Trillanes, Pacquiao want PSC replaced

Two members of the Philippine Congress—Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and Sarangani Rep. Emmanuel “Manny” Pacquiao —are batting for the abolition of the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC), the government agency which is tasked to provide funding for the Filipino athletes.
Both lawmakers, to my mind, are sick and tired of our athletes being embarrassed again following the debacle in the 26th Southeast Asian Games in Indonesia where the Philippines could only finish a lowly sixth among 10 competing nations with a poor collection of 36 gold medals, its worst finish since joining the biennial games in February 1977.
The hopeless state of Philippine sports is something my mentor and idol, the retired Col. Julian Malonso, had
already acknowledged a long time ago.
Now bedridden, Malonso, a former Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) president and the country’s No. 1 sports critique, had said: “For Philippine sports to progress, it needs only one person to run the national sports program. The boatload of problems it is encountering now is the result of the two-headed bureaucratic hydra.”
Widely regarded as the oldest living POC president, the 88-year-old Malonso, an out-and-out Olympic purist, had strongly opposed the creation of the Philippine Sports Commission in 1990 by politicians who do not understand the Olympic Movement, stressing that “the PSC is arrogating and stifling the initiatives of the POC.”
The straight-talking Malonso added: “Unless Republic Act 6847 (the law that created the PSC) is repealed, Philippine sports will remain the eternal ‘sick man of Asia’.”
Malonso said it is but logical that the president of the POC should be the
only one to run the national sports program chiefly because he has been elected by the different members of the NSAs (national sports associations) to a four-year term and not the PSC chair, who serves at the pleasure of the President.
The 40-year-old Trillanes, the youngest member of the Senate, is sponsoring a bill that will seek to
replace the PSC with a cabinet-level department headed by a secretary who will enjoy the same rank as the other secretaries in the cabinet.
Sports will become a priority and its budget will increase as well, he explained.
“Right now, you don’t know what kind of an animal is the PSC,” said Trillanes, who recently took over as president of the Table Tennis Association of the Philippines.
On the other hand, Rep. Manny Pacquiao said he would help sponsor a bill in the lower house for the creation of a Philippine Ministry of Sports.
My esteemed colleague Recah Trinidad wrote “Pacquiao did not bat an eyelash and said yes when asked if he would care to help.”
Recah added, “Pacquiao, of course, knows it would not be easy to make an airtight bill creating a national sports ministry. Above all, the bill must be foolproof, meaning its prospective head must not, and must never, be beholden to the powers-that-be in the national Olympic committee.”
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MORE ABOUT MALONSO: Before assuming the presidency of the POC, Julian Mota Malonso was a Spanish professor and Physical Education director at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran. During his college days, the 5-foot-10 Malonso played center for the University of Santo Tomas and Letran College basketball teams. He served as POC president in 1980 and represented the country during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.