Chris - THE GAME OF MY LIFE by Bill Velasco

Chris Monfort is gone, and the world is a poorer place for it.

I first encountered Chris Monfort in second year high school, when I was still entertaining dreams of becoming a World Cup goalkeeper. He was this smiling, athletic, patient Ilonggo who had an exotic accent and an unusually endearing way of stringing English sentences together. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was still studying at UP, and wanted to start teaching. He made football fun.

Throughout my career as a sports journalist, I always found Chris in the middle of change for the better, at every level of football.

At the time of his death, Monfort was the head of the Ateneo Football Program (1997-2001), director of the Ateneo Football Center (AFC) and secretary general of the Philippine Football Federation (1995-2001), and representative to the FIFA in Asia. A 1981 graduate of UP, was a member of the Philippine national team (1979-80), San Miguel Football Club (1975-76) and Magnolia Football Club (1977). As a coach, Monfort was a PE instructor at the Ateneo high school and college from 1979-1990 and coached the Ateneo College football team from 1986-96, helping steer the school to a UAAP championship in 1996, and in the international arena with the Gothia Cup in Sweden and Finland. He also represented the Philippines in the 1998 World Cup in France.

Monfort’s leadership is also credited with bringing Ateneo numerous championships in RIFA at the grade school and high school levels. Since the 1980s, he has been part of the AFC where young children are taught the basics of high caliber-football. The AFC has grown to be an institution that now trains hundreds of kids in the Ateneo grounds every weekend. That’s where you’d usually find him striding like a giant across the fields, breathing in the open air with a passion for soccer that never dimmed.

One thing that most of us in Metro Manila did not know was how much Monfort had helped spread his southern love for the sport in the Visayas. In major papers throughout Cebu and Negros, columnists made their voices heard in thanking him for taking football deep into the grassroots of the south, and bringing national attention to it.

Upon his death, hundreds of letters from Ateneans, alumni and former players crisscrossed the globe, from Ateneo de Manila president Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., to young men he had touched in Australia, the United States, Canada, Europe and the Philippines.

I last spoke with Chris two weeks ago, to discuss a football project. He said we would talk once he returned from a FIFA convention in Korea. I always remember his moustache curled up in a smile, even when he was shaking his head at the impurity of politics in sport, which he always found so unnecessary and trivial.

In the hour before June 12, Monfort was driving home to Katipunan, when nails allegedly thrown by some goons supposedly ruptured one of his tires. His Kia slammed into a concrete post, caving in the passenger’s side, severing an arm and causing other massive injuries. A couple of hours later at hospital, Chris Monfort was dead at the age of 42.

The other day, we buried another hero. There will be no monuments or markers, no permanent tributes; not yet, anyway. But in the hearts of thousands of us former students, players, fellow sportsmen and Ateneans, he will live forever.

And every time I drive by the wide open football fields of the school which made me the man I am, in my mind I’ll always see this smiling, athletic, patient Ilonggo with the exotic accent pacing around, like he always was, like he always was part of it all. And I’ll still see those bright eyes and that upcurled smile, and remember Chris Monfort, who made the world of sport a better place.