Without mincing any word, this corner is serious about replacing the dribble and shoot game with chess as the country’s national pastime.
Since the Filipinos emerged as Asia’s super power in the mid-50s up to the advent of the 70s, basketball has been glorified, adored and put on a pedestal as if our lives depended on it.
Basketball or nothing.
Meantime, chess is a-glowing with the very recent impressive victory of GM Wesley So in the US Chess Championship in Missouri, USA, one of the most prestigious competitions in the world.
As can be gleaned from the triumph of WS, height or heft is not a built-in (dis)advantage for eventual winners.
It meant that Filipinos – who are only of medium build – can be at par with the world’s best in chess. Unlike in basketball where the towering NBAers and their European counterparts like Spain, France, Slovenia, Germany, Greece et al easily overwhelm their diminutive opponents from Asia.
Our policy-makers in sports must correct this deficiency – now.
It is about time they told Filipino sports fans that basketball is NOT made for the Filipino athlete. Basketball, in fact, was discovered and originated in America.
Read your sports history. After China emerged from its slumber and joined the Asian circuit, Filipino cagers found it extra difficult to win championships even just in the Asian sphere.
We have not beaten the Chinese in the FIBA Asia (then known as the Asian Basketball Championships or ABC) nor in the quadrennial Asian Games, for that matter. For the record, the Mainland Sinos unmercifully shamed the Robert Jaworski-coached RP squad by unloading an impressive 60 points winning margin, more than the entire Philippine team’s production.
Only South Korea has been able to sneak a win over China.
This is the sad reality that our sports officials of the Philippine Olympic Committee and the Philippine Sports Commission have conveniently ignored since that tragic 1990 debacle.
In the meantime, chess is played by millions of ordinary, under-shirted Juan dela Cruzes – in the barbershops, in the marketplace, in bus and jeepney terminals, in ports and piers, in classrooms and school campuses, in wherever there is a small, albeit, cramp space for two players huddled over an old, worn out 64-square chessboard.
WS’ scintillating performance in the chess circuit is all we need to claim that between chess and basketball, the former can give Filipino athletes a better chance of excelling in the world stage – regardless of their physical frames.
Basketball, truth to tell, is not all about physical prowess. Much of it is mental. Hoopsters are not robots nor androids. They think before they leap and shoot. That is why they need a coach and a bench strategist. To harness their physical abilities with their mental attributes.
Still, because the basketball ring is situated ten feet high up there, the taller and bigger a player is, the better for him to put in the ball easily inside it and score the much-needed points.
I don’t think we need to lecture Filipino sports officials about this glaring disparity. They are neither deaf nor blind. The big BUT is they don’t have the balls to rectify the wrong. They continue to make pronouncements favorable (as protocol) to basketball affairs in order not to ruffle the feathers of those holding the basketball reins. But look at the results. There is no fulfilment of the HOPE that is deceptively being nurtured in our hearts.
Like the much-needed constitutional reforms, basketball is a sports bloc that is very hard to penetrate and sway.
But if responsible Dep-Ed officials are listening (and reading this piece), it might do well for them to promptly put more emphasis on chess because it hones the mental aptitudes and skills of elementary grade schoolers (even the preps) who might otherwise stray and take up basketball because these kids are easily attracted by the “heroic” exploits of hoopsters in the sports pages of broadsheets and tabloids and lionized by commentators.
I am not putting down basketball for the sake of putting it down. I am lifting chess for the sake of correcting an irregularity.
Basketball is simply not made for the Filipino athlete.
Chess is. (Email your feedback to fredlumba@yahoo.com.) GOD BLESS THE PHILIPPINES!
