Pacquiao hangs up gloves, says he has heard the 'final bell'

Manny Pacquiao is finally hanging up his gloves, capping a phenomenal two-decade career that swept him from being a hardscrabble, odd-job worker at a poor coastal town in war-torn Mindanao to a superstar boxer known across the world and, possibly, to becoming the Philippines' next president.

"It is difficult for me to accept that my time as a boxer is over. Today, I am announcing my retirement. I never thought that this day would come... Goodbye, boxing... I just heard the final bell," he said in a 14-minute video released on his Facebook page yesterday.

Now 42, he finishes his 26-year, 72-fight career with 62 wins, eight losses and two draws.

He won 12 world titles.

He is the only fighter in history to win titles in eight different weight classes. "I'm amazed at what I've done," he said.

What he has done is rise from being a fishmonger moonlighting as a boxer so that he can earn an extra peso to buy a sack of rice for his mother, to a boxing demigod who can rake in US$100 million (S$136 million) for a day's work.

"He is the ideal aspirational model for ordinary Filipinos, the underdog who, through perseverance, manages to make it to the different portals of power: cultural, political, economic," said pop culture expert Rolando Tolentino of the University of the Philippines.

Pacquiao was born in 1978 in Kibawe town, in the southern province of Bukidnon.

He grew up dirt poor.

He once recalled sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes stacked together just high enough to provide some cushion from the hard floor.

He said he was always in rags, and his mother's shack was the only one in his village that did not have a television.

He had to quit school when he was 10, after his father, who was never around, left for good.

He flitted from one odd job to another, hawking bread or helping unload tuna at a wharf, to help his mother make ends meet.

Yet, there was seldom enough money for a bag of rice. He and his sister and two brothers had to settle for root vegetables.

At the age of 12, he began boxing for money but two years later stowed away on a ship destined for the capital, Manila. There, he lived on the streets and did construction jobs to earn money that he sent to his mother.

Boxing was never on the cards, he once said. What he wanted to be was a basketball player, but soon realised that his real talent lay in his speed and savagery in the ring.

At 16 and weighing 48kg, he became a professional boxer.

He won his first major title on Dec 4, 1998, capturing the World Boxing Council flyweight title.

The lightning-quick southpaw would eventually take his talent to the United States for the first time in 2001, and the rest is history.

The match that made him a global superstar was his 2008 thrashing of Oscar de la Hoya.

He had by then reached his prime.

In 2015, after on-and-off talks that spanned six years, Pacquiao finally squared off with Floyd Mayweather for the title of the world's best pound-for-pound fighter.

With a total take of US$600 million, it was the richest fight of all time. Mayweather won by a decision in what boxing fans and critics panned as a lacklustre match between two ageing prizefighters.

None of Pacquiao's fights after that would be as sensational.

Last month, he lost by decision to unheralded fighter Yordenis Ugas. At 42, the power and speed that once made him unstoppable were no longer there.

Now, Pacquiao is pivoting towards politics, where his record is far less stellar.

He is running to become Philippine president next year.

A poll released yesterday showed him trailing far behind President Rodrigo Duterte's daughter and mayor of Davao City, Ms Sara Duterte, putting him in fourth place behind two other more popular candidates.

Pundits say his performance in the poll shows that while Filipinos worship him as a boxer, they are less than impressed with him as a politician.