por da lab op da game

me wonders how many balls they've lost down the side of the mountain...





somewhere in the mountain barangays of cebu city (murag lapas na sa busay), june 2010

basketball court

mactan, cebu, april 2011

the carrot and stick approach

talk about the carrot and stick approach:

Boom Boom's village loses road project after boxer's loss

CEBU CITY -- The shocking defeat of Rey "Boom-boom" Bautista by Mexico's Daniel Ponce de Leon did not only sadden his fellow Boholanos. It also cost his village a cemented road.

A dismayed Bohol Gov. Erico Aumentado said that the plan to cement the provincial road going to Barangay Can-uling, Bautista's home village in the town of Candijay, would not push through -- for now.

Aumentado admitted that before the fight, he promised the young Boholano boxer that the road would be cemented but only if he won.

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if we could only find a truly effective way of motivating our athletes, then maybe our basketball team wouldn't have to apologize to us after failing in the fiba asia olympic qualifier. maybe we'd even get that elusive gold in the olympics! we can rule the world!

i remember something i read in time magazine years ago. as a way of 'encouraging' the iraq national football team, saddam's son uday hussein would beat the soles of their feet with a cane everytime they lost. unlike the good governor of bohol, uday did not believe in the power of the carrot, only the stick. it had to take the fall of saddam for iraq's soccer team to finally win big, a testament to the validity of uday's motivational approach.

i can imagine gma placing a call to manny pacquiao before his rematch with marco antonio barrera:

gma: hello manny?

manny: yis ma'am! gud ibning ma'am!

gma: my husband just bet 100 million on your coming fight with barrera. if you win this fight, i promise you, on the next election, you will have the hordes of garci and lintang bedol in your disposal! you will finally get that seat in congress! or like migz, even become senator, if you like!

manny: and... uh... if i lose?

gma: i'll just issue an executive order sparing the rest of the country from your singing career [mike arroyo sniggers in the background]

manny: oh, is that all madam president?

gma: yes manny, have a good fight then! bye!

gma hangs up. mike arroyo is later taken to the hospital for laughing too hard. and manny pacquiao regains his focus, forgets about ara mina, goes back to LA, spends his remaining time training hard, and clobbers marco antonio barrera on fight night.

the nba is a loony bin

and i thought kobe bryant was crazy... here's a bit of old news i came across:

(CBS) MINNEAPOLIS On March 30, Minnesota Timberwolves center Eddie Griffin was drunk and masturbating when he crashed his luxury SUV into a parked Suburban outside a store in Minneapolis, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the man whose Suburban was hit in the crash.

a divine win

another thought.

after the san miguel beermen's miraculous win over coca-cola last sunday, eric reyes interviewed coach siot tanquincen about the win. he asked coach siot, "what were you thinking during the game?" to which coach siot replied to the effect, "you just don't give up on situations like this, and you leave everything else to God. fortunately God blessed us with this win."

it occured to me, does God meddle with sports? does He decide who should win, or does He just leave it up to the players to win it? do we REALLY have free will?

poor loser(s)

ralf souquet just happened to suck at his game at a very bad time. and ronnie alcano's peaking performance made things even worse for souquet, making alcano the 3rd filipino to win the world pool championship.

i'm not taking anything away from alcano, of course. except for that moment when the score stood at 15-9 where he missed the 9-ball (of all balls on the table...), he played great pool against souquet. his break was efficient: soft yet accurate, which is just the opposite of the djanggo bustamante break with the accompanying flying kick from his right leg. his combination shots with the 9-ball were gutsy game winners which the crowd loved. and his safety game was just beautiful it boggled the mind, much to souquet's discomfort. to reach the final he even beat other big name players in the tournament like efren "bata" reyes and the defending champion wu chia ching of taiwan.

but nevertheless, ralf souquet simply sucked... and he knew it. he struggled with a lot of errors and which alcano took advantage of to dominate the match. even his break didn't help him, not giving him a clear shot to the next object ball. in fact, he sucked so much that during the post game interview, he couldn't help but shed tears in front of God, espn, and everybody. poor loser. seeing a grown man like him cry was so unsettling for anthony suntay (who did the post game interview) that, in a weak attempt to make souquet feel better, suntay encouraged the crowd to applaud souquet, telling him to "feel the love" of the filipino fans. hahahahahaha. schadenfreude, more like.

naturally, the newspaper headlines the following day were all about alcano's win. and president arroyo, the political animal that she is, does the same thing she did with manny pacquiao and takes advantage of the situation, awarding alcano the "champion for life" award (corny name for an award, no?) and a cool 1 million pesos (kaaachiiing). i wouldn't be surprised if members of the house of representatives and the senate, plus his home town's mayor, vice mayor, ... [fill in the blanks] ... up to the baranggay tanod, will all be lining up to give him heaps and heaps and heaps of awards. anything to bask in the reflected glory of alcano's victory, i guess.

but wait a minute... don't you notice something here? try mentioning a list of sports filipinos have excelled at internationally. and when i say internationally, i mean the philippines vs. the world kind of international. so in that definition, our win at the last sea games won't count (we had homecourt advantage there anyway). let's see, we have billiards, boxing, bowling... see it now? aside from the obvious and strange fact that they all start with the letter B, the other thing common with them is that they are all individual sports.

tell me, have filipinos ever excelled in a team sport internationally? let's see... basketball? nope... we can't even win gold at the asian games. football? even worse, i think myanmar just gave the philippine team a good thumping at a southeast asian event recently... uhhh, rugby? does the philippines even have a rugby team? rugby boys, maybe... how about baseball? yeah, we did win once in an international little league competition some years ago, but we did it by sending overage players. holy crap. we can't even seem to win in team sports without cheating!

what the hell does that mean? that pinoys can only excel when they are working for their own glory? that pinoys cannot grasp the concept of a TEAM, much more the concept of a NATION? another result of the notorious crab mentality that we all complain about but never seem to conquer?

doesn't speak so well for us as a people, no?

the glory of defeat

what on earth were WE thinking? what on earth was I thinking? we were humiliated, annihilated, crushed, beaten, awed, humbled, blown away, ______, ______, ______, ...you can fill in the blanks. the table tennis tournament that me and some of my officemates joined can be succinctly described by one word: DISASTER. our team of 4 players did not win a single match, not even a single set. the field was simply too good for us. ironically, two of my teammates went out drinking the night before. drunk guy number one went home around 12 midnight, while drunk guy number two (who was supposed to be a top 10 table tennis player from japan) went home around 4 am. he even came in late on the morning of the tournament, still smelling of alcohol and wearing slacks and shoes that were so scruffy i wondered if he had to crawl his way home last night. player number 3 didn't even join the practice session last night because he went out on a date. so there we were, 4 guys who barely had any practice (actually... none...), 2 of us still nursing a hangover, ranged against the elite, the best of the best, of cebu's table tennis scene. no wonder. and what the hell went in to our heads that we joined the tournament thinking that we could actually win? overconfident or just plain delusional? maybe both. i'll just charge it to experience then. drunk guy number one actually had some words of wisdom distilled from the experience. he said that you can look at it 2 ways, either you become so discouraged that you stop playing table tennis altogether, or you use it as a reason to actually improve yourself in the game so in the next tournament you can at least give a decent showing, or maybe even win. so even though my ego was bruised, at least i came home with a lesson... and a free t-shirt.

what did you expect?

pacquiao wins over larios. not exactly surprising. you know what would be shocking news? if larios knocks pacquiao out on the first round. now THAT would be real news. everybody had already expected a pacquiao victory. pacquiao handlers were predicting a knockout in 6 rounds. eric morales also predicted pacquiao winning. even gamblers had a hard time trying to find someone who would put his bet on larios, so instead they did their betting on if pacquiao would be able to finish larios off before the 6th round or not.

yes, there were some nervous moments in the beginning of the 3rd round, but it was more a matter of overconfidence on pacquiao's part, i think. he just let his guard down, larios saw the opening and took advantage. this stunned manny for a few seconds and pushed him to the ropes, allowing larios to give pacquiao his own flurry of punches. but manny was still able to fight his way out of that fix, and the remaining rounds saw manny's domination till the end, plus two knock outs.

at the end of the match i had a feeling larios went into to this fight expecting to lose. he didn't fight to win, he just fought for the exposure and, of course, the money. but he did finish the match with his two feet on the canvass, so we should at least give him credit for that.

on other pacquiao related matters, he sure has a very unfortunate choice for nickname. other boxers have chosen names like el terible (morales), the golden boy (de la hoya), the flash (elorde), the bomb (jimrex jaca), the czar (amonsot), but pacman? like, that little moving yellow circle with a mouth you find in video games? remotely scary. i suggest a name change.

manny pacquiao kicks ass!!!

paquiao wins! wooohooo!!! not just that, the 2 other pinoys in the bout also won! at last, some good news after months of getting nothing but crap from political scandals.

the day i heard about the fight, i had a bad feeling deep in my gut that he'd lose this one. a lot of people were saying that this fight would be an easy one for him. but guess what, people were saying the same thing about the pacquiao vs. morales bout, see how it ended.

good thing the bout didn't last long. i don't think pacquiao has a particularly stellar record with bouts that go the distance, considering his loss to morales and his draw against marquez.

unfortunately though, for pacquiao, morales lost to zahir raheem. that would make his coming rematch against morales sort of pointless. who would want to beat a loser? wait, if eric morales is a loser, and pacquiao lost to morales, then what does that make pacquiao? hehehe just joking...

on a sidenote, what on earth is manny doing starring in his own movie (co-starring the bold stars aubrey miles and juliana palermo and the very jurrasic looking eddie garcia)? does that mean that even a world famous boxer like him also has aspirations of becoming an artista? or is this just a sideline for him, some sort of plan b, in case something happens to his boxing career? everybody just wants to be a star, i guess. this reminds me of onyok velasco. remember him? whatever happened to onyok velasco anyway?