No Euro, No Ole! Ole!

July 19, 2000

IF WE insist on playing basketball with the subconscious hope of getting the Olympic gold, we are better off planting kamote. Moturok pa. You can’t teach height. And height being a pre-requisite in basketball might, no amount of dreaming and holding hundreds of thousands of hoop tournaments a year will make the us standouts in the international (that is, outside Southeast Asia) arena. Basketball will always have a place in the collective heart of Filipinos, “as sure as the sun shines”...as sure as Robert Jaworski will be elected senator if he runs again.

Concerned countrymen have been harping on our need to wean ourselves from basketball and try or re-try other sports like baseball, softball, and football. But we have to break our love affair with basketball. Easier said than done. There are product endorsements for all things related to “caging” and cage superstars and very little, practically nothing, for less popular games.

How can we break the basketball habit if TV and radio stations highlight basketball games all the time, giving little if any attention to football and other sports like badminton, chess, table tennis, and the martial disciplines, among others, where height is not necessarily an advantage. Boxing is popular enough not to need more stress.

COVERAGE. Which brings to mind the recent European Football Finals 2000. Not even Star Sports or ESPN – the perceived mecca of world sports coverage – showed the event. Not one measly game, not even the championship between mighty Les Bleus of France and overachieving Squadra Azzurra of Italy was shown. Many football enthusiasts were reduced to scouring cable television for CNN, BBC, and European channels for sports news and video clips of the game results.

The lucky ones turned to the Spanish channel to see live the French-Italian Final won by the defending World Cup champions, 2-1, on a golden goal. France thus became the first defending European WC champs to get the Euro title. I remember spending sleepless nights and days taping the 1994 World Cup shown on ESPN, CFI of France, CCTV of China, and PTV of Pakistan. The European Finals were then still too Continental for my taste. Although a Euro tournament is sometimes tougher than the World Cup Finals, what with teams like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Spain, Romania, Sweden, Denmark included and ironically not qualifying for the World Cup. Any of these teams will run roughshod over Asia/Oceania perennial qualifiers South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and even Australia, which has some excellent European players in its lineup.

GLOBAL. But as football really goes global, the World Cup having more member teams than the United Nations has member countries, FIFA seeks truly universal acceptance by spreading the tournament qualifying gravy. So we find World Cup minnows like Nepal, Cambodia and dear old Pilipinas getting slaughtered and humiliated by World War II invaders South Korea and Japan, 10-0 or 15-1. The one point most likely a case of compassion.

Baseball and softball and football were once adequately popular in the Philippines to warrant six-column spreads in the national papers. These sports even had their heroes. But now, who remembers star striker Tonio Gutierrez, who got to play in the lower divisions of a Brazilian professional league? Gutierrez was actually the closest we had to a Filipino football hero, with the possible exception of Bert “Mr. Football” Honasan.

Then there were the Blue Boys and Blue Girls. No foreign teams took them lightly. Well, a big blot in Philippine sports history was the Little League team who beat their American counterparts in American soil in their national sport and later were stripped of the title for violating some qualification rules. Well, at least we made them nervous for awhile. A fine fantasy is if we beat Brazil in a World Cup Final in Estádio do Maracanã and later lose the title for cheating. We can dream, can’t we?