Boxing legend Manny Pacquiao is a pin-up for un-millennials like me

Dan Jones
Dan Jones22 January 2019

On Sunday morning, bleary-eyed, I sat and watched Manny Pacquiao defend his World Boxing Association title against Adrien Broner. Pacquiao took the 29-year-old to pieces — a welcome outcome since the Filipino legend is the happy face of the fight game, while Broner is just an overhyped twerp.

It was all the more satisfying because Pacquiao is 40, and when he is not boxing he holds down a job as a senator in the Philippines.

When you consider it, this is extraordinary. A rough analogy would be Britain’s 40-year old Health Secretary Matt Hancock moonlighting from his defences of Theresa May’s Brexit bill to beat the scales off all comers three times a year.

Hancock is two months older than Pacquiao and I fancy that he would fight somewhere nearer super-middleweight than welterweight, so the comparison is not perfect. But you see my point.

Despite having reached the age where most men are expected to settle down to a squarejohn job and the drudgery of sensible car choices, Regaine and the impending likelihood of Viagra, Pacquiao is still flying around the world, beating younger men in fistfights and earning vast sums of money.

He is carrying a torch for the un-millennials. The general rule of life is that as you approach 40 you become physically obsolete — allowed to be rich or clever, but no longer hard or fit.

Anyone rolling back that tide gets my vote every time. Not least because it allows me to cling to the fantasy that, even at 37-and-a-half, if I were to lace up my gloves again, train really seriously and maybe stop binge-drinking then in a couple of years I’d be ready for a title shot of my own.

Not against Pacquiao, of course. But maybe Hancock would be up for it.

Why record shops are losing touch

It’s sad to see HMV heading into administration, and perhaps the slow agony of being run down in the Mike Ashley portfolio of companies.

I went into our local branch the other day and it was a doleful experience. I wandered around buying nothing and recalled all the hours that I used to spend in record shops, click-click-clicking through racks of CDs — the aural pleasure of new music preceded by something pleasingly tactile.

Now one just hits Tidal or Spotify with a single thumb, and there it all is, with an algorithm telling you what you like. Convenient — but hardly sensual.

Mahershala’s the man of the moment

The bleak darkness of winter is a good time to watch bleak and dark television — and there’s nothing better on that count than the third season of HBO’s True Detective, starring Mahershala Ali.

Mahershala Ali
AFP/Getty Images

Ali plays Wayne Hays, a detective losing his mind in different ways at different stages of his life.

After a supremely Gothic debut season, True Detective went astray last time around. But with Ali on board it is better than ever. There are few such skilful or subtle actors working at the moment, few more capable of projecting hellish inner turmoil beneath a buttoned-up exterior.

Today Ali is in the mix for the Oscars nominations, thanks to his big-screen role in Green Book (he has already won a Golden Globe for it).

It may well be that his turn as Hays on HBO’s leading show — the leading HBO show that doesn’t feature dragons and White Walkers, anyway — is enough to tip Academy voters. Either way, it’s a tremendous turn.

Anyone in need of a colossal cactus?

I made an error last month while shopping online for my wife, who wanted a giant cactus as a houseplant. I spent several hundred pounds on what turned out on arrival to be a seven-foot plastic one, tremendously ugly and actually quite useless.

It was not gratefully received and, as punishment, sits beside my desk, looming over me as I write. I have no idea what to do with it — it is too kitsch to be a hatstand, too big for a doorstop. If readers have any ideas for the wretched thing, please let me know. Alternatively: does anyone want to buy a seven-foot plastic cactus?

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