EIGHT GOLD MEDALS DID THE TRICK when the philippines won the overall boxing title in the just concluded 23rd Southeast Asian Games.

Such a feat reminds us of two-time world champion Luisito Espinosa who has brought so much boxing glory to our shores.

Unfortunately Luisito’s story is increasingly becoming bizarre and far from complete. The latest chapter includes training to fight a ghost.

That the former champion’s topsy-turvy life has taken a tilt for the occult is an understatement.

Luisito, now 38, was TKO’d by a sympathetic athletic commission in California recently. Done in by a string of savage losses to upstarts, he’s been disallowed to fight for now in the Golden State.

Enter two friends, late bloomers to Luisito’s boxing heritage but are now addicted to it.

Joe Robles, a cop, and Frank Osias, an auto mechanic, now form Espinosa’s new management team.

Bucking naysayers, they plan to rebuild Luisito’s name–finding the time, money and effort to keep Espinosa sweating it out at the gym.

Even if the training is for a phantom bout this time.

Such is the life in California today for a world champion who twice scaled the apex of his sport. He held the World Boxing Association bantamweight title in 1989-91 and the World Boxing Council’s featherweight belt in 1995-1998.

Luisito lives with the Osias household in Fairfield, California. Fall is in the air in America, a bleary season indeed, we imagine for Espinosa.

The fighter should have retired by now due to advanced age and diminished skills. But for someone who earns a living as a fighter, he continues to face the horror that can occur within the ropes.

Life’s attractions beyond the ring could have been there for Espinosa if his civil action to claim an unpaid champion’s purse of $150,000 from eight years ago had been settled.

Luisito plans to come home for good, invest in a gym, show young boys how to box. And perhaps re-fight past matches of his glory years.

That is, if and when he gets the money due him.

But three years later, the case remains unresolved and had put on the elements of a John Grisham legal drama.

The case was last penciled in for a hearing by a Manila court early this year. For mysterious reasons, that hearing never occured and, needless to say, remains in legal limbo. It could someday end up in the Guinness Book of World Records, certainly not a feather in the cap of our judicial system.

“I am about ready to throw in the towel,” admits broadcaster Hermie Rivera, who filed the case for Luisito. Rivera took over Joe Koizumi as Luisito’s manager after he earned the purse for defending his world feather crown in Koronadal in 1997.

Increasing words of despair from Rivera must be music to the ears of ex-governor Larry de Pedro, boxing manager Rod Nazario and matchmaker Lito Mondejar. These inhabitants of the red light district of the sport have selfishly stood their ground.

Paying is farthest from their minds.

But knowing Rivera, he won’t call it a night that easy. He will go on seeking the abolition of the Games and Amusement Board for acts inimical to the sport. “It was this agency which allowed this travesty to happen by ordering Louie to fight despite not being paid in full as required,” says Rivera.

He will also work for the adoption of a local Ali Boxing Law to look after the interest of fighters taken advantage by unscrupulous promoters, managers and the like.

More power to people helping Luisito get what is rightly his.

And to people grappling with their conscience about the boxer’s current plight, two queries:

What have you done to a man whose life is more than boxing–it’s about being an amabassador of the Philippine Culture?

What have you done to a true hero from the slums of Tondo who succeeded to bring down the giants of his game and give us immense pride as a people?