BY ANDREW CORSELLO | PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SELIGER

"YOU THINK THAT WHEN you talk about Manny Pacquiao, you're talking about just an athlete? You're not. You're talking about a man born to Dickensian tin-shanty poverty in General Santos City, a dry-baked scab on the Philippine nation's equatorial bottom. You're talking about a man who spent every hour of his childhood stomach-hungry, shoeless, and stinking. A man whose father abandoned the home when he was a toddler, stayed away for many years, showed up one day for several hours, just long enough to cook and eat his son's dog, then vanished again. A man who never finished school and left for Manila as a teen not because he was pulled, not because others sensed a destiny in him, but because he felt duty-bound to decrease the mouths under his mother's roof. This may be the strangest twist in Pacquiao's athletic history: He grew up in a nation where the cultivation of boxing talent amounts to a civic duty, yet those who saw him compete as a boy considered Pacquiao, at best, a local talent. After arriving in Manila at the age of 14, he spent a year selling doughnuts in the street, working construction, training in a gym, at times sleeping under a bridge swaddled in newspapers— and fighting for one-hundred-peso purses (about two U.S. dollars) in illegal back-alley brawls. You're talking about a man whose consciousness was reduced to the purely physical by the time he hit puberty, a nasty little fighting cock, everything about him that could have been supple and imaginative scraped down to and off the bone…yes? Well, no. By all rights, that's how this guy's life should have unfolded. But then that other element, the strange—which meant this was a fighter who often subjected the gym where he trained to…speeches.”