No Pain, No Gain, No Pay

Aug. 16, 2000

HAVING mastered the technique of rolling forward from side to side, crawling front and backward, pulling either arm from underneath the torso to get to a vantage point in a struggle to kneel, sit, or stand, is like watching a National Geographic Channel feature on quicksand. (Lesson number one, the only one: How to escape during the early stages of quicksand entrapment. Pull one leg, step on solid ground, then pull the other leg. Fall on your stomach, focus your weight on one side then crawl towards dry ground using your arms and knees.)

TV, yes, have had a lot of that recently. What else can you do when you’re practically bedridden? That or books, newspapers, magazines, comic books, unintended meditation, football/basketball-playing fantasies.

That’s how the problem started actually. Almost an hour of basketball on a parking lot under the unceasing heat of the summer (in this country there is no other) sun causes lumbago whispering to be noticed.

Ten days later, after just three hours of sleep, 10 minutes of stretching, an hour is spent football goalkeeping with two dozen youngsters, and a playing coach who was also born on The Year of the Tiger almost four decades ago. Shutting out the second team for about half an hour forces the coach to transfer the keeper to the other goal. The goalie manages to fend off attacks for a reasonable period before better offense, rusty reflexes, and 40 pounds of added weight take their toll. After goals are scored, two in succession, and lower back pain murmuring on the edge of a scream –- practice is called off. The coach asks the keeper: “Kaya pa?” Pride and delusion due to a lack of oxygen to the brain compel the goalie to blurt out: “Sige!”

SIMPLE DRILLS. The field players do stretching exercises while simple drills keep the goalie busy. So simple that any grade-schooler with faculties intact can do them. The two goalies pass two balls alternately high and low while stepping from side to side towards the goal posts, continuous jumping from post to post while reaching for the crossbar.

All that is needed are 10 jumps but at number eight a horned red demon stabs the lower back of the born-in-the-sixties goalie with a pitchfork. He falls in mid-leap and crumples to the ground. Flat on his back on the soggy pitch, the injured goalie looks up to the coach framed by the morning sky. He remembers a similar vision nine years ago when he went one-on-one against a 6-foot-6 striker playing with a bunch of visiting college soccer players from the Eastern United States in an early morning exhibition game against a Foreign Students Association team composed of undergraduates from a Negros Oriental university.

The American, who was with an NGO, had asked to play with his compatriots. He obviously had tried his hand and foot at football when he was younger and seemed to not have played the game in years. But that didn’t’ matter. He was tall and he was big. Almost 30 pounds heavy. So big that when the goalie lunged for the ball, he looked up to see the sky darken as the American fell on him.

He opened his eyes glad to see he was still on the mortal plane. The Filipino goalie, who pretended to be a Hong Kong national, was asked by his schoolmates to play with them only a day before.

STEELY DAN. He didn’t disappoint. He dived low right in the very first on-goal attempt by the Yanks to prevent them from scoring in the first 20 seconds of play. He would give away his Steely Dan record collection for a copy of the videotape the Americans took of the game. There are events in our lives that we cherish more than others.

Be it dramatic, funny, action-packed, glorious or even embarrassing –- we either keep them longer in our memory banks or prefer to stash them away in the darkest recesses of the subconscious. But bad, good, or middling, memories are just that, memories. We are better off living in the present.

Glorious heroic accomplishments in other fields cannot compare with the warm sensation of the proverbial hundred sets of arms embracing you for a goal made or a shot saved in sports competition (amateur or professional). But some things are better left to the young and capable. We all must grow old and grow up (the former is easier). We must make a living, and if brave and stupid enough, raise a family.

Injuries with exotic names like anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), PCL, and MCL or sciatic neuritis/sciatica are serious enough to be branded career-threatening or even career-ending. When that happens, the victim is incapacitated, has to undergo therapy, and in most cases cannot make a living.

Glory days are just that –- glorious. They don’t pay the bills.