Red Smith, Jim Murray and Damon Runyon would find endless inspiration and poetry in the likes of Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Bob Arum and the rest of the characters in the sport today.
Boxing is the gift that keeps on giving.
It is why the great wordsmiths gravitated to it. It is why Red Smith could easily find poetry in its violence, why Jim Murray scoffed at anybody wishing for the departure of Mike Tyson.
"Lord, no," Murray would say. "He's 10 columns a year."
Damon Runyon painted such wonderful word pictures of boxing characters that, over time, his name was used as a category for those with special quirks.
It hasn't changed, only gotten better.
Smith, Murray and Runyon cry out from their graves for another day to write. Manny Pacquiao would have intrigued and inspired them to combinations of words worthy of plaques, headstones and literary immortality.
They would not only see him as this skinny, hungry child from the mean streets of General Santos City, Philippines, and later the meaner streets of Manila, but for what he has become and how beautifully he has handled it.
Like none others, they would articulate how an impoverished child from a third-world country had become a hero on the American sports scene, while maintaining dignity and perspective. They would make the contrast between how he shares fame and fortune and how so many of our homegrown heroes never have even an idle thought about giving back.
Even better, they would find, as they always did, the delightful wackiness of the people connected to Pacquiao and would quickly make the point that, of them all, he is the most stable.
They would be in full typist mode in the aftermath of Saturday's annihilation by Pacquiao of a slow, plodding, six-inches-taller Mexican named Antonio Margarito. It looked like Paul Bunyan being taken to the woodshed by his 10-year-old son.
They would find a way to, respectfully, point out to Mr. Margarito that a boxer who just made $5 million while having an orbital bone broken and jammed with pieces of eye muscle needs to take that $5 million, thank God daily, and retire to a life of bouncing his children on his knee.
They would have a field day with the never-ending maneuvers of Pacquiao's promoter, the veteran master of all angles, Bob Arum. Arum now calls Pacquiao the best fighter he has ever seen, even though he has seen, and promoted, Muhammad Ali and Oscar de la Hoya. Our writers would quickly make the translation for readers who might be a bit slow on boxing-promoter-speak. Best fighter also means biggest payday fighter.
Nor would they miss Arum moving immediately to what's next for Pacquiao (and him). As every boxing fan knows, the ultimate match is Pacquiao against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Arum was quoted a few days ago as saying that Pacquiao would have a birthday party Dec. 17 and they had better hear of Mayweather's interest by then.
Ah, the old birthday-party deadline trick.
Our beloved authors would find volumes of fascination in Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who, by his own admission, took five fights too many in his own career. Roach has Parkinson's disease, the likely result of punches absorbed in those last five fights. Yet while he struggles physically, Roach has more common sense about what will happen and what should happen next for Pacquiao than anybody.
When Roach said Pacquiao would handle a bigger, more famous Oscar de la Hoya, the boxing world laughed. Roach was right. He had a plan for his fighter to handle Miguel Cotto. It worked. Same with Joshua Clottey and Margarito. Four bigger trees, all becoming kindling.
Now Roach says his fighter, who also happens to be a congressman in the Philippines and who seems increasingly more interested in politics than punching, should consider retiring from the ring. Pacquiao has had 57 fights, and Roach knows what five too many means. Pacquiao already could be three-fifths there.
Our wordsmiths would find a wealth of material in the Mayweather family, which seems as destined to jail time as to ring time. The immediate future of the sport may have less to do with Arum and HBO and De La Hoya's Golden Boy and Pacquiao and Roach and panting fans than it does with the judges in Nevada who will rule in separate cases involving Floyd Jr. and uncle Roger, Floyd's trainer, in late January.
Then there is Shane Mosley, who is 39 and coming off a draw with Sergio Mora, in the Snore at Staples, seeking the next shot at Pacquiao. Also, Bernard Hopkins, telling the world that Pacquiao would lose to Mayweather because he couldn't deal with Mayweather's "black, street-fighter style."
These guys are a stitch, in several ways.
All this and even a real fight going on Saturday night in Atlantic City, N.J. — Sergio Martinez versus Paul Williams. That fight has been unfairly and incorrectly lost in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, Pacquiao-Margarito.
So many stories. So little time. And so sad that Smith, Murray and Runyon could not have lived forever.
bill.dwyre@latimes.com
