What’s changed, and what hasn’t

There is nothing noble about being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. – Winston Churchill

This writer turned 57 yesterday. And as I enter my 36th year as a sports journalist, I realize how so much has changed in Philippine sports, and how much hasn’t. There are, thankfully, still constants from those early days in 1986: the PBA, Paeng Nepomuceno, Efren Reyes. From a diet of basketball, boxing, bowling, billiards, darts and motocross, there have been roughly 20 new sports that have entered the mainstream just since the 2000s began. It’s been a long journey, and the battle continues to change a flawed system.

In the 1980’s, mobile phone technology was still in its infancy. So if you were going to an appointment that was postponed or cancelled, there was no way for you to know. The first bag phone mobiles came to the country in the mid-1990’s, when Globe and Smart still operated on separate systems, and you could not call one from the other. The Philippine Sports Commission came into being in 1990, replacing Project: Gintong Alay as the government’s lead agency for sports. We got a lot of our foreign sports broadcast from the US Far East Network, emanating from the American military facilities in Clark and Subic, which you could catch if your rooftop TV antenna was pointed in the right direction. The internet really started to make an impact on sports in the mid-1990’s. It was used extensively by the international media in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for sending stories back home. Many of us were still using electric typewriters or dot matrix printers and fax machines and whiteout. It was a more laborious process, and correcting mistakes was more difficult.

In the last 20 years, several new sports have competed for our attention. Billiards exploded after Efren Reyes conquered the first World 9Ball Championship in 1999. Volleyball took off locally in the first decade of the new millennium. Around this time, mixed martial arts started competing with boxing, first in the US and Europe. Capoeira briefly became a craze.  Manny Pacquiao was a former world boxing champion who catapulted into our consciousness in 2005. E-sports are a product of the last decade, and Filipinos are now world champions. New sports like tchoukball and many others have made it into the Philippine Olympic Committee.

Sadly, politics still hasn’t left Philippine sports. In the amateurs and national federations, we still have leaders who are nothing more than feudal lords or toll collectors with their own agendas. They still look at athletes as chattels who serve them and not the nation. Many act as indispensable contributors to our athletes’ successes, when the athletes actually triumphed in spite of them. The good news is that social media has allowed more people to look behind the curtain, and more athletes to level the fight by going public with their issues. However, this has also given voice to the undiscerning, so those in my profession have to be more active and vigilant. No rest for the weary.

Over the last three decades plus, there are still matters that need closure, such as benefits for some national prior to 1990, funds not liquidated or returned from past SEA Games, and others. We have been exceedingly fortunate that this administration has shown great heart for the athletes. Very few other times in our history (Presidents Marcos, Ramos and Arroyo) have we seen such support for our warriors in the field. For that, we are grateful. When you take the long view, the more you see that many things change, but many things don’t. The things that stay the same, people have chosen to remain that way.