Fri, Apr 17, 2015 page19

• New Pacquiao film shows poor boy grow to be champ

  • AP, MANILA
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  As a dirt-poor rookie boxer in the southern Philippines, Manny Pacquiao started his phenomenal rise to global fame not as the Pacman, as he is sometimes called, but as “Kid Kulafu.”

  That moniker — the title of a new local film about Pacquiao’s childhood — was taken from the label of a cheap wine whose empty bottles he returned for recycling to earn money to help his family.

  Kid Kulafu opened on Wednesday in more than 70 theaters across the Philippines starting ahead of Pacquiao’s May 2 megafight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. It will be shown in some US and Canadian theaters beginning on Friday next week.

  Produced with advice and other assistance from Pacquiao, the film depicts the impoverished world he grew up in well before he became the world’s only eight-division boxing champion, one of its highest-paid athletes and the wealthiest member of the Philippine House of Representatives.

  “He had every excuse in the book to fail — broken family, no food, no home, nowhere to go, no money, but he still persevered, and that’s what I want the people to see — that he is where he is today because of hard work,” filmmaker Paul Soriano said.

  The 36-year-old boxer was born in a thatch-roofed house with a dirt floor in the mountains of southern Bukidnon province at a time when anti-communist militiamen were battling insurgents. One brutal clash near the Pacquiao home forced the family to move to General Santos City, into a shack owned by his uncle, Sardo Mejia.

  There often was not enough food for the family; sometimes they ate boiled rice paired with fish entrails or corn on the cob. In the movie, militiamen compel Pacquiao’s mother to hand over two small fried fish she had prepared for her family.

  Pacquiao’s father later abandoned the family, leaving Manny, the eldest of three brothers, to find a livelihood, like most young boys in the country’s rural areas. He sold fried peanuts, bread and doughnuts made by his mother, and earned a little money of his own by gathering and selling tiny native lemons called calamansi.

  He also worked as a store assistant for Mejia, and collected sacks of empty bottles of Vino Kulafu, which he returned to the distributors to cash in the deposits. Kulafu was originally a Tarzan-like Philippine comic-book hero.

  Pacquiao became drawn to boxing after he started watching Betamax tapes of world heavyweight fights with his uncle. Mejia encouraged Pacquiao to box and later trained him, though his mother hated the sport. She wanted her son to be a priest, but was too poor to enter him into a seminary. Still, she ingrained deep spirituality and religious faith in him.

  Ironically, Pacquiao’s road to boxing was partially paved by his mother when she was struck by a heart attack, Soriano said.

  The movie depicts the boy entering a fight to win 100 pesos (about US$2) needed to buy her medicine.

  With training by his uncle and a friend’s father, Pacquiao soon became the amateur boxing derby champion in General Santos, fighting in the open-air ring in the town plaza as Kid Kulafu, a name Mejia came up with. Without telling his mother, he left General Santos to train in a dingy boxing gym in Manila.

  “Kid Kulafu is really a movie about a young boy who grew up with nothing,” Soriano said. “All he really had was a dream and he fought and fought and fought until he made those dreams come true.”

  “It is a fairy-tale story, but it’s true,” producer Marie Pineda said.
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