page_title: Manny Pacquiao
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Manny Pacquiao / Professional boxing / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Manny "pacman" Pacquiao with his coach Freddie Roach... the man is a hero here in the philippines.
context_page_description: Emmanuel "Manny" Dapidran Pacquiao, CLH is a Filipino professional boxer and Senator of the Phillippines. Nicknamed "PacMan", he is regarded as one of the greatest professional boxers of all time. He was elected as Senator of the Phillippines in 2016 and is serving a 6 year term.
  Manny Pacquiao is the only eight-division world champion in the history of boxing, and has won twelve major world titles. He was the first boxer to win the lineal championship in five different weight classes, the first boxer to win major world titles in four of the eight "glamour divisions": flyweight, featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight, and is the only boxer to hold world championships across four decades.
  As of 2015, Pacquiao's fights had generated $1.2 billion in revenue from his 25 pay-per-view bouts. According to Forbes, he was the second highest paid athlete in the world in 2015.
  In July 2019, Pacquiao became the oldest welterweight world champion in history at the age of 40, and the first boxer in history to become a recognized four-time welterweight champion after defeating Keith Thurman to win the WBA welterweight title.
context_section_description: Pacquiao was introduced to boxing at the age of 12 by his maternal Uncle Sardo Mejia. According to his autobiography, Pacquiao said watching Mike Tyson's defeat of James "Buster" Douglas in 1990 with his Uncle Sardo as an experience that, "changed my life forever." Mejia began training his nephew in a makeshift home gym. After 6 months of training, Pacquiao began boxing in a park in General Santos eventually traveling to other cities to fight higher-ranked opponents. By age 15, he was considered the best junior boxer in the southern Philippines. At the age of 15 he moved to Manila. In January 1995, at the age of 16, he made his professional boxing debut as a junior flyweight.
  Pacquiao stated of his early years, "Many of you know me as a legendary boxer, and I'm proud of that. However, that journey was not always easy. When I was younger, I became a fighter because I had to survive. I had nothing. I had no one to depend on except myself. I realized that boxing was something I was good at, and I trained hard so that I could keep myself and my family alive."
  On December 4, 1998, at the age of 19, he won his first major title, the World Boxing Council (WBC) flyweight title.
caption: Pacquiao with his trainer Freddie Roach
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