Fair Play: Basket-boxing's new grounds (sort of)

WHAT do you call a group, which replaced an old group and says that because it wants to “break new ground,” it will conduct old experiments? Or, again, as part of that “breaking new ground,” it will hold a stakeholders’ summit, where all the who’s who in the event will attend, but adds, “those who wish to join the stakeholders’ summit are requested to contact Mr. So and So.”

What do you call them? You call them the Amateur Boxing Association of the Philippines (Abap).

I thought Manny V. Pangilinan and his basketball folks were stretching themselves too thin by taking over the boxing body and based on the first news of the year, things don’t look well.

Abap’s Patrick Gregorio said, “Under the leadership of Abap president Ricky Vargas and vice president Manny Lopez, the 2009 Philippine boxing program is expected to break new grounds.”

What is this new ground? A soon-to-be launched boxing competition pitting boxers from different regions?

Oh, gee. Somebody ought to tell Gregorio and the rest of the basketball slash boxing officers to read previous stories. Don’t they know we’ve had boxing competitions from different regions in the past?

It’s like somebody saying, “We are going to break new ground in education and we are going to conduct a national assessment exam.”

This is your new ground?

Or is it the boxing summit?

“Aside from hosting the boxing competition and launching the inter-region competition, we will also have the boxing congress, which will be participated in by the different stakeholders,” Gregorio said.

But if Abap has to ask “these stakeholders” to drop a call to join the boxing congress, doesn’t that mean the group doesn’t know who they are talking about?

I mean, if you want to get the support of the stakeholders, don’t you think these people deserve a bit of respect by inviting them personally? Instead of waiting to have these stakeholders call you and say, “Hey, I’m a stakeholder. I think I should be in that summit.”

Oh yeah. Lest I forget, these are basketball folks. Folks, who until now, can’t decide who the stakeholders in Philippine basketball really are.

And here they are, trying to determine who the boxing stakeholders are. (Hmmm, is a parallel boxing group, headed by a wannabe senator, not too far away?)

Oh well. There are still three years to go before the next Olympiad. I hope Abap will have three years’ worth of a genuine boxing program instead of three years’ worth of a massive PR campaign.

And one thing, when Abap finally decides to break new ground, I hope it finds a fresh patch, not some overgrown cemetery where the skeletons of previous boxing programs are buried.

FR. VIC. When Fr. Vic Uy was named as one of commissioners of the Philippine Sports Commission, I thought Cebu sports was going to hit it big.
So far, Fr. Vic is hitting all the right notes and most of what he said he wanted to accomplish this year are commendable.

Last year, Fr. Vic also started a Children’s Community Games, patterned after the International Children’s Games and I think, that’s going to be an annual event.

Though I don’t agree with Fr. Vic’s plan to put up a media center for PSC Cebu. What for? The PSC office already functions as one and besides, it’s just five to 10 minutes away from the newsrooms—I do hope Fr. Vic succeeds in his plan to revive the Trimedia Olympics.

The Trimedia Olympics used to be an annual event and was the lone avenue to get media practitioners to exercise their muscles but has since been shelved since 2005.
Fr. Vic has a lot of plans for the year and I hope he succeeds in all of them. But it is the revival of the Trimedia Olympics that I’d be really looking forward to.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mother Nature plays spoilsport

The failed U23 experiment

Fair Play: The Devil's Advocate and CFA vs. CAFC