Manny Pacquiao is a man unchanged by fame and fortune

After several days in Mannyland, you might begin to pinpoint why the experience feels so unusual and refreshing, and you might happen upon a thought that strays beyond boxing into someplace broader.

Surely nobody else lives great fame quite this breezily.

Nobody else sits around Starbucks for four hours on a Sunday to alleviate boredom and greet intermittent waves of approaching fans. Nobody else keeps his coterie so close by and so perpetually that old friends often sleep at the foot of his bed. Nobody else lets the public lurk three metres away during training. Nobody else has this rapport with fellow citizens.

Asked one day in March why he comes all the way to the far-flung northern Philippines from Los Angeles to train for fights, Manny looks a mite incredulous.

"This is my country," he says.

Manny Pacquiao grew up only vaguely aware of the existence of refrigerators as machines in other people's houses, dreamt while asleep of tables of food, suffered the vacant look of hunger in his mother and three younger siblings. He learned the brutal strategies of hunger management such as avoiding eating while starving so as not to deepen famishment hours on.

He ends up living global fame at 32 as you might hope you would live it.

You would pay the medical bills of people who queued up in your hometown. You would rescue troubled friends. You would bond with those who have suffered similarly. Mostly, you would stay unperturbed, even grateful, even with the media.

At 51 and realistic, the trainer Freddie Roach speaks with a tranquil bluntness. He knows Pacquiao's imperfections. He readily tells you while waiting for Manny to come downstairs for training that nobody in the group wants to wake Manny from naps because nobody wants to incur the bad mood. He tells of Manny's stubbornness when told he cannot do something. He bristles at prospective injuries from Manny's basketball obsession - "I won't go watch a game, because I don't condone it" - so that the two have cut a deal to quit the basketball four weeks from fights.

"He'll play up to that last night, 11.50pm," Roach says.

But Roach also says this: "A really nice kid. So he's such a giving person that I'm afraid he's going to give it all away someday. That's my biggest worry. Because he's a generous, generous person." And: "He does like people."

He's the kind of guy who'll quickly give a cheque for US$9,000 (Dh33,000) to his sparring partner for a house down payment, but never does Manny's legendary generosity ring any truer than in the case of Buboy Fernandez, childhood friend, assistant trainer and cornerman alongside Roach during fights.

Eyeball Buboy's big life at 36. Here he is with a laptop, playing a video that shows him winning at motocross outside Baguio before onlookers perched in trees. Here he is, regaling listeners with his impressions of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

There he was back in December 1997, on a street in General Santos, the city where he first met a nine-year-old Pacquiao, who eventually stowed away at 15 on an 800km boat ride to Manila in 1994, slept in parks, scratched out moderate boxing success, sent money to his mother, returned south for a fight. Now he encountered both Fernandez and heartache at his friend's dirty clothes, unkempt hair and wretched cigarettes.

He insisted Fernandez join him in Manila, and he did swoop up a life. More than supporting Fernandez, he employed him, such that by now Fernandez accepts training awards in posh hotels, as he did in Manila last month.

Source: thenational.ae