Pacquiao eats up training for big fights
LOS ANGELES – Manny Pacquiao, sitting at the dining room table inside his house two weeks before his Saturday fight against Keith Thurman, looked grossly overmatched.
By breakfast.
He surveyed plates of white rice, chicken and steak kebab, fried squid, sliced bananas, beef and cabbage soup and eggplant omelet with bitter melon. Then the daily ritual commenced.
Pacquiao dug into a pile of rice as his manager, Sean Gibbons, watched the Filipino boxing star.
“Most fighters have a little piece of chicken in front of them and they look like they haven’t eaten in about a week,” Gibbons told USA TODAY. “They look like they’re crying.”
But Pacquiao’s cooks keep piling up the Filipino food as he prepares to face Thurman in Las Vegas for the super welterweight championship in which both will have to get down to 147 pounds by the weigh-in.
“No problem,” Pacquiao said between bites of beef kebab.
As usual.
Having turned pro as a 106-pound lightweight at 16, Pacquiao, now 40, has steadily bulked up while winning an unprecedented 12 titles in eight weight divisions. He said huge quantities of Filipino food helped fuel his rise and address a potential problem.
Because of his legendary work ethic and metabolism, Pacquiao burns massive amounts of calories during his training. He said his five-man cooking staff helps him maintain his weight. So the tradition continued at this breakfast.
Before Pacquiao started his 5-mile run up Griffith Park, followed by agility drills with a medicine ball and brutal abdominal exercises, his team of cooks was hard at work too. The flames of three grills crackled in the backyard of Pacquiao’s $3 million home with five bedrooms and five baths as the five men prepared the breakfast feast.
One stirred bulalo, a popular soup in the Philippines made by cooking beef shanks and bone marrow.
Another cut off skin from eggplant before it was dipped into egg.
Two others prepared the kebab, basting the beef shanks and sprinkling spices over ground chicken.
“Secret spices,” Archie Banas, the head cook, said before breaking into a smile. “No, the secret is just black pepper, salt, paprika.”
When Pacquiao heads to Las Vegas this week for the fight, the whole cooking operation will come with him rather than trying to find a Filipino restaurant to cater his meals.
“I could find it, but it’s not easy,” Pacquiao said. “It’s good to have a cook. So whatever I want to eat, they will cook.
“If you’re changing your food during training, your condition will change. That’s the most important thing. What you eat from the start of the training, then that’s your food, every month, every week, every day.”
Pacquiao said he did not have such luxury when he was growing up in the Philippines and sometimes sleeping on the streets with his five siblings.
“Sometimes we didn’t have food to eat,” he said. “Just water.”
That changed, Pacquiao said, when he found a job in construction at 14 and started his professional boxing career two years later. He said he used the money he made to help feed his family, usually with rice and occasionally with sardines and noodles.
“In the Philippines, if you have rice, you can survive,” he said.
The heaping plates of food in front of Pacquiao at breakfast two weeks ago reflect how much has changed for the boxer with a record of 61-7-2 with 39 knockouts.
“If he doesn’t finish it, we finish it,” Banas said.
There is plenty of food to go around, and sometimes up to 100 people fill Pacquiao’s 4,273-square-foot house for meals, according to Gibbons.
“I love to be surrounded by the people and feed the people,” Pacquiao said, as his breakfast became a multitasking event. A senator in the Philippines, he talked politics, watched basketball, posed for photos and addressed Thurman’s trash-talk.
Thurman, who at 30 is a decade younger than Pacquiao, has predicted he will retire the Filipino boxing star.
By this point in the conversation, there were no empty plates in front of Pacquiao, but he had put a serious dent in the rice, kebab and banana. Yet Pacquiao sounded hungry to face Thurman in the ring.
“I told him, ‘The more you talk trashtalk, the more it will help me, because it gives me more encouragement, motivation.’
“They’re thinking at age of 40, he’s slowing down. But if you look at my training and my speed. …”
Could Pacquiao be like the feasts his cooks serve up – as good as ever?
It is food for thought.