TODAY Manny Pacquiao will climb into a professional boxing ring for the 70th time. He will do so in a career that stretches so far back it’s tempting to ponder if he first arrived in the US from the Philippines on a biplane.

The Filipino ring legend made his pro debut in 1995, fighting literally to feed himself and his family in General Santos City, where, the story goes, they were so poor his father resorted to killing and cooking the family dog at one point. 

Even though I was just telling Prince Charles the other week how I cannot abide people who name-drop, this writer was living in LA and a regular fixture at Freddie Roach’s Wildcard Boxing Club in Hollywood when Pacquiao first started training there. 

It was the year 2000, a typically hot morning in Hollywood, and in a gym where air conditioning was considered heresy the heat was so intense that just blinking broke you out in a sweat.

I was training on one of the bags like the big palooka I was and remain when suddenly a loud scream rent the air, followed by what sounded like a man being tortured on the rack. 

Like everyone else, I stopped to look at the source of this mad noise and there he was, Manny Pacquiao, as skinny as one of the threads hanging from my shorts. He was in the ring shadowboxing with the intensity and fury of someone who meant it.

Fast doesn’t come close to describing the blur his hands made as he threw them in various combinations. He looked half-starved and in need of an intravenous feeding drip, yet for all that exuded an inner strength born of desperation. 

Poverty would make not break Manny Pacquiao.

His long-time trainer Freddie Roach has said that the moment he took him on the pads (mitts in US parlance) for the first time he knew he was special. Yet neither Freddie nor anyone around Pacquiao back then could possibly have known “how” special he would become.

The index of where Manny Pacquiao stands in the special stakes 18 years on is that when he climbs into the ring today, he will do so as the only eight-division world champion in the history of boxing.

The who’s who of hall of fame and future hall of fame champions he has fought and defeated along the way is close to unparalleled in the modern era.

That Manny Pacquiao also happens to be a genuinely humble man, whose acts of kindness and generosity to the poor in the Philippines are legendary, adds emphasis to a legacy of greatness that seems more compatible with the sport’s golden age, a time when honour and boxing were relatives rather than strangers. 

Turning the page to Pacquiao’s opponent Adrien “The Problem” Broner and honour and humility evaporate.

Broner is the 29-year old product of the tough streets of Cincinnati. When he’s not boxing he’s rapping, partying, shopping, throwing money around (literally in some instances), insulting workers in supermarkets — in general abusing himself and debasing a sport he hasn’t so much graced as invaded. 

It is one thing suffering cultural impoverishment, it is another embracing it, which Broner has done and more. He has talent, no doubt, but is yet to deliver on the potential he carried when he turned pro.

Bling more than boxing has defined his career to this point, with Broner going out of his way to walk in Floyd Mayweather’s Gucci-clad footsteps. 

The question going into this fight is whether this dynamic has changed, or changed sufficiently for him to be able to overcome Pacquiao.

The 40-year-old still retains a punch output that most of his peers cannot match. With Broner’s own punch output renowned for being conservative, the Filipino has to be favourite to come out with his WBA welterweight title intact.