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couldn’t accept it. For me, losing is unacceptable. I won’t even do sit-ups in the ring because you’re never supposed to be on your back in there. I had a fighter who once wrote ‘Oh Shit’ on the bottoms of his shoes—so if he got knocked out you’d see it on TV—but I could never do that.” It was the beginning of the end for Freddie. He went about fifty-fifty for the rest of his professional career as a fighter. Stylistically, defense wasn’t part of his game.
    “Manny, he’s more accessible, he can accept when things don’t go his way,” Freddie said.
    “I think maybe it’s about the Philippines, the lifestyle there. They’re pretty passive in a way. I mean, the traffic is bad and the street is filled with horns, but nobody gets road rage. I was watching basketball and I’d see fouls that would lead to a fistfight in the United States, and they would laugh it off. Manny knows that every fight has a winner and a loser, and sometimes it’s not his night. But for me it was unacceptable. For me, there was only a winner.” There’s something very durable about that fatalistic acceptance of third world survivors. Manny’s father abandoned the family when he was twelve, and he grew up dirt poor in the Philippines. Even today, when they go to Vegas for a big fight, Freddie stays in his hotel room alone and Manny has ten people living with him in his suite. It creates strength, a buffer of home and country. You can watch him relaxed and at ease with the distractions of his extended family around him.
    “Manny took that stoppage, he dealt with it, and he learned from it. It just wasn’t his night. Now, he works his abs religiously so he never gets knocked out by a body shot again. They found a weakness in him, so he works to take it away.”
    Freddie discussed how Ray “Boom Boom” Bautista, another fighter of his, was dealing with the same issue: coming back after being knocked out. Freddie peers at me through the long tunnel of his thick glasses and drawls, “Is he going to come back as a better fighter or is his career over?”
    “So how are you going to help him?” I asked.
    Freddie says, “You give him a lot of positive reinforcement, tell him it could happen to anybody, ‘You’ve knocked out a lot of guys.’ Fighters are hardheaded, and when they’re stubborn and doing something wrong but keep winning, they can always fall back on that ‘winning formula’ thing. But now, with one loss, I got some clout. When you lose I got some ammo.” Freddie will use the loss to work on some fundamental things that he had been trying to get Boom Boom to do. He’ll work on the little things, but the little things add up.
     
    A tall, good-looking older man with long blond hair, wearing a casual, tropical suit came in the door and Freddie’s eyes lit up. It was Donny Lalonde, a former world champion who’d knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard in the fourth round (although he’d lost in the ninth). Donny was into real estate in Costa Rica. That was the thing about Wild Card—it was chock-a-block with celebrities, and anybody could wander in. Donny shook hands and leaped into the conversation. I told him I was looking into the mental aspect of fighting, and Donny chuckled and said, “You’ve got to have already done the thinking in the gym. In the fight, you can’t have your mind wrapped up. You can’t be thinking instead of fighting. It’s about reacting.”
    Freddie told us a funny story about the purely mental side of things, about Steve Collins fighting Chris Eubank for the middleweight title in 1995. Collins had very publicly gone to a hypnotist to make him stick to Freddie’s game plan. Whether or not that made a difference was sort of besides the point, because his opponent, Eubank, thought Collins was inhuman now, just a fighting machine. Freddie laughed, “So the bullshit worked and the hypnotist took thirty-three and a third for the next three fights!” He means that the hypnotist took