The sports compass is broken

I HAD lunch recently with a former top sports bureaucrat I won’t name.

The guy was not chomping at the bit as usual. He could have readily painted the state of Philippine sports in vivid colors but did not because he said from now on his lips are sealed.

He concedes, though, that there’s reason for the sports establishment to be buoyed by weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz’s silver-medal finish but it should be bothered at the same time by the dismal performances of the rest of our 13-athlete team to the Rio Olympic Games.

He could have spouted his ever-ready prescriptions to cure the maladies of our sports program, but chose not to because his pronouncements could be construed as demagoguery.

Meantime, diagnoses—tagged the “pitiful kind” by fellow Inquirer Sports columnist Recah Trinidad—for “all [sports] debacles and past failures” are pouring in from all directions.

Also, sports officials are coming up with their own applause lines while talking yet again about upgrading the skills of our athletes and the roads they have to take on the way to the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

We couldn’t agree more with the former sports honcho.
All these so-called course corrections point to one thing.
Our sports compass is broken. It needs fixing right away.
* * *
Dong Secuya’s PhilBoxing.com slipped into its 13th year in cyberspace quietly last month, at about the same time Sen. Manny Pacquiao announced he was coming out of retirement to fight WBO welterweight champion Jesse Vargas in Las Vegas on Nov. 12.

It should be noted that the Cebu-based boxing portal—consistently among the top five of its kind in terms of popularity—started out as mannypacquiao.ph to publicize the then-underdog Filipino’s bout with Marco Antonio Barrera.

Of course, Manny’s conquest of the Mexican legend in San Antonio, Texas, on Nov. 15, 2003 sped up his meteoric rise, leading to a wondrous feat as an eight-division ring champion and one of the most bankable and recognizable boxers of all time.

As a web designer in those days, Secuya searched online for design ideas and on the side for stories on that propitious fight with Barrera.

“One day I was led to Barrera’s website and its forum had lively and sometimes hateful discussions between the Mexican’s supporters, who said their idol would win the fight easy, and a handful of Filipino fans, who rabidly defended Pacquiao,” recalls Secuya.

“Then I read this one post where a Mexican fan berated the Filipino ‘forumers,’ telling them they are like vagabonds without a home (website) of their own, and since they infested Barrera’s website, why don’t they just go away and leave Barrera alone,” Secuya remembered.
While he was then in the business of creating websites anyway, Secuya went on to build the original boxing forum for Pacquiao fans. “Of course, after the fight, boxing history changed and quite unexpectedly my career also changed,” exulted the accountant-turned-boxing publisher.
More on philboxing.com in a succeeding column.