By CHARMAINE DEOGRACIAS
GENERAL SANTOS CITY – Boxing hero Manny Pacquiao still has to decide when to hang his gloves after today’s megafight with Floyd Mayweather but many young boys from his hometown are already training to fit those lucky gloves.
Young aspiring boxers here believe their future is in the boxing gym not in school as they see how the world is abuzz over what is dubbed as “The Fight of the Century” with a prize pot said to reach 400 million dollars.
Scarleth Jordan, 44, from General Santos City, is a mother of 6. All his four sons are into boxing – Zaldy, Jr, 22; Joash, 19; Ken, 17; and Donato, 12. The elder three have left school and are training fulltime under their father, Zaldy, 57.
The youngest, Donato, just finished grade school. Unlike other children who dreams of getting a college education, he wants to follow the path his brothers have taken and also focus on boxing once he has finished high school.
The Jordan boys have several medals in their name from their boxing matches, and not from school.
“It’s every mother’s dream for their children to graduate and finish school but what can I do, they don’t want to go to school anymore. So I just send my daughters to school instead, because for my sons, all they want is boxing,” Scarleth said in the Visayan dialect.
It’s like they’re also in school studying, except that they don’t carry books, but gloves, she said.
Their “school” is the People’s Champ Gym, where they train every single day. The Jordan brothers are herded by their father every morning to jog as part of their training. A tricycle driver, Zaldy shortens his day’s work to drive his boys to the gym.
“I got them into boxing because with my work now, I cannot afford to send them to school to get a degree. They are six. So even if only one of my four sons would become a world champion, we can already afford their dream and they can also make their dreams for their own families come true. They can make their children become doctors or pursue any four-year course, that I have not provided them,” Zaldy said in their dialect.
Training for boxing is just as hard as studying, even harder, Scarleth said. “At the end of the day, their strength is all spent and they are very tired. But at least they are kept away from drugs and other vices because of the discipline that boxing training requires of them.”
The Jordan brothers believe that training is the key to their future. That’s what they saw in Pacquiao. “He struggled in life. He just trained so hard to reach his dream of a good life,” Donato said.
Zaldy, Jr. said they grew up watching boxing bouts in the town plaza. “Our idols are Rolando Navarette before and now it’s Manny Pacquiao,” he said.
General Santos City is known as “home of boxing champions” having produced a number of world class boxing champions and title campaigners.
Navarette, dubbed as the “Bad Boy from Dadiangas (Dadiangas was General Santos’ old name),” was the World Boxing Council super featherweight king from Aug. 29, 1981 to May 29, 1982.
A boxing superstar, Navarette basked in the celebrity trappings: a beautiful house, a sportscar, trophy girlfriends, and wild parties. Now 57 and surviving on dole outs, he is a picture of a dream that turned into a nightmare.
GenSan aspiring boxers learn valuable lessons from Navarrete and Pacquiao life stories.
One thing common with Navarrete and Pacquiao’s rags- to- riches journey (although in the case of Navarrete, from riches he returned to rags) that they find suitable to their circumstances is that school is not the only place to make one’s dream of fame and fortune come true.
Poverty, as they saw in their two home grown idols, can be knocked out in the boxing ring.
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