BY ROMMEL YNION
LAS VEGAS – On the eve of his third fight against the Panamanian slugger Roberto Duran, then 33-year-old Sugar Rey Leonard was asked by a reporter what his strategy was against him. And, shrugging his shoulders, he just said, “I will fight him in many ways.”
Dubbed as the Uno Mas, the much-anticipated duel between boxing’s biggest draws at that time – in December 1989 at the brand-new The Mirage resorts and casino hotel on Las Vegas Blvd. – disappointed much of the crowd booing them for what they called a lackluster performance; but in the eyes of the discerning aficionados, it was a fight that marked Leonard’s metamorphosis into a virtuoso performer on the pugilistic stage.
Darting in and out of Duran’s “killing zone” while delivering a variety of his lightning-quick punches, Leonard confused Duran all throughout the 12-round bout, with the latter unable to figure out what the 1976 Olympic light welterweight champ was up to. In the end, the former won by unanimous decision over the dazed and bewildered Panamanian slugger.
After lazing around The Mirage here in Las Vegas this morning, those were the thoughts crossing my mind: bits and pieces of that particular juncture in boxing history from which we can all learn, enriching our souls forever. For boxing is akin to life in which we fight to live and live to fight.
When I was in amateur boxing almost 30 years ago, I also played chess, thinking that it would make me a better boxer. Little did I know then that both boxing and chess were just, more or less, the same. In both games, there is a continuous process of responding to every move your opponent makes in an attempt to outwit him, outclass him and outgun him.
But, isn’t this what life is all about? Life makes a move; and in response to it, we also make our move in an attempt to rise above it and emerge triumphant over it. Ah, that underscores the commonality between sports and life: the fluidity of existence requiring us to be on our toes constantly to keep ourselves relevant to it until the end of the game, so to speak.
After over a week of lazing around here in America, I have seen a lot of what I call down-and-outers in life, most of them I “interviewed” are Filipinos – since I have been curious about the Filipino diaspora all over the world – wondering what made them leave us and if, indeed, they have found greener pastures in foreign lands.
“Here in America, we need to work round-the-clock to make enough to live comfortably,” a jack-of-all-trades type of Filipino said. “Sometimes, we even do more than two kinds of jobs with a few part-time jobs in between just to keep ourselves afloat.”
Up and down The Strip here in Las Vegas, this is the oft-repeated story of Filipinos who live here – and I heard this thousands of times before all throughout my sojourn all over the world to the point that I concluded that wherever there are Filipinos, I would hear this story. It is no doubt not a story of success but of defeat; not a story of fulfillment but of disillusionment.
For these unending cries of hardship only expose common denominator among the majority of Filipinos: the lack of creativity to fight the world in many ways. They only fight the only way they know how: To work round-the-clock like beasts of burden so they can live another day of the same old grinding routine.
Indeed, how I wish Filipinos could understand what Leonard meant with the words: “I will fight him in many ways.” From my vantage point, what he meant was like any individual, he was creative enough to create options for himself using the mind that God gave him and that if he can do it, we can do it, too.
As Claude Bristol said, we should not be afraid to take time out to think because thoughts form the foundation upon which man builds everything. That, in a nutshell, is what I have seen in all these Filipinos: their aversion to taking time out to think. For they just trudge on with alacrity through life, merely conforming to the conventional idea of survival adopted by most of their countrymen around the world.
Life is like a beach of pebbles from which we can pluck even diamonds if only we care to take a closer look into it. Ah, that is the philosophy that has served me in good stead all these years – I always take time out to think and more often than not, later on in the day, while immersed in something else, life-changing ideas cross my mind, enriching my life no end.
We cannot reduce life to just a multiplicity of repetitive back-breaking work if, indeed, we still want to make it worth living. There must be more to it than that; as human beings made in God’s image, we just cannot be what the majority of us have limited ourselves to be. Alas, we cannot just allow ourselves to be limited by our “limits”. We need to be more creative – in tune with that biblical admonition for all of us to exercise dominion over this thing called life.
Nobody really has all the answers to everything; but, that third fight between Leonard and Duran 25 years ago has exposed the many ways we can live our lives, fight our fights, and meet our appointments with destiny which God has prepared for us at the end of this long and winding tunnel we have travelled in our search for meaning./PN
