Where’re we headed? / Andy Roddick, wow

Where are we headed? Almost everyone I encounter asks me that question, expecting I have the philosopher’s stone in my breast-pocket and therefore can pull out all the answers. The truth is, I don’t really know. I assume the question has to do with future of the Philippines next year, two years from now, maybe five years. Or twenty years. The current situation reminds me of the Philippines during the height of martial rule when foreign correspondents flocked to Manila and even settled temporarily here.

That was the time the domino theory of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gripped the heart of American geo-political strategy in East and Southeast Asia. The fear was that Vietnam would fall to the communists of Ho Chi Minh, and after Vietnam the others would follow. Laos and Cambodia, of course, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma. The Philippines was considered ripe for the picking. The New People’s Army (NPA) then was storming province after province as the populace drew back from the dictatorship. The economy was floundering.

Malacañang’s assassination of Ninoy Aquino Aug. 21, 1983 sank the martial rule of Ferdinand Marcos to its lowest point before Edsa Feb. 22-25, 1986.

The domino theory never materialized. The Philippines held. The other endangered nations like Malaysia and Indonesia held. Not only did they hold but many of them eventually rocketed to fame and fortune as Asia’s capitalist economic tigers in an epic 30-year struggle that held the West and the World Bank in awe. Unfortunately, the Philippines missed that Asian economic roller-coaster drive. And so we are where we are today – the Poor Man of Asia, tossing in a sea (of our own making) of political, economic and social turbulence. Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

The only light I see so far – unless the impending war in Iraq blights it – are the elections in 2004.

If for the first time, these elections should be clean, honest and orderly then there is hope. If the elections should produce a president with two fists, a first-class brain atop his shoulders, and a character resolute enough to chop heads, get the law to work like a speeding locomotive, then the hope grows into a fireball. The elected president will need at least a year or two to clear the cobwebs. If one or two years pass, and he does not meet expectations, he too will go. The maelstrom will resurge and the poor will pour into the streets. A hungry population of 82 million cannot wait forever.

These are at best educated guesses.

I do not think President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will recover. The odds are overpowering. I do not think Speaker Joe de Venecia and his ravenous cohorts in the House will get anywhere with their preposterous Constituent Assembly scenario. I do not think either that rightwing generals and colonels in the military can take over Malacañang in the near future or ever. If Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes has any generalissimo ambitions, or whoever in the military, he might as well forget it. He will forthwith be blown to bits by an aroused citizenry and I think he knows it.

What is fast shaping up is that the year 2004 will be the real election year. Elections are fiesta for the majority of Filipinos. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew espied this easily. He was amazed at the propensity, the exuberance, the frothy, bubbly squish of the Filipino for our gaudy electoral campaigns.

All these are at best educated guesses – for now. They are not Nostradamus prognostications, far from it. I do not certainly know what war in Iraq will bring in specific repercussions to the Philippines. I would guess not even US president George W. Bush knows what will exactly happen days, weeks, months or even years after his mighty invasion armada disables and devastates Iraq. All we can guess is that the world economy will reel, and the world of Islam will react angrily. We shall be affected adversely. Part of Islam is in Mindanao.

It is regrettable that civil society – once so proud of its name, its battering ram role in toppling two presidents – is now rent into factions. Except for the Left and deeply motivated nationalistic elements who demonstrated and were brutally banged about by a sadistic police last Monday, I saw none of the old marchers, those who boasted they were the spearhead of People Power II. Civil society’s selected and invited, joined President GMA and Jaime Cardinal Sin at the Edsa Shrine – all oblivious of the shouts and protests outside of their former comrades. Other ex-marchers watched safely from the sidelines. Sad, very sad.

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It’s probably time to say a lingering goodbye to the tennis phenoms of the 90s like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. They were the best, probably of all time (until their time), particularly Sampras who roamed the courts like nobody else. Sampras had the big serve, the cougar’s speed and agility, the all-court versatility, the fierce mental and emotional grasp, and an extra pair of steel lungs.

I was riveted to my TV set Wednesday afternoon-evening watching Andy Roddick beat Younes El Aynaoui in five gruelling sets in the Australian Open – all of five hours. The outcome: 4-6, 7-6 (5), 4-6, 6-4, 21-19. It was one of those rare epic battles, two superb warriors refusing to yield an inch, almost each game a flight into superlative tennis that just riveted you in your seat.

It should have been the Moroccan’s march, and in one split-second the young 20-year-old American looked like a goner in the fourth set. Except that Roddick pulled out an impossible winner and what emerged after that was the longest match in Open tennis history. El Aynaoui had earlier disposed of the tennis world’s No. 1, the fidgety, prickly Australian Lleyton Hewitt. And he did it with a display of power and versatile tennis that in the end flummoxed Hewitt, no slacker himself in matches demanding wizardry of the highest order.

And so the fifth set went largely according to service. It was the young, utterly boyish American into a game he never experienced before. It was a physical game as it was a mental game, spooling into the sky almost endlessly, requiring courage, endurance, judgment, and, of course, tennis of the highest order. It was the tousle-haired Moroccan, tall, powerful and swash-buckling, much older into a gruelling game that should have exhausted him, except that he did not, and he gave as much as he got. It was boom-boom tennis of sizzling cross-court exchanges as it was tennis of volleys and half-volleys, each approaching the net like an Aztec with a machete.

You could see it in the crowd.

They could not believe what they were seeing. At times, many covered their eyes thinking believing Roddick or El Aynaoui would finally snap. And they didn’t want to look. No, neither didn’t. On and on they went. And it was simply amazing where they got their wind. At times, they botched their shots. El Aynaoui would fling his racket to the ground, not just once but twice, thrice, shouting curses in I do not know what language. Twice, the Moroccan screamed, a long anguished wail. And I thought his game had gone apart. It did not. He pulled back and his great tennis was also back.

Andy Roddick, never really a tantrum-thrower, also smashed his racket into the ground, made faces. At one time, he knelt like a Muslim in prayer, head to the ground. The American remonstrated loudly when his return – which I thought hit the baseline chalk – was ruled out by the umpire. The rising spiraling tension of the match had gotten to the two players, the umpires and linesmen, and the crowd. Nerves were frayed. It was like a journey into the unknown, neither giving up, a young American and an elder Moroccan, as it were, down in the fight pit, not one of them able to get his knife to the other’s heart.

When it was all over, after exactly four hours and 55 minutes, the stadium exploded into applause. Not just for Roddick but also for Younes El Aynaoui. They had seen tennis as they had never seen it before, tennis that was not just great, but tennis that drew diamonds that flickered on the court. You could easily imagine they were floating, gliding or streaking in air or walking on water.

Andy Roddick neither jumped for joy nor raised his hands in victory. He was stunned. He walked around like a somnambulist, trying to understand what happened. He sat down, stood up again, his face a mask. He peered ahead blankly, as all around him the spectators cheered loud, long and lustily. Finally, the young American who looks like the boy next door, got out of his post-game reverie. He smiled. He acknowledged the plaudits of the crowd. With his racket, he smashed a ball or two into the stands. Now he was alive. The crowds did not rush to the exit. They continued to watch, savor the event, and the Moroccan was called back. He was a hero of this epic almost as much as Andy Roddick was.

This decade has finally found the successor to Pete Sampras.