RUDY SALUD: FRANK AND STRAIGHTFORWARD
By Ronnie Nathanielsz
PhilBoxing.com
Tue, 26 Jun 2007
If there’s one thing we admire about our longtime and esteemed friend, the eminent lawyer Rudy Salud, is that he makes his feelings known in a frank and straightforward fashion. Unlike some lawyers we know, Salud doesn’t make vague comments or say things and then adds a rider that he could be quoted but not identified.
When we spoke to Salud the other day he flat out stated his valued opinion – in his lawyer’s assessment of the available facts – on what could happen to Top Rank promoter Bob Arum and Manny Pacquiao in the lawsuits filed by Golden Boy Promotions against Arum for “tortuous interference” in the contract Pacquiao signed with Golden Boy for which he received $500,000. In Salud’s legal mind, the fact that Pacquiao signed a second contract some two months later for essentially the same services but for which he received $1million, compounds the felony.
While Salud joined his close friends to watch Pacquiao’s second and third fights in an exciting trilogy against Erik Morales on pay-per-view at the Rockwell theater and enjoyed every moment of the action and praised Manny for his performance which thrilled a nation and lifted our collective spirits, he has had the judicious capacity to distinguish between Pacquiao the fighter and Pacquiao the human being.
It was no wonder then, that when our friend, Ring Magazine editor-in-chief Nigel Collins emailed us with his comments about Pacquiao’s chances of replacing Floyd Mayweather Jr as Ring’s top pound-for-pound fighter and then added his comments about Pacquiao the person, Salud immediately took issue.
Collins had said that “unlike in the Philippines, Manny’s political adventure has not detracted from his popularity in the United States.” Nothing wrong with that statement of fact. But when Collins mentioned that “sometimes Filipinos get too caught up in the periphery events surrounding Pacquiao and forget what he does once the bell rings” that was when Salud took serious issue with him.
To Salud, those who live and work in the US forget everything as long as an athlete is good in one thing. He quickly pointed to Barry Bonds who is on the verge of breaking the homerun record of the revered Hank Aaron. As Salud points out it doesn’t seem to matter that the man is surely guilty of using steroids and the responsible sports authorities in baseball haven’t done anything to deny Bonds the record he seeks through methods that are decidedly unethical even though they may not be illegal in a technical sense.
Indeed, what have they done to protect the glorious achievement of Aaron who established his record with no artificial methods of increasing his strength and hitting power or modern day bats, unlike Bonds who is widely believed to have used performance enhancing drugs aided by equipment that is manufactured in a far more sophisticated manner.As Salud points out, values are put behind or forgotten depending on what they want to get.
Salud takes no issue with Collins on the fighting skills of Pacquiao and the excitement he brings into the ring and points out that “he is right because as far as he is concerned as editor-in-chief of Ring Magazine he looks at Manny only as a boxer within the ring.” But Filipinos don’t look at it that way. As Salud says “we look at Manny with all the values that we want popular Filipinos to live by and become role models for our youth.”
Of course we forget what Pacquiao achieves in the ring once he steps out and we look at the behavioral pattern of a national icon because our assessment of the man – indeed any other individual similarly situated – is certainly not confined to his great performances in the ring.
To millions of his countrymen Pacquiao is a Filipino and we agree with Salud when he makes it clear that we want him to have the values of a Filipino. Indeed, the best proof of the national consensus is when the late Gabriel “Flash” Elorde in a recent survey of the top ten all-time Filipino boxing greats finished No.1 as he has done in similar surveys in the past while Pacquiao finished No. 6. It should also be recalled that in response to a question on who was the Filipino’s idol in sports on the Pacland website itself, pool hero Efren “Bata” Reyes beat Pacquiao by a two-to-one margin. To Salud, that's the best proof in support of his contention that we measure the man's athletic achievements alongside a human dimension.
It simply means that while many Filipinos may not live up to the values enshrined in our heritage, there are many more who have an abiding faith in those same values and wish that our modern day heroes, whether they be athletes, law enforcers, government officials, captains of industry or even Overseas Contract Workers strive to live by them because they are worth living by.
Click here to view a list of other articles written by Ronnie Nathanielsz.
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