Pacquiao is chicken soup for boxing’s soul

A man’s success can be measured in various ways: the accumulation of wealth, of real estate, of popularity, of a singing contract. Well, maybe not a singing contract. David Soul, the actor who played “Hutch” on “Starsky & Hutch,” had a singing contract.

At 5:30 p.m. Saturday, more than three hours before Manny Pacquiao was to fight Antonio Margarito at Cowboys Stadium in Texas, the Fiesta Henderson ran out of chairs for boxing fans to sit on. That’s another way to measure a man’s success.

You had to pay to view the fight at home, but it was free at a Station Casino near you where they obviously underestimated Pacquiao’s magnetic appeal.

This was understandable, what with boxing supposedly being dead and all. Yeah, I know, they were giving it away. But you can get a free chalupa and stuff like that by showing your ticket stub from a UNLV football game, and they have yet to run out of chalupas at Taco Bell.

So I stood and watched Manny Pacquiao punch the daylights out of Antonio Margarito over 12 rounds of boxing in the super welterweight division. Like Margarito, I had somehow gone the distance. And whereas he only had to contend with the Pac-Man winging nonstop punches at his melon from angles that only Archimedes could deduce, I had to contend with a fat guy blowing caustic cigar smoke in my face for the entire 12 rounds, plus the last six rounds of the Mike Jones vs. Jesus Soto Karass undercard bout or the fourth quarter of the Oregon-California football game, depending on your point of view or interest.

Everywhere you looked, there were people craning their necks to watch television. It looked like Super Bowl Sunday, only these people were watching boxing, of all things.

Your grandfather would have loved it. Yes, he would have complained about having to stand, as grandfathers are wont. But he also would have unwrapped a Havana-sized stogie of his own and blown smoke right back at the fat guy, as grandfathers also are wont.

The most amazing thing about the Fiesta crowd, other than its volume, was that it didn’t consist mainly of Filipinos and Mexicans. There were some of each, but there was nothing to distinguish this throng from the one that might watch the Colts play the Patriots on Sunday, other than it had come to watch boxing and was mostly cheering for one man, the little guy with sprigs of facial hair spouting from his chin who was winging punches from all angles; the one who, you guessed it, sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” as part of a duet with Will Ferrell on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

It was clear to see, at least after the caustic cigar smoke lifted, that Las Vegas loves Manny Pacquiao.

You would hope that boxing could see that, too.

The sport’s myriad problems have been well documented and I’m not going to rehash them here, other than to note it continues to lose vast amounts of ground to the UFC and its many variants where guys are allowed to punch each other whenever and wherever they feel, such as in hockey and on pit road in NASCAR.

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover. You can judge a sport’s popularity by how many times its participants have appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

During the 1960s, 28 fights or fighters graced the cover of the magazine. Same for the 1970s. During the 1980s, it was a whopping 47 boxing-themed covers; during the 1990s, there were 26.

During the 2000s, there have been just two: Mike Tyson in 2002 and Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2007, who appeared under a headline proclaiming theirs “The Fight to Save Boxing.”

It didn’t.   

But perhaps there’s still hope for us old guys who would stand for all 12 rounds of a good or interesting fight, at least if it’s being shown for free.

I left the Fiesta holding my lower back and having arrived at the conclusion that boxing isn’t dead, it’s just feeling a little under the weather.

And that this Manny Pacquiao guy is the chicken soup for its soul.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352.