Manny Pacquiao's Scripture Study
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The lights in the suite stayed low after midnight. I sat on the edge of a couch that smelled like leather and sweat from the day’s work, watching Manny Pacquiao open the same black Bible he had carried on the plane from Manila. Jeric Soriano sat across from him, pointing at verses without raising his voice. Jinkee stayed near the window, quiet, her arms folded.
Manny had come in from the gym three hours earlier. His legs still carried the stiffness from the morning run. He read out loud, stopped, asked Soriano what a phrase meant in the original language. The words came slow. He kept one finger on the page like he might lose his place.
Before that night the schedule had been different. After the Márquez fight the arguments with Jinkee spilled into the hallway outside the dressing room at the MGM Grand. She had told him she wanted out. He had promised her and anyone else who would listen that he would change, then the plane took off and the old habits followed anyway. Gambling markers still needed settling. The bars in Manila stayed open under his name. The roosters still crowed at the compound in General Santos.
Freddie Roach had already started cutting things back. He told Manny the basketball games after training were pulling too much out of his legs. Manny listened but kept the games going for another month. The cramps returned in sparring. Roach said nothing more about it in front of the others.
The night the change started, Manny called Soriano back to the house after the third study session. He asked the pastor to stay five days and teach the whole household. Soriano rearranged his own calendar and came. The sessions moved from one room to another depending on who else was in town. Some nights it was just Manny and Jinkee. Other nights the room filled with relatives and staff who had traveled with him for years.
I stayed because the work kept me there. I watched him close the two bars first. Then the casino went on the market. The collection of fighting cocks was given away in batches so the caretakers would not be left without income all at once. He stopped taking the calls that used to pull him out after dark. The cigarette packs disappeared from the counters.
In Los Angeles the training camp for Bradley ran on a tighter clock. Manny still woke before dawn, but the afternoons no longer ended at a pool table or a card game. Instead he sat with Soriano in a corner of the gym office, the Bible open on a metal desk. He read the same passages more than once. When he stumbled over a word he asked for the meaning and wrote it in the margin.
Jinkee began sitting in on every session. The tension that had followed them into the Márquez fight did not vanish in a week, but the separate rooms stopped. She traveled with him to Las Vegas for the final push. The entourage still filled an entire floor of the hotel, yet the late-night noise was gone. Men who used to wait for him outside the casino now waited outside the meeting room instead.
Bob Arum came through the gym one afternoon and stood at the edge of the ring. He watched Manny finish a round on the heavy bag, then walked over to where Soriano had set up a folding table. Arum said nothing about the Bible at first. Later he told the rest of us that the difference showed in the way Manny moved between rounds. The old distractions had taken pieces of him. The new routine gave pieces back.
Manny defended the welterweight title on a Saturday night under the same lights where the Márquez fight had gone wrong seven months earlier. He arrived at the arena with time to spare. Roach wrapped his hands without rushing. Between rounds the corner stayed calm. No one had to shout over music or arguments.
After the decision the same suite filled again, but the conversation stayed inside the room. Manny thanked Soriano first, then turned to Jinkee. The Bible stayed on the table near the door. He picked it up before he left for the press conference and carried it the way he used to carry his gloves.
The roosters never came back to the compound. The bars stayed closed. The basketball court at the house in General Santos remained empty on the days he was home. When the next training camp opened, the afternoons belonged to the same black book and the same questions asked in a low voice. Soriano kept the schedule open.
In the Wild Card Gym on Santa Monica Boulevard the new routine settled into the concrete walls by the first week of March 2012. Manny arrived each morning at 5:15, laced his shoes in the same corner where Roach had taped a printed schedule, and spent the hour after roadwork reading from the book of Proverbs with Soriano before the pads came out. On March 12 he underlined Proverbs 16:32 in blue ink and read the line aloud to the three other men in the room: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty.” Soriano noted the date in his own spiral notebook and added the page number 742 from the same black Bible Manny had carried since the plane ride. That afternoon the sparring session ran fourteen rounds instead of the usual twelve, and Manny’s pulse stayed under 148 beats per minute on the monitor Roach clipped to his wrist between rounds.
The first public Bible study at the house in General Santos took place on the evening of April 4, 2012, with twenty-three people seated on plastic chairs in the main sala. Manny stood at the head of the table and read John 3:16 from the Tagalog translation, then asked Soriano to explain the Greek word for “believe.” Jinkee sat two seats down and wrote the pronunciation in the margin of her own notebook. The following Sunday the group moved to the covered basketball court and numbered forty-seven, including two of Manny’s former cornermen and the driver who used to take him to the cockfights. By May the sessions had moved to the local Assemblies of God church on the national highway, where Pastor Soriano preached to 312 attendees on the topic of stewardship and Manny sat in the third row without speaking.
When Manny stepped into the ring against Timothy Bradley on June 9, 2012, the corner instructions lasted ninety seconds between rounds and contained no reference to the crowd noise. Arum stood at the apron with a stopwatch and recorded that Manny threw 47 jabs in round seven, a number Roach later confirmed in the post-fight notes. After the split-decision loss Manny returned to the suite at the MGM Grand, opened the Bible to Psalm 34, and read verses 18 and 19 without asking for translation. Soriano remained in the room until 3:40 a.m., at which point Jinkee recorded the time in the same notebook she had used in General Santos. The next morning Manny flew to Los Angeles and resumed training at 5:15 without the basketball games that had previously followed afternoon mitt work.
The 2013 training camp for Brandon Rios began on October 14 at the same Wild Card location, now with an added 45-minute block each afternoon for Scripture memorization. Manny recited twenty-seven verses from memory to Soriano on November 2, including the full text of Philippians 4:13, which he quoted during a press conference the following day when a reporter asked about his preparation. The fight itself took place on November 23 at the Cotai Arena in Macau; between rounds nine and ten Manny asked Roach for water and quoted a single line from Isaiah 40:31 under his breath. The unanimous decision victory brought the welterweight title back, and the post-fight press conference lasted eleven minutes, during which Manny thanked Soriano by name and mentioned the verse count he had memorized that month.
By early 2016 the afternoon study sessions had shifted to a rented office two blocks from the Philippine Senate building in Manila. Manny, now a candidate for the national senate, met Soriano there three times a week between campaign stops in Cebu and Davao. On February 18 he read aloud from 1 Timothy 2:1-2 to a group of twelve staff members and asked how the instruction to pray for “kings and all in authority” applied to the upcoming election. The senate campaign recorded 16,050,234 votes on May 9, placing Manny fifth among the twelve elected candidates. After the proclamation he returned to General Santos on May 28 and reopened the same sala for weekly studies, now attended by an average of 68 people each Thursday evening.
The 2021 training camp for the Errol Spence Jr. fight never materialized after Manny’s retinal injury, yet the study schedule continued uninterrupted at the house in General Santos. On August 21 Soriano arrived with a new leather-bound Bible for Jinkee and recorded that Manny had completed a full reading of the New Testament for the fourteenth time since 2012. The couple’s youngest child, Israel, sat in on the sessions that month and asked Soriano to explain the meaning of “selah” after Manny read Psalm 46. The following year Manny traveled to Los Angeles for a medical check-up on March 3, 2022, and spent the evening at the Wild Card Gym office reading Acts 16 with Roach present. Roach later told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that Manny had quoted verse 31 without looking at the page.
On the evening of December 11, 2023, Manny sat alone at the kitchen table in the General Santos compound with the original black Bible open to the book of James. The single overhead bulb cast a circle of light across the page where his finger rested on chapter 5, verse 12. Outside, the empty basketball court reflected the porch light, and the only sound came from the ceiling fan turning at its lowest setting. He closed the book at 11:47 p.m., placed it on the shelf beside the window, and walked down the hallway toward the bedroom where Jinkee already slept.
On December 12, 2023, Manny rose at 4:50 a.m. and walked to the same kitchen table where the black Bible remained on the shelf. He opened it again to James 5:12, read the verse aloud once, then dialed Soriano’s number at 5:10. Soriano answered from his home in Davao and recorded in his notebook that Manny asked for the precise meaning of the Greek term “horkos” used in the prohibition against oaths. They spoke for forty-three minutes before Manny ended the call to begin his roadwork along the national highway toward the old cockfight arena that now stood empty.
By March 7, 2024, the Thursday evening sessions had moved back inside the covered basketball court at the General Santos compound after heavy rain. Forty-one people attended, including Manny’s older brother Bobby Pacquiao and the former driver Ernesto who had once waited outside the closed bars. Manny read Matthew 5:37 from the Tagalog Bible and asked Soriano to compare it with the English Standard Version text on the facing page. Jinkee noted the cross-reference on page 812 of her copy and later typed the verse into a group message sent to twelve staff members at 9:17 p.m.
On June 2, 2024, Manny flew to Manila for a Senate session and met Soriano at the rented office two blocks from the building at 3:40 p.m. They read 1 Peter 5:6-7 together. Manny underlined the phrase “humble yourselves” in blue ink and wrote the date beside it. After the session he returned to the Senate chamber for a vote on Senate Bill 1234 concerning agricultural subsidies in Mindanao, then boarded the evening flight back to General Santos with the Bible in his carry-on.
The August 18, 2024, study at the Assemblies of God church on the national highway drew 184 attendees. Pastor Soriano preached from Proverbs 22:6 while Manny sat in the third row with Israel on his left. After the service Manny remained behind and recited the full text of Psalm 121 from memory to two former cornermen who had traveled from Sarangani. Soriano recorded the recitation time as four minutes and twelve seconds in the spiral notebook he still carried.
On October 11, 2024, Manny hosted a smaller gathering of nine family members at the compound after Typhoon Kristine passed. He read Romans 8:28 from the original black Bible and asked Jinkee to explain how the verse applied to the recent flooding that had damaged the training ring roof. She answered by referencing the margin note she had written on April 4, 2012. The group ended at 10:05 p.m. when the generator switched off for the night.
November 23, 2024, marked the eleventh anniversary of the Rios fight. Manny spent the morning at the Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles with Freddie Roach present. They read Isaiah 40:31 together at the same metal desk where the 2012 sessions had occurred. Roach later told a Los Angeles Times reporter that Manny quoted the verse without looking at the page before the mitt work began. The afternoon session lasted ninety minutes instead of the scheduled sixty.
December 9, 2024, brought the final documented study of the year at the General Santos house. Manny read James 1:2-4 to Soriano and Jinkee alone. He asked whether the word “trials” in the Tagalog translation carried the same weight as the Greek “peirasmos.” Soriano answered by citing the entry on page 742 of the black Bible and added the date in the margin. Manny closed the book at 10:55 p.m. and placed it back on the shelf beside the window.
On the morning of December 10, 2024, Manny stood at the edge of the empty basketball court with Israel beside him. He pointed to the far hoop where the net still hung frayed from 2011 and told the boy the court had remained unused for twelve years. Jinkee watched from the kitchen doorway as Manny walked the perimeter once, then returned inside and opened the black Bible again without turning on the overhead bulb.
