Mighty sports is taking a beating

Manny Villaruel, sports editor of The Freeman, showed me this quote from former US chief justice Earl Warren: “The sports page records people's accomplishments. The front page usually records nothing but man's failures.”

I couldn't agree with Manny or Earl Warren more. Sports has always had a reserved place in man's never-ending endeavor for achievement, self-improvement and discipline. Without sports, man's natural proclivity to hie it to perdition will find him a shortcut there sooner.

The miraculous beauty of sports is that it is not only the competitor who takes part in a struggle. There is a sense of community in sports that sucks in individual spectators and entire nations into what ring, arena or court a sporting action is taking place.

Sports even has a kind of healing and redemptive property that many have learned to repair to and exhort others to try. One of the most famous catch phrases pertaining to sports in this century is that which says: “Avoid drugs. Get into sports.”

And so it comes as a great disappointment, a source of great anger even, when sportsmen betray our great respect and our great expectations. It is as if we are being stabbed in the back by the very heroes we cheer on, pray for and emulate after.

Right now there is a growing list of sporting fiascos, not just abroad but in the Philippines as well, that have given admirers and spectators alike cause to pause, reflect and have second thoughts about whether their feelings about sports have not been misplaced.

One is of course Manny Pacquiao, whose exploits in the ring made up the single biggest booster of national pride in recent years but whose activities outside it now threaten to shove them all aside in favor of disdain and disgust.

His foray into the dirty arena of politics, his tendency to dishonor the very contracts he signed, his alleged gambling and the libel suit he filed against those who wrote about it, and his tax troubles with the government - these all served to bring down his stock in our hearts.

There have been other recent fallen angels like world pool champion Ronato Alcano who has a pending molestation case in court involving his own daughter and cage superstar and Kris Aquino's husband James Yap and his spa cubicle caper.

While impressionable youngsters and teary-eyed middle-aged and senior citizens were still trying to get a grip on what is happening - boom - came another sporting fiasco, this time involving basketball, the country's number one sport.

A popular collegiate player, Paolo Orbeta, who also plays in the amateur commercial league, was arrested days ago in a game-fixing scam involving huge sums of money that has cast a dark veil of suspicion over the entire sport.

The scam reminds us of a similar stain on the professional side of the sport many years ago, the specter of which, while always a hounding afterthought, we have managed to consign to grudging forgetfulness over the decades.

But now it has reared its ugly head again, leaving us looking like a limp and empty wet bag and feeling dirty and sorry about ourselves. Even posing the half-hearted question about what is happening to us does not serve the purpose of cleansing the guilt we do not deserve.

If in this mighty human diversion called sports mankind now finds itself battered against the ropes, then maybe, as in sports, we should call for a timeout and reassess the position we have taken. For we cannot hope to beat two enemies, the one before us, and our very own selves.