Watching our athletes compete in Vietnam made me especially proud. Our contingent this year was a determined lot, competing against all odds and having to deal with various financial, organizational, and logistical challenges. Despite all of that, our athletes pulled through.
They brought home 48 gold medals this year, 17 more golds than in the last SEA Games. That’s more than 50-percent improvement, mind you. Sigh, if only our economy grew by that much. Plus, they improved the country’s ranking, finishing fourth in the medal tally, overtaking Malaysia on the final day of competition.
Being with the athletes up close, I was able to feel their hard work, their determination, their pain, their anguish, their defeats and their victories. And I realized just how much all of us have taken these national heroes for granted. Personally, I must confess that prior to my trip to Vietnam, I didn’t take the participation of the Philippines in international competitions seriously. I kept saying to myself, "Oh boy, here we go again – another occasion to showcase our weakness as a people." And I think this sentiment is shared by a lot of Filipinos. We’re not really a sports-powerhouse. So my thinking before was, "Why bother?" Except maybe for bowling and boxing, we are not considered a threat in the world of sports.
Despite the seeming indifference of Filipinos in general (especially with regard to the SEA Games which, by and large, is considered by many as minor league compared to the Asian Games or the Olympics), out athletes fought their hearts out. After Vietnam, I realized that behind the medal tallies are hundreds of stories – inspiring tales of hard work, grit and determination, difficulties, injuries, discouragement, etc. And I had a glimpse of what these athletes have gone through in order to reach the top.
If there’s one thing I learned during the Southeast Asian Games, it’s the fact that there is really no shortcut to success. Sure, there are those that are naturally talented and gifted, those that have it in them from the very beginning – like Muhammad Ali, for example. It seems he was destined for greatness, and we call him "The Greatest" now and take it for granted, as if that title was simply bestowed on him just like that. But Muhammad Ali didn’t become "The Greatest" overnight. He had to earn it. He fought a lot of fights, got knocked down several times and even got defeated. But in the end, it was his grit and determination and sheer hard work that finally made him rightfully earn that moniker.
Our Filipino athletes showed me that it is only through daily training, learning the ropes, constantly perfecting your skill and endless practice that you get to be successful in what you do. And that principle applies in our daily lives. I must confess I cannot carry a baby properly. I just can’t do it. I don’t know how to position my arms and make sure that I’m not strangling the poor little rascal. But the yayas can handle a baby like it was part of their bodies. When I see nannies pass babies around, I am amazed at how effortlessly they do it. Whenever my wife asks me to carry a baby, I get rattled, and oftentimes end up carrying the baby with its feet up and head down.
I’m simply useless when it comes to carrying babies. But nannies because they do it everyday become experts in what they do. They can change a diaper in a blink of an eye. I would need around two hours to do it.
Let’s talk about professionals. How about accountants? Numbers flow through them like water flows through a net. It’s so simple for them. If they are confronted with a bunch of numbers, they can categorize the numbers immediately and come up with a financial report in no time. Heck, if you gave them a bunch of telephone numbers, they can come up with a balance sheet. But this confidence with numbers came about through constant exposure to financial books, through daily evaluations of financial reports, etc. It certainly didn’t come overnight. The ability to deal with numbers comfortably happens only through years and years of work.
Or how about doctors, especially the ob-gyn? I’ve seen one in action. When a woman is about to deliver a baby, the ob-gyn is called and he takes his sweet time by getting a latte at Starbucks. Everyone is panicking while he strolls along the hallways of the hospital, drinking his frapuccino, with a don’t-worry-I’m-here look. He goes to the emergency room, has a little chat with the nurses about a telenovela that he saw on TV the night before, calmly goes to the poor woman who is screaming her head off, puts his gloves on and puts his hands between the woman’s legs and then yanks the baby out like a piece of meat and calmly says, "Congratulations, it’s a boy." Then he calmly washes his hands, gets his glass of latte and waves bye, like it was all in a day’s work.
Meanwhile, the nurses are trying to revive the poor husband who passed out during the "yanking." The ob-gyn has become an expert in delivering babies. But of course, we all know that beneath all that confidence are years and years of hard work, daily visits to the hospital, endless night shifts, toxic duty nights, etc. There’s no shortcut to get that kind of confidence in what you do. That’s the rule in life.
Sadly, this general rule of "there is no shortcut to success" doesn’t apply to one set of people: politicians in the Philippines. In this country, you don’t really have to work hard or have a good track record or have an expertise in governance to run for office and to run the government. All you need in order to run for office successfully and be a top government honcho in this country is to possess any of the following: 1) a familiar family name; 2) a political family background; 3) or a decent career in showbiz or media.
OK, I am not saying that all those with political family names and all those in showbiz and media have no right to run. Everyone has the right to run. And there are some political heirs and showbiz people who turned out to be good politicians. But my point is, in almost everything that we want to excel in, we have to get some kind of training. If you want to be an actor, you need to go through acting workshops, right? If you want to be a news anchor, you have to audition and do some newscasting training. Heck, even if you want to be a waiter or a TV repairman, you have to be trained on what to do. You can’t just wake up one day and say, "I want to be a plumber." It just doesn’t work that way. You have to learn the skill and you have to train long and hard in order to excel. Just like athletes. A guy just doesn’t wake up one day and say, "I’m going to win the gold in wushu." First, he has to learn wushu, and then train hard to master the skill.
But in this country, a person with no political experience whatsoever can go, "I am going to run for President." And the persons who are backing him up insist, "He’ll be fine, he will have a lot of advisers." Isn’t that amazing? We’ll be a country run by a committee of advisers.
How would you feel if you brought your pregnant wife to the hospital and the hospital’s janitor suddenly went, "I want to be an ob-gyn. Let me operate on your wife. I have lots of advisers beside me to help me out." Will you let him touch your wife? No freakin’ way. And I feel the same way about our country. I don’t want an intern or an on-the-job-trainee to run the government. Now, if he applied for barangay captain or councilor first, that’s fine. He can train in the lower public offices first. But I feel that a person can’t have his training while he is running a whole country. Just like athletes, doctors, actors, and accountants, a person who will run the country should undergo some kind of training and education. Otherwise, we’re all screwed.
Politicians or wannabe politicians should really learn from our athletes. They work hard and train to be the best in what they do. And while they have advisers and coaches, at the end of the day, it’s not the coaches who will be competing – it’s the athlete himself.
To our national athtletes, "Mabuhay kayo! You did the country proud!" And to everyone, "A Blessed Christmas and a Peaceful New Year to all!"