Luisito

There was a time when Luisito Espinosa was magic in the ring, firing bombs from a fighting physique he sculpted from Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson. He danced and shuffled, shifted and slithered and hitting him was like hitting greased lightning. That's why they called him Lindol opening up from almost nowhere to destroy his opponents. Well, that Espinosa was nowhere Friday evening in Merida, Mexico. I am not saying Luisito is finished as a champion fist-fighter but would surmise his glory days are over.

Guty Espadas Jr., a short-cropped Mexican with long hands, knocked our Luisito down in the first round and then whipped him clean. A right to the jaw caught Espinosa in mid-movement, and he dropped as a melon drops, plump on the canvas. Luisito recovered, of course, but he was never the same after that. Everything he learned from Ali and Sugar Ray he chucked out of the window. He fought like Jake La Motta, the Raging Bull, right up Guty Espadas' alley.

Why did he change his style?

We are told that from a distance Espadas' punches hurt. And so Espinosa had to come in and mix it up toe to toe, something he never did in his entire ring career. The fight became an alley brawl, two pit dogs loose on each other. But somehow Luisito Espinosa's combinations, wicked and lethal in the old days, didn't frighten off the Mexican. Seven years younger than Espinosa, 32, he took everything and gave even more than he got. That was the story of the fight sloganeered on our TV screen as Vengeance in Merida.

Okay, the referee and two judges may have fudged their scorecards as there were some erasures. But the final tallies told the real story. Espadas won cleanly and unanimously. American judge Chuck Hassert scored it 108-99, fellow American Marty Denkin 110-98 and John Keane of Britain 108-99. But let's not take anything away from Luisito Espinosa. He fought the fight of his life, fought it like a butangero, knowing fully well his only chance of winning after that first round knockdown was to knock out Espadas. And so Luisito raged. And raged in vain. The fight ended by technicality in the 11th when Espadas sustained a big forehead cut through accidental butting.

I am told it was Luisito's father who instructed him to change his style. I am sorry but I don't agree.

You don't fight a bull like a bull. You fight in the best lights a life-time of boxing bore you to the top. A slugger like Espadas you toy with, you spear with jabs, while shuffling and dancing away, you annoy with feints, dribbling in with big blows only when the coast is clear, then riding the scooter again and again, then pouncing with combinations when the foe is off-balance. Or a little bit hurt. When Espinosa fights this way, he is seamless, because all his reflexes are at work as to gauging distance, studying his opponent, probing his weak points, feinting.

As it was, Espinosa gave it all he had. By the eighth round, the air had been scraped from both his lungs, and yet he fought on because he wanted to be a world champion again. And his heart beat fiercely. But the legs were giving way in the eighth. After missing a left hook, Luisito Espinosa sprawled forward, then fell. He was a beaten man. The years had caught up with him. The world had changed. The young ones were coming up, hungry fighters they, strong with famished fists on the unending, ceaseless trek to pugilistic glory.

Espinosa was one of the best fist-fighters we had.

He had natural gifts, tall for his weight which was a big advantage. His lanky body was a whippet he could use to bob and weave, and legs that belonged to a ballroom. He could jab, his left hook was one of the best, and his hands were fast, like twigs suddenly torn by a gale off a tree so they could whip the hell out of you. Oh, yes, even at age 32, Luisito Espinosa still has some good fights in him, still a small fortune to be earned, still some residual cheers from the gallery.

But definitely he is on the way down. I had thought he would eventually occupy a niche alongside that of Gabriel (Flash) Elorde. But The Flash had something Luisito Espinosa did not have, or did not have much off, the stealth of a wounded panther who could stare death in the face. And win. Funny. But when finally Espinosa decided to shed off his style as a boxer, and get inside there round after round, tear his lungs off, crawl over to that tunnel where excruciating agony lays siege on a fighter's body, he lost to a youngling of a Mexican named Guty Espadas.

There was irony there.

Everybody agrees. The Abu Sayyaf group that sent President Joseph Estrada a letter riddled with impossible conditions and demands are not "only out of their minds" as the president said, but should be destroyed and decimated, if that is at all possible. And only if their demands are met will these thugs release their 30 Christian hostages, most of them schoolchildren and a Roman Catholic priest. Judas priest! They seek the release of -- among others -- Arab terrorist Ramzi Youssef, the notorious mastermind of the 1993 bombings of Twin Towers in New York. Youssef was also once in Manila masterminding a plot to kill Pope John Paul II.

All these criminals are in high security jails in America, including Sheik Omar. The latter must be Sheik Adurahman Omar, the blind, rumple-haired Muslim religious leader who held sway over the Muslim community in New York. He was looked up to as a man of magic and mystique, whose slightest murmur was the divine breath of Allah. Well, they got what they deserved. As I write, I look at the photo of Khadaffy Janjalani, chair of the Abu Sayyaf. And he scares me. His late father led a raid on Ipil in Mindanao about six years ago, and they set the town to the torch, virtually killed everybody, not sparing pregnant woman and child.

How does the government deal with them?

I don't know. All I know is that Abu Sayyaf is not really all of Islam, but the evil diabolical face of Islam in warrior rage. The Abu Sayyaf terrorists are a small page torn out of Taliban, the ruthless, medieval, antediluvian Muslim congregation that rules Afghanistan. The warrior visage they present to the world is the mujaheedin, the so-called "freedom fighter" of a warrior Islam in renaissance, who looks at capitalism as evil and the US and the West as a viper civilization to be destroyed.

Maybe Dr. Samuel Huntington, professor emeritus of Harvard, was right. In his best-selling Clash of Civilizations, Huntington said the fault lines of today's world no longer concerned ideologies, such as capitalism and communism, but long-embedded cultures that could never see eye to eye. Huntington forecast that the next world war, after the devastating First and Second, would be a titanic confrontation between capitalist America and Europe and Islam spread all over the world.

As I write, reports virtually bang on my desk that commando guerrillas of the MILF (Muslim Independence Liberation Front) of Hashim Salamat late last night raided several places in Cagayan de Oro. A choice bomb target was reportedly the marketplace where about 20 or more people were injured. Is the rampage on? Is the war joined? Remember that just a week ago, President Joseph Estrada declared total war on the "terrorists" of the MILF and it is just possible the MILF has taken his words to heart.

This is simply terrible. The MILF knows it can never take over Mindanao, where the overwhelming majority of the population are Christian. The government knows the only way it can win the war in Mindanao is to depopulate it of Muslims. Meaning kill four to six million of them. But that too is crazy. Islam today is an international force and can possibly influence the course of events in Mindanao, if not the Philippines. They too can wreak havoc.

During the times I met Ninoy Aquino in Boston in the early 80s, Muslim Mindanao often crossed our conversation. Early during martial rule, Ninoy said he offered to mediate the war in Mindanao. He was in Fort Bonifacio prison then, and expectedly, President Ferdinand Marcos turned down his offer to be a peace emissary or mediator. "That was understandable," Ninoy said, "can you imagine the president giving me any kind of importance and what if I succeeded?"

But Ninoy knew the problem well. He was at the time also looking at Algeria, French Algeria to be more precise and which France considered to be an integral part of French territory. Never would the French government give up Algeria or any part of it. "Algerie Francaise" was the cry of the French military. More than five million Frenchmen had taken residence in Algeria, and Algeria was home. The issue divided the soul and the heart of France. But eventually, as Ninoy pointed out, France had to abandon Algeria. Why not an enclave solution for Mindanao Muslims? he asked.