Former WBC lightweight champ David Diaz plans to visit RP
CHICAGO, Illinois – Former World Boxing Council lightweight champ David Diaz plans to take a leisure trip to the Philippines before the end of this July. In a phone interview Saturday (Sunday in the Philippines) with GMANews.TV, Diaz said: "I will be showing up there. Maybe the last days of July. Just visit and go out there." Diaz will be accompanied by his wife, Tanya. Their two children – two-year-old David Jr and thee-month-old Elia – will remain in the US, under the care of his mother-in-law, Merriam Quiñones, and his sister, Araceli Diaz. Asked if there was some business involved in his trip, the 32-year-old Chicago-native said: "I don’t know yet." When told that at one time, Erik "El Terrible" Morales, visited the Philippines and was offered a product endorsement deal with Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao, Diaz said: "I haven’t heard of any such offer." Diaz has no plans of hanging up his gloves yet. "I think I still have two more years of boxing left on me," he said. "I will take advantage of that and see what happens. I will start training maybe by the beginning of August." But he has no idea whom he is going to fight. "Everybody is fightingm" he said. "I'm going to see which one is the best for me to fight." How about a rematch with Pacquiao, who took away his World Boxing Council lightweight belt last June? "If circumstances will present themselves and are offered to me, yeah I would love to," Diaz said. "I will set back and wait. And see what promoters want to do. And what Manny wants to do. It would be pleasure to do it all over again. But then if they don’t to do it, then I’m stuck. So that’s why I feel I need to go out and see whom I am going to fight. If there is a fight for me, I will do it. If not, well. Right now, I am not even thinking about it. I am just relaxing and enjoying my family." Diaz recalled his last fight with Pacquiao, saying: "Manny was a great, great fighter. He has tremendous speed. He caught me with a good punch. I didn’t see it coming. And the rest is history. We were thinking of giving Manny a good fight in a certain way but we ended up fighting long and he took advantage of that. And he showed great boxing skills. Something I did not see coming. And he did a great job at it. I was headbutted in the eye but the one that got me was the punch. His left hand. "It was a great experience, a great fight. I appreciate everybody’s support. The one thing about it, I won a lot of Filipino fans who came up to me and said, David, you are a warrior and that’s all we expected from you to come out in this fight." - JOSEPH G. LARIOSA, GMANews.TV