One Championship: Joshua Pacio leads Team Lakay into a brave new world at Fire and Fury in Manila

There was a brief moment of reflection in the wild aftermath of Joshua “The Passion” Pacio’s defence of his One Championship world strawweight title.

For much of the post-bout press conference late on Friday night, the 24-year-old (17-3) Filipino fighter had been grinning widely. He’d shared jokes with the fellow Team Lakay fighters who surrounded him on the podium, he made the most of the fact that he’d just survived a thorough examination inside the cage by former champ Alex “Little Rock” Silva (9-5) only to emerge relatively unscathed and with a split decision.

But as the Baguio City outfit’s leader Mark Sangiao took a question from the press, Pacio seemed to take a deep breath as he reached for the shiny title belt on the table in front of him. He then gave the belt a quick rub and looked off into the distance, smiling to himself.

The sense was that the true enormity of this occasion had not been lost on Pacio. The facts are he had not only laid firmly to rest the notion that Team Lakay fighters can’t grapple, given the way he dealt with every trick the third-degree Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt tried to pull. He’d also helped breathe life fully back into his team’s fortunes following a year when no less than three of their fighters had lost their titles.

“I still feel I need to work more,” Pacio said. “I didn’t get the finish that I expected so I have to work more on my ground game, learn to follow up on my striking. I think he was waiting for me to make a mistake but I wasn’t going to do that.”