From Sleeping in a Boxing Ring to World Titles

Manny Pacquiao grew up in Tango, a remote area about 50 kilometres south of General Santos City in the Philippines. The South China Morning Post wrote that until he was ten he had never seen a television or been to a town. His family lived in a single-room shack, and his father climbed up to 70 trees a day to gather coconuts. They often had only bananas and root crops, and rice was rare. The family later moved to General Santos, where his father left them.

Pacquiao left school and was introduced to boxing at 12 by his maternal uncle, Sardo Mejia, who turned a room of his house into a makeshift gym. Pacquiao fought all comers at an open-air park in General Santos and travelled 150 kilometres to Davao City to face better opponents. The article says that within three years he was the best junior boxer in the south of the country.

At 15 he stowed away on a boat to Manila in search of tougher competition. In the capital he had no home of his own and slept on the streets and in the ring of a gym, where he kept training.

He later became the first boxer in history to win championships in eight weight divisions. His 2015 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. was billed as a $300 million event, and he was expected to earn $100 million from it alone. In 2013 he was elected as a congressman for the Sarangani region, and many people expected him to run for president.

The article presents his path from a one-room shack to those heights as one of boxing's great rags-to-riches stories.