A glimpse of Manny Pacquiao’s LA life as fight nears

April 20,2015
A Mercedes and a Ferrari cool their engines at Manny Pacquiao's Hollywood manor. The Los Angeles home on Plymouth Blvd is abuzz nowadays with fight talk, prayed-over feasts and playtime with the “Pacman” family. But the Pacmans are moving up to a real mansion in Beverly Hills before the month ends. REM ZAMORA

A Ferrari 458 Italia and a Mercedes-Benz SL 550 cool their engines at Manny Pacquiao’s Hollywood manor. The Los Angeles home on Plymouth Blvd is abuzz nowadays with fight talk, prayed-over feasts and playtime with the “Pacman” family. But the Pacmans are moving up to a real mansion in Beverly Hills before the month ends. REM ZAMORA

LOS ANGELES—The lawns are well manicured but the community is neither gated nor affluent. Very few other celebrities are known to live in this neighborhood, which is just off the more upscale Hancock Park, but there’s no mistaking who lives in one of the few gated houses around.

The neighbors are used to living next to this celebrity, so they don’t mind the crowd that gathers outside his house or the cars that fill up whatever space is left on both sides of Plymouth Boulevard on this sunny spring afternoon. They are members of Team Pacquiao and a handful of media men trying to squeeze something out of what is left of Media Day at training camp.

Finally, two cars arrive. The first unloads what looks like takeout food from the resident’s favorite Thai restaurant outside his place of work. The second car, a dark Mercedes Benz, enters the gate, stops next to a Ferrari and delivers the man the crowd has been waiting for.

Smiling broadly, Manny Pacquiao, after another day at the office, is home. A member of his team calls it a mansion. Indeed, it’s a mansion for the hoi polloi from whose ranks the once-impoverished Manny comes from. But it’s a modest abode by Hollywood standards. Soon, Pacquiao will be moving to a new address with celebrity neighbors in a gated barrio called the Summit in Beverly Hills, light years removed from his humble, proletarian beginnings. Soon, there will be peace and quiet on the street where he lives.

But for now, the champion’s house is like a marketplace in Babylon. People speak in three different languages—English, Tagalog, Cebuano. Sometimes they have to introduce themselves to one another, although the Pacquiao mascot, a vested Jack Russell terrier named Pacman, seems to know everyone by their smell. It’s almost impossible for a visiting newcomer to tell who’s a relative, who’s a member of the household staff, who’s a member of the boxing staff or who’s just a plain hanger-on. They all act the same; they all feel at home. Manny obviously wants it that way. –Artemio T. Engracia Jr.

Read more: (No typical) Day in the stateside life of Pacquiao

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