Fair play

Let me come clean: I do not watch sports on TV. Not because I dislike it, but it’s rather from the nagging fear that I’ll find myself like one of those regulars in those sports bars — even more obese than I already am, cheering and guzzling beer while watching something I can never hope to do. It’s fun, I’ll admit, but ever since playing a whole game of full-court basketball became a rare thing for me, I’ve dropped watching the NBA or PBA broadcasts. (Even sadder for the fact that I used to play for the varsity all throughout high school and could scrimmage up to eight games every practice.) I’m sure both envy and insecurity plays a part in my self-imposed abstinence.

I may not play or watch sports, but I do know what sportsmanship is. Simply put, the term puts more emphasis on how the game is played rather than the outcome, to be gracious in both winning and losing. The playing of sports and the holding of events like the Olympics was meant to get enemies to participate in a competition on a level-playing field, following a set number of rules. This allowed the participants an opportunity to disentangle from the politics of their time and engage in play. (Or perhaps emphasized that it’s all a game after all?) The Greeks who founded the Ancient Olympics almost certainly didn’t view it as a means to achieve a utopian ideal of world peace. It respected the fact that conflict was inherent — they were still competing against each other. Again, rather than the end-result, it was the fact that there the opposing peoples could actually get together and play a game that was remarkable.

But even as the Dalai Lama himself has denied categorically that he favors independence from China, we had the spectacle of protesters disrupting the progress of the Olympic Torch to Beijing, protesting for Tibetan freedom and generating disruptive mayhem. More deplorable is the fact that we have to put up with the smug Hollywood stars like Mia Farrow and Richard Gere lecturing the rest of us about why we should boycott the “Great Yellow Peril” of the Beijing Olympics. The fact that these so-called liberals from the West are notoriously selective should give one pause as well.

In his blog entry, “Free Tibet… Later” on his blog (http://acabaya.blogspot.com/), Antonio C. Abaya writes:  “Contiguous to Tibet to the east is the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, home to ethnic Uyghurs, who have been agitating for independence from China for decades — exploding bombs occasionally to remind the world that they are still fighting for a homeland — but no one pays any attention to them.”

The fact that the Uyghurs are also Muslim may not particularly endear them to a post-9/11 America. In the same piece, Abaya points out that “there are actually more Uyghurs (about 15 million out of a total Xinjiang population of 19.5 million) than Tibetans (2.62 million in Tibet, plus another 4 million outside Tibet). And Xinjiang is actually bigger (636,000 sq. miles) than Tibet (472,000 sq. miles).”

To protest and call for change one must be consistent and be held up to higher account, in my view, to those you are opposing. Unfortunately, the “white man’s burden” the West carries these days contains only a carry-on baggage load of history — neatly put it in the overhead compartment or slipped underneath the seat in front, and promptly forgotten if the need arises.

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Locally, the reports as of this writing state that we still have not gotten a single medal in the Beijing Olympics. Unfortunate though that is, it’s even sadder to note that sports commentator Recah Trinidad’s recent deriding of our athletes in his column, “Team Philippines: Who’s the biggest flop of all?” which was mean-spirited to say the least. He also missed the point of the Games in the first place.

Admittedly, he has valid points in taking Jose Cojuanco, the head of the Olympic Committee, to task. But after branding some of our countrymen as “dismal Philippine failures” and writing that the media is “who’s the dumbest among the Filipino losers,” it’s clear that his comments were unsportsmanlike indeed.

Again, the Olympics will not solve the problems of our country or the Tibetans. (Trinidad’s other columns from Beijing contain several jibes against government, which could be seen as light-hearted and fair enough, if not for the tenor of the aforementioned article, which makes them suspect.) Although politics will never be absent from these events, let’s try and not make the Olympics an expression of it.

Curiously, during the 1939 Olympics in Germany, journalists reported that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens, who had won four gold medals. Owens denied this, saying that he “waved his hand at me, and I waved back to him.” He further criticized the writers for their bad taste in criticism, decrying that in “bad taste” and false. “Hitler didn’t snub me — it was FDR (Roosevelt) who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”