Friday, June 27, 2008 Wenceslao: Money Pakyaw and Tudela’s grenade By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
MANNY Pacquiao fights are going the way of gasoline and rice: the price of viewing it is soaring. When I checked last week the pay-per-view fee (residential) of Dream satellite and Solar Sports for the coverage of the Pacquiao-David Diaz lightweight scrap in Las Vegas, Nevada, I was told it is P890. Wow. P300. P500. Now P890. Grabe.
A writer for a boxing website, quoting an unidentified Las Vegas ticket broker, claimed seats in Mandalay Bay for the championship fight are not selling well. “I am ready to slash the prices on them and take that hit,” the broker was quoted as saying. Of course, I don’t want to immediately believe what every minor boxing website says.
But Pacquiao-Diaz should not be as big as, say, Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez, so there must be something in that claim.
Still, the writer said, promoter Bob Arum will earn a tidy sum even if Mandalay Bay becomes a howling wilderness. He is being subsidized by a “seven-figure” site fee, and he gets a cut from pay-per-view sales.
So there. Pay-per-view prices are rising because of those “cuts”: by the satellite provider, Solar Sports/GMA 7, Pacquiao, etc. That does not include profits from pay-per-view shows in malls, bars, barangay gyms. By the way, retired champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. now calls himself “Money” Mayweather. Time to call Pacman, “Money Pakyaw.”
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Demetrio “Mano Demet” Granada recently lived up to his name, exploding a political grenade in Tudela by assuming the post of mayor, thereby creating a standoff with the other claimant, Rogelio Baquerfo. No Demet would have made the move two months ago but for a Comelec temporary restraining order (TRO). The TRO has expired.
Granada, declared winner by a margin of 13 votes in a court-ordered recount, got immediate recognition from the Municipal Council and the Association of Barangay Councils. Baquerfo, declared winner by the Comelec in last year’s polls by a margin of eight votes, is recognized by the Department of Interior and Local Government as mayor.
That’s what you call an impasse. But then again, an impasse in governance has hounded Tudela in the past months.
Majority of the municipal councilors are Granada’s allies, and Baquerfo is complicating the situation with his combative stance. Recently, he padlocked the town’s session hall and in effect the office of Vice Mayor Clint Maratas.
Tudela is actually a peaceful town, the reason why years ago I would usually prod Nanay Juling and Tatay Tiyong to grant me permission to spend my summer vacations there. Funny, but while some of our relatives on my mother’s side were in Poro town, I always ended up spending most of my vacation time with my father’s folks in Tudela.
Its politics, however, has been tumultuous, especially in the past decades. The Duranos politically controlled Tudela, as well as the other Camotes towns. But that changed in the 1985 presidential elections when Granada led a revolt of sorts by helping Cory Aquino win in the Tudela poll count over the Durano-supported Ferdinand Marcos.
Baquerfo is the odd man out in the political equation in place since Granada took the post of mayor in Tudela in the late ‘80s. But he is determined to battle it out to the end. I hope this twist in Tudela’s politics won’t lead to something violent.
(khanwens@yahoo.com/ my blog: cebuano.wordpress.com)
