THE last time out, Manny Pacquiao virtually chopped down a man mountain in Miguel Cotto.
It took Pacquiao all of 12 rounds to do it, lasting almost an hour in that brutal fight as the vagabond Vegas lights glittered in the cold November night of Nevada.
In Cotto, Pacquiao found a prey too huge to handle, hurdle.
Suddenly, Paquiao had embraced the likes of a fierce fox wrestling, tackling, an elephant down to satiate his voracious appetite for raw meat.
If he were a lumberjack, Pacquiao was tirelessly tearing away at a narra tree that was much taller than the tallest tree in Sierra Madre.
At the start, Cotto was as stubborn as a Kamikaze pilot, fighting back ferociously, nay desperately.
Meek, almost, were his shots against every thrust thrown his way by Pacquiao, which came in torrents so that Cotto’s head snapped back and forth like a windshield wiper.
Cotto was really no match to Pacquiao’s salvos, whose jarring impact would gradually weaken the very foundations of the giant from Puerto Rico.
Like Oscar De La Hoya before him, Cotto’s face would soon be also grotesquely rearranged from Pacman’s unrelenting blasts blazing away from all barrels.
When the carnage was over, Cotto’s face had cuts all over, as though shrapnel had violated both his cheeks from a detonated grenade nearby.
In fairness, Pacquiao had to also absorb some punishment from Cotto that, in the end, Pacman’s eardrum had been shattered —almost, that is.
Pacquiao had to wear shades the longest in his career to hide swollen eyes and bruises around them.
It was, literally, a rumble in the jungle.
Or, had a pundit said the ring had been bizarrely transformed into a slaughterhouse, amen to that.
Four months later, Pacquiao would again go scaling a height, as Pacman fights Joshua Clottey. That’s on March 14, this time in Dallas (Arlington),Texas.
But while Clottey is also a man mountain (like Cotto he’s also taller than Pacquiao), the Ghanaian is no Mt. Everest, nor Mt. Vesuvius.
If Pacquiao used a chainsaw against Cotto, a fruit knife would suffice against Clottey.
Or, for a touch of class, a Swiss knife, maybe?
(alsol47@yahoo.com)