In sports competition, champions are ‘made’ not miraculously born

Even as the 23rd Southeast Asian Games formally opened yesterday, with a ceremony in the Quirino Grandstand, Filipino athletes won some gold medals to spice up the day.

I think it’s disgraceful that we’ve not been able, owing to squabbling and technicalities, to put up a basketball team. This game has for generations, not just decades, been our nation’s most popular sport, even if, on the basis of height and reach we’ve already long been outjumped, and regrettably outclassed by other Asians on the hardcourt. Even if we didn’t win, we ought to have competed.

We may surprise ourselves by harvesting more gold than we’re expecting – we have many great athletes, no thanks to lack of government or private support. Neither, unfortunately has been forthcoming.

Our threadbare sports facilities pale in comparison with even Hanoi’s the city which hosted the biennial games in 2003. Imagine a dirt-poor but rising Vietnam putting up a better show, and fielding more athletes than us. We didn’t go through a bone-grinding, destructive, bloody war and years of human, economic, and political repression that they did – but, perhaps, our political wars proved more punishing, and, worst of all, our indifference to athletic development. Athletic prowess has been a source of pride and morale, and a tool in nation-building in many countries. In ours, sad to say, we continue to embrace the Cult of Mediocrity.

As usual, officials and politicians alike shrug: "There’s no money for sports development, or for sports facilities."

Haven’t you noticed? There’s never any money – whether it’s to upgrade EDSA, our country’s Main Street, which remains potholed, pitted, dark and unlighted, and bordered by hideous and claptrap buildings and shacks, and gridlocked with traffic aggravated by some illegal bus terminals; or whether or acquire combat jet aircraft for a dismally backward Philippine Air Force; or else procure modern warships for our brave but rust-bucket Philippine Navy.

Our soldiers go into battle with holes in their boots, rips in their ponchos, their vehicles breaking down at the most urgent moments. It’s the "Oakwood Mutineers’" bellow of complaint again and again – but, once the "rebels" surrendered, it was back to complacency.

The most deplorable words in our vocabulary are okay lang, puwede na – and, that magic, chronic buzzword bahala na. Of course, with regards to the latter, God will sometimes provide, but while prayer can move mountains, using bulldozers will give prayer an extra boost. Ora et labora, my father a Latin scholar from his high school days in the now-long vanished Jesuit Seminary in Vigan used to urge us kids: Pray – and Work! He would remark: Pray as if everything depended on God, work as if everything depended on you, and go as fast as you can, as if the Devil were after you. God loves us, our Churches are full of faithful. Optimistic worshippers (which is our people’s not-so acknowledged strength), but the Devil, too, is very much alive and moving among us.

In sports, as in everything we undertake, okay lang, puwede na, and bahala na should never be enough. We cannot just be lucky, or even merely good. We’ll have to strive to be champions, no matter what it takes in terms of pain, effort, practice, sacrifice, endurance – and perseverance.

In the above, we’ve failed.

We’ve not pursued excellence, but the easy way. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, a down-in-the-mouth discredit would-be seer with a cracked crystal ball. But I’m afraid we’ll find this shortcoming demonstrated in the SEAG competitions in the days of competition to come.

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One has to go to Taipei in Taiwan to find the world’s tallest building, "TAIPEI 101" and it truly is. Officially called the "Taipei International Financial Centre 101," the building – built to resemble a stalk of bamboo with graceful ropes corded around the bamboo’s nodes – soars 101 storeys (508 meters) to the sky. The structure was completed in 2003, and a vibrationless elevator zips you to the top observation deck in just 21 seconds.

Determined not to be outdone, Shanghai in China is rushing to erect a taller building, which, if completed by target date 2007, will be named the World Finance Centre. Next to this project is Shanghai-Pudong’s tallest building, the Jinmao Tower which is 88 storeys high. The interesting feature of the Jinmao is that the Grand Hyatt hotel is located inside the Jinmao, occupying the 54th to 87th floors.

In the 88th floor observatory deck (340 meters high) is one of the most fascinating exhibits in town: a glass-enclosed pair of the gigantic-sized NIKE playing shoes of China’s tallest human export – the 2.26-meter-tall Yao Ming, whose spectacular rocket to NBA, therefore worldwide fame, as a point-making machine for the Houston "Rockets" now nets him an $18-million capitalistic-type contract, which he gets to spend under the watchful eye (and thumb) of his mother, a former Red Guard of the discredited and forgotten (by her) Cultural Revolution.

Yao Ming’s career has spawned a movie, "Year of the Yao", books, television specials, even a Yao Restaurant & Bar in Houston run by mom and pop.

Last November 14, TIME magazine ran a cover-story, with the Red star holding a Spalding basketball in his red-bordered, snow-white NIKE shoes glaring at readers from its cover (I suppose he got paid for that photo’s commercial value, too) was bannered: "TALL TALE" and subheaded: "How the Communist bureaucracy – and an extraordinary mother made YAO MING China’s biggest sports star."

Inside, is an excerpt from a coming book, "TIME" revealed how "from the beginning, the life of China’s biggest sports star was shaped by two powerful, often competing forces: his mother and the communist government." (Both mother and the communist government won, I think).

In sum, the article alleged that Yao Ming was no genetic accident. He was planned.

When Yao was born on September 12, 1980, an "abnormally large baby boy" to two "retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before had made them the tallest couple in China." He came into the world in the Shanghai No. 6 Hospital with "the enormous legs, the broad squarish cranium, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. "At more than 5 kg. he was, "TIME" stated, "nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn."

No coincidence, obviously: Fang Fengdi, the mother, measured 1.88 meters, over half a foot taller than the average man in Shanghai. Father, Yao Zhiyuan, was a 2.08-m giant. Since childhood, the two had already been dubbed Da Yao and Da Fang – Big Yao and Big Fang.

When news of Big Baby Yao Ming’s birth was "relayed across town to the top leaders of the Shanghai Sports Commission . . . they were not surprised. These men and women had been trying to cultivate a new generation of athletes who would embody the rising power of China. The boy in the maternity ward represented, in many ways, the culmination of their plan."

One of his old coaches was quoted by the magazine as having said: "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations."

Yao Ming’s training was, naturally, programmed to make him the best in basketball. I won’t dwell on the details. But you can see that SEA Games trophies and Olympic golds don’t come about by sheer effort, luck, or genetic accident alone – everybody, from individual to state must pitch in to produce champions.

In our land, we may not be able to replicate an "Operation Yao Ming," but you get the idea.

From the old Soviet Union to the defunct DDR (East German state), to the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern and Central Europe, the race for dominance netted golds and silvers for the athletes of Communist regimes, in a battle to prove the superiority of Marxism-Leninism, even Stalinism, and later Maoism, over the weak decadent Western-style democracies.

It’s not an ideological struggle we’re preaching, but one dedicated to building a strong, self-confident, excellence-seeking nation – by a coordinated national effort. Manna may come from heaven, money from the bank, but champion athletes are "made."

It’s akin to the ancient Latin proverb, "poeta nascitur, orator fit" (poets are born, orators are manufactured). An athlete may move like poetry, but it’s training, endurances, perseverance, and sweat that makes him – and her – fit. It’s time we abandoned being satisfied with mediocrity, but began to fight to become the best.

As for our guests and rivals in the Southeast Asian Games, we welcome them with open hearts. We wish all of them luck, happiness – and success, although our fondest wish is to deny them victory, which we covet for ourselves!

The Games have begun. We say "MABUHAY" to each and everyone!

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"NEWSWEEK" Magazine, in turn, has a cautionary tale about the upwards progress of booming China, its editors swimming against the current of plaudits and gushy journalism, to warn: "Time to Cash Out?" The newsmagazine’s subtitle, which is cleverly portrayed by a flag of the People’s Republic of China splattered with casino chips, avers: "Big Players are Hedging their Bets on the Middle Kingdom."

In short, the cover piece by George Wehrfritz incisively reports that "China’s too-hot economy is prompting firms to look elsewhere to invest."

If you ask me, when you visit China’s crown jewels, Shanghai-Pudong, Beijing itself – and even "provincial" cities like Xiamen and Xian – the superstructures, skylines mushrooming with high-rises, the avenues, ringroads, expressways, and subways, are mind-boggling in aspect. But while Chinese products are flooding the world’s markets — even outselling Indian-made silk sarees in India (bringing cheaper, silkier sarees to India and ruining the livelihoods of 12 million Indian silk-weavers) – I can’t help agreeing with Wehrfritz and "NEWSWEEK" that a crisis may be brewing. Speaking of the glut in setting up steel foundries as an example, the writer points out "it’s a crisis of plenty, not want." The question to be poised is not a new one. It has been said of other countries with over-heated economies: When will the bubble burst?

Having covered China since my first trip there in 1964, I continue to nurse the feeling that the fantastic wonders we’re witnessing are in the Tourist Belt. In the darkness of the non-coastal and fecund provinces are the Dark and Deprived inland areas and the West (of the tall mountains), where 200 to 250 million may be unemployed – not merely underemployed.

We hail the progress and coming superpower status (but it‘s early days yet) of a China finding its place in the world. There’s still many a pitfall ahead.