pa-pa-ra-Pacquiao, love ko ‘to!

Pure genius.

I’m quite sure products like Carefree, Modess, Creamsilk, and Lactacyd are also itching to dunk their hands in the Manny Pacquiao phenomenon, except that they’re still trying to figure out how to tie Manny with their brands. Maybe ask him to do a cartwheel and talk about his monthly period, ehrmm, I mean, monthly training period? Make him pick daisies, write his innermost thoughts on a diary, and make him say things like, “Nothing’s as fresh as Lactacyd in the morning.”

And don’t forget to emphasize the Visayan accent Jericho Rosales is so fucking proud of. Wait a minute, why not make Jericho Rosales do all the fake Visayan speaking, and just put Manny in the background, say, ten mountains away, nodding in approval? Or why not make Jericho Rosales just kill himself and spare us all the bloody trouble?

Manny Pacquiao has become a huge media and marketing juggernaut; he’s no longer just a boxer from the Philippines. He is the Philippines. Yesterday, it’s probably fairly accurate to say the entire country dropped everything and sat before a TV set. The joke was that thieves and swindlers cancelled whatever their plans for an otherwise happy fruitful day of petty crimes just for Manny’s sake. You could even walk on completely empty roads; everybody seemed inside their homes, watching the fight, bursting with all sorts of colorful expletives each time a punch landed on the right place, or dismally missed.

Maybe I should find a way to have a cut in the whole thing before he spars with Eric Morales some months from now. I’ll sell t-shirts with Manny’s shit-eating grin on them. Shave my black curly cat and sell the hair on Ebay, telling people it was from Manny Pacquiao’s armpits; all those dirty matrons would have a blast sniffing it.

Maybe I’ll shoot some flamboyant movie and call it, The Devil Wears Manny Pacquiao’s Sponsor-Overkilled Jersey.

Or I’ll “invent” a new kind of bread and call it, “Manny, the new monay!” (Monay is a Filipino bread that resembles a woman’s boobs, and it’s usually warm, too.)

Not bad. I think I like the monay thing so much I’m going to strike a deal with the baker right now.

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