Go Donnie

Anxiety mixed with “sadness” and a never-ending state of asking what’s happening. This is how many of us Cebuano boxing fans will feel about Pinoy Pride 9. It’s probably the only Pinoy Pride fight card that we would have loved to watch live, but unfortunately can’t. For starters, it takes place in Bacolod. Travelling these days isn’t exactly cheap as you have to worry about transportation, hotel accommodations and food. So we’ll have to settle for the delayed telecast this morning over ABS-CBN. The downside is that the fight already happened and we might have heard news of who won last night, assuming that we didn’t watch the live airing on PPV.

 The other side about feeling uneasy and guilty why we can’t watch it live is that it’s not just any ordinary Pinoy Pride event. This one stands out above Pinoy Pride 1 to 8 for a simple reason. It features a real world championship fight featuring Donnie Nietes of the ALA Gym. Having a world title fight means that we’re having a world class event on a neighboring island away from our very own Cebu. Moreover, this is the only world championship fight that the country will most likely host this year. We haven’t hosted a world title fight since Gerry Peñalosa defended his WBO bantamweight title against Ratanachai Sor Vorapin in 2008. This is where the sad part comes in. Why Bacolod and not Cebu? Why not the Hoops Dome? Waterfront? It’s a classic case of being so near, yet so far. Oh well, I guess you can’t have ’em all now, can you?

 So as you read this, you most likely know who already won. This is what makes the card doubly interesting as a writer. When writing about other Pinoy Pride or other local promotions, it’s almost automatic to assume that the Pinoy boxing star always wins. In fact, many even criticize that foreign opponents are literally fed to make our local boxing heroes look good. But this again is like no other event. Nietes isn’t guaranteed of a win against WBO world champion Ramon Garcia Hirales who’s defending his world light flyweight championship for the first time. In betting talk, this is a 50-50 fight even if Nietes may be considered a slight favorite for simply being the hometown boy.

We will surely hope for a Nietes win, but it won’t be easy. Donnie will have to dig deep and be the better boxer that he is against Garcia. Garcia is no pushover but is technically more inferior to Donnie. But again, this doesn’t mean an automatic win for the Negrense. Expect to see Donnie use his boxing skills to slowly but surely pick Garcia apart. He won’t be going on a toe-to-toe slugfest unless Garcia is ready to kiss the canvas. Nietes will use various combinations off his jab and will look for the correct formula to wear down Garcia. He’ll go with right straights and left hooks from the distance, and when the infighting takes place, expect Donnie to go to his uppercuts. He’ll also work the body with his vicious left hooks. And when Garcia is softened up, he’ll go down wilting under tremendous pressure from Donnie. To his credit, Garcia will most likely last the entire fight but he’ll be beat up pretty bad. The main reason why Donnie will win is that he has the fighting style to beat all those Mexicans in the lighter divisions. Most of them are alike and Donnie has already faced five of them before (Armando Vasquez, Mario Rodriguez, Jesus Silvestere, Manuel Vargas and Erik Ramirez). Unfortunately for Mexico, nobody has stepped up to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Ricardo Lopez. Conversely, that’s great news for us Pinoy boxing fans. Not many fans might know it but Donnie is also another Mexicutioner in the mold of Manny Pacquiao and Nonito Donaire. He just doesn’t happen to be as popular.

It’s tough to compare Donnie to Pacquiao and Donaire, but the boxer from Murcia is the most soft-spoken and most humble of the country’s top boxers. This is what makes Donnie so special. If you meet him in the streets, you’ll never know that he had already won a world championship here in Cebu (which we proudly witnessed), and had defended this three times on hostile territory in Mexico. And I’m pretty sure he won his second world championship last night.

And so with mixed feelings, we stand proud and happy (and sad) that Nietes is getting his due. Winning his second world title on home soil should be doubly sweet. And with his head in place and feet firmly planted to the ground, we salute / the new……WBO light flyweight champion of the wooooorld, Donnie “Ahas” Nietes. (If I can’t say it, I can at least write it out).

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Time-out: Happy birthday to my sister Anneli Navarro Christensen in the U.S.