Rico Barrera fights again

THE LAST time he was in a reality show - the first season of Pinoy Big Brother - he didn't do so well.

By Aprylle Liabres (Contributor)

Published: Sun 4 Nov 2007, 12:41 PM

Last updated: Tue 20 Jun 2023, 2:32 PM

Assigned to take over kitchen duty one early morning, he used too much cooking oil and nearly burned down the house.

Rico Barrera, 22, still vividly remembers that kitchen disaster, which led to his being the first-ever PBB housemate to be evicted. "Big Brother ordered me to prepare breakfast for my fellow housemates," recalls Rico. "But I had to go to bed later than any of them, then wake up and finish making breakfast before any of them woke up the next day."

He kept telling his fellow housemates to go to bed so he could go to bed. But they insisted on staying up till past midnight. The following morning, he had to get up and finish making the breakfast - which consisted of bacon, eggs and fried rice - before any of his housemates woke up. This meant getting out of bed at 2:45 AM. With wake-up call scheduled at 5:30 AM, Rico felt that he had enough time to complete his assigned task. He thought it would be a cinch. What happened instead was the complete opposite. Half-asleep, Rico stumbled into the kitchen and proceeded to gather what he needed.

It was in frying the bacon that he encountered a problem. "Because I was still so sleepy, I guess I wasn't thinking straight," laughs Rico. He put the bacon strips in the frying pan, followed by a large amount of cooking oil instead of allowing the bacon to fry in its own fat, as is normally done. Too much oil, plus the heat, sent the flames leaping toward the ceiling. Rico wasn't able to react in time because he was still a bit dazed from lack of sleep. Meanwhile, all the housemates came running when they heard the smoke alarm in the house go off.

It took a while before Rico could live down the embarrassment caused by the incident. However, now that he is in a new reality show-Mano Mano: The Celebrity Boxing Challenge, where he will match up against seven other celebrity boxers - Rico is hoping that this match will turn out better than his last one.

He certainly spent a lot of time preparing for it. Rico and the other celebrity boxers trained long and hard, such that even Rico, who had always been athletic (he was into taekwondo, karate and basketball) found it difficult to keep up. "On the first day of training, I wanted to quit," he laughs.

Their first workout consisted of a warm-up, then two hours of circuit training. Since then, they have been training every single day. Their training is supervised by the Amateur Boxing Association of the Philippines (ABAP) and conducted by Mano Mano's consultant Joseph Pagulayan of the Red Corner gymnasium.