NONITO DONAIRE JR. lost because he disobeyed his father.
Manny Pacquiao led his Kia Sorento to victory because he obeyed his trainer.
After losing by a sixth-round knockout to unbeaten Nicholas Walters on Sunday, Donaire admitted not having heeded his father’s strategy of “boxing and not brawling.” After the getting-to-know-you session in the first round very commonly seen between boxers fighting for the first time, Donaire quickly engaged Walters in a brawl in the second round.
Almost, the “Filipino Flash” succeeded in stopping the “Axe Man,” jarring and buckling the knees of the Jamaican with his signature left hook.
Alas, luck was on Walters’ side.
When he got rocked and appeared ready to fall as Donaire aimed for the kill, the bell rang.
So, who said it was Walters’s strength that made him win?
Hello? It was the bell that saved him and eventually gave him his 21st knockout win for a 25-0 record to unify the WBA featherweight belt (126 lb).
Bob Arum himself said it: “Thirty seconds more in the second round and Donaire would have won by a knockout.”
Even if Walters was bigger and concededly a natural featherweight, he could have fallen for good if only Donaire listened to his Dad.
In his burning desire to finish off Walters after having been blocked by the bell in the second round, Donaire, 33-2 before Sunday’s fight, let all hell break loose in the third.
He brawled instead of boxed and in this style of fighting, the one that could slip in the haymaker wins.
Walters did, sneaking in an uppercut that Donaire said “I didn’t see coming.”
But, of course.
It was also in a similar barroom-like brawl that Pacquiao got caught by a thunderous right to suffer a knockout, coming coincidentally in the sixth round against Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012.
No, Donaire was not knocked out in the third, only a knockdown from a right uppercut in the heat of a toe-to-toe combat.
“I didn’t see it coming,” Donaire told Inquirer’s Marc Anthony Reyes, who was at ringside covering the fight. “When he caught me with the uppercut, that changed the game. It took my legs and my body.”
He could have restructured his game but then, he continued disobeying his Dad’s command to box and not brawl.
With a second left in the sixth round after losing badly the fourth and fifth rounds via a wild exchange of shots, Donaire was struck by an overhead blow delivered axe like by a lumberjack chopping down a forest tree.
Donaire dropped face first, crawled slow-motion as in a movie, his eyes blank as a white wall while referee Raul Caiz Jr. was administering the count.
As Donaire struggled to rise, Caiz waved him out—very correctly, I must say—at the count of nine.
“I am so grateful that referee Caiz stopped the fight,” said Donaire’s dad afterward.
Explaining later why he brawled after the third-round knockdown onward, Donaire said: “Sakit ko ’yun. Hindi ako umaatras [That’s my bad habit. I don’t back down from a fight].”
Not Pacquiao.
After failing to buy a basket and committing two turnovers in six minutes and 46 seconds of action in the first quarter that helped Blackwater build a 15-6 lead over Kia Sorento, Pacquiao decided it was time to heed the counsel of Freddie Roach, his boxing trainer.
“Don’t force the issue and just play a few minutes, relax and then leave the game,” was Roach’s parting shot at a Pacquiao leaving training camp in GenSan for Manila to act out his newest role as player-coach of Kia Sorento in the PBA Philippine Cup.
Pacquiao never played again, electing—wisely, I must say—to coax his players to give it their best shot while assisting his assistant coach, Glenn Capacio, to map out strategy from the bench.
That produced a handsome 80-66 victory for Kia, giving Pacquiao a rousing debut in a league where, as a 35-year-old, he became the oldest rookie to be drafted.
But the biggest winners that auspicious day at the Philippine Arena where a record 52,612 fans watched a PBA twinbill were the Filipino people, who happily saw Pacquiao emerge from his first professional basketball game unscathed and in one whole piece.
Did Donaire learn something there?
THAT’S IT. Not known to those selected to hit a half-court shot during the halftime break in the Kia-Blackwater game was that a Kia Picanto car was at stake. “Too bad nobody won,” said Demosthenes “Bobby” Rosales of the Kia Sorento Team. Kia President Ginia Domingo would have been proud.