Double bladed sword

A few days ago, parents of the National Capital Region (NCR) elementary baseball team that competed in the recently-concluded Palarong Pambansa in Naga City filed a formal protest against the elementary baseball teams of Calabarzon (Region IV — A) and Eastern Visayas. Parents of the NCR team claimed that Calabarzon and Eastern Visayas fielded players who exceeded the age limit of 13 years.

As of this writing, we are not aware of the outcome of the protest although we are told that Secretary Fe Hidalgo of the Department of Education (DepEd) ordered Palarong Pambansa national coordinator Len Toledo to look into the matter.

While we await the results of this investigation, I go back to the uniqueness of youth sports, which is what the Palarong Pambansa essentially is, and the role they play in forming the values of our young men and women.

The first basic fact about the Palaro is that it is a competition for amateurs who are not supposed to receive non-monetary or monetary rewards. So- called semi-professional or professional athletes, on the other hand, receive such rewards directly or indirectly.

Except for school sports, such distinctions are not however made anymore given the present nature of open competitions in sports all over the world, including the Olympics. In fact, the old oath of sportsmanship that athletes used to make at the start of competitions was an affirmation that one was an amateur athlete.

Purists made much of making a distinction between amateurs and professionals. This distinction dates back to more than a century when the upper class elite in Europe who engaged in sports as their leisurely activity and as a form of socialization, refused to compete (and mix in sporting clubs) with laborers who also competed in sports.

The desire to maintain exclusivity in some sports was really the reason for such a distinction although there have been many attempts to romanticize what amounted to discrimination by using the Olympics as the instrument to protect "amateurism". In fact, sports purists kept on stating that the word amateur is derived from the Latin word that means "lover". Thus, an amateur athlete plays sports for the love of it.

Nowadays however the strict distinction between an amateur and professional athlete is no longer invoked, except in youth or school sports where participants are expected to be in school and thus are assumed to have as their main preoccupation their academic duties. And it is for this reason that quite a number of people were taken aback when several years ago, government officials offered financial rewards to young athletes who break records in the Palarong Pambansa.

Hence, the present-day oath of sportsmanship is more concerned with playing fairly and observing the rules of the game that include compliance with whatever age limits are imposed.

It is unfortunate that in most cases, young athletes who recite the oath of sportsmanship fail to appreciate (or probably, even ignore) what they are committing themselves to. They fail to realize or are not made to realize that as they grow up into adulthood they will be reciting oaths of offices and signing documents that attest to the veracity of the information they have provided. They do not seem to be aware of the seriousness of the oath they have publicly recited and the gravity of the crime they committed by violating the oath they made.

School sports like the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) are particularly vulnerable to violations of age limits and eligibility rules. The recent controversy in the UAAP where De La Salle University (DLSU) voluntarily reported the ineligible status of two basketball players it fielded in 2004 and 2005 is an example of school sports’ vulnerability to eligibility regulations which are, in turn anchored on documents whose regularity are often presumed.

While there have been many noble examples of schools the world over like DLSU coming out publicly to confess lapses in their system, one just wonders how many more violations to keep players eligible illicitly are being committed. In his paper, "Ethical Dilemmas in American Sport", author D. Stanley Eitzen names illegal practices (many of them instigated by schools themselves): phantom courses, surrogate test takers and altered transcripts. In most cases, young athletes are willing conspirators to the crimes being committed by education leaders who are supposed to impart values by the mere fact of being educators or teachers.

If anything does come out of the investigation by the DepEd and the allegations of fielding overage athletes are proven, the whole episode highlights once again the fact that sports as a medium for education of the youth can be a double bladed sword.

Sports provide enormous opportunities for doing good. However, as a double bladed sword, sports could be wielded to negate these potentials. Eitzen quotes Stoll and Beller who say that while sport does build character if defined as loyalty, dedication, sacrifice and teamwork, it does not build moral character in the sense of honesty, responsibility and justice.

It is a tragedy that collegiate sport in the Philippines, on too many occasions, especially very recently, does not truly enhance the development of positive character traits. As the philosopher Charles Banham has said, many do benefit from the sports experience but for too many others, sport encourages selfishness, envy, conceit, hostility and bad temper. Far from ventilating the mind, it stifles it. Good sportsmanship may be a product of sports, but so is bad sportsmanship.

Truly our collegiate sports leaders, the wielders of sports swords in our country, have to perceive and appreciate the double-edged characteristic of sports.