Fair Play: There's always a next time

I LOST the Sony Ericsson contest for bloggers for the 2010 World Cup.

I finished fourth with just over a thousand votes. It could have been more but for some strange reason, a lot of folks were voting me down. Why? I don’t know. They probably thought I was No. 1 and the one who was trailing me by 100 votes had a chance to win.

I so badly wanted to turn into a virus and turn the PC of whoever was orchestrating that into useless junk.



Still, I didn’t do too poorly considering I was in the bottom five when the contest started.

I could harp on a lot of “What ifs” in my missed World Cup trip but I’ll take this opportunity to thank all those who voted for me and those who asked other people to vote for me.

That made the whole exercise worth it.

Instead of harping about missed opportunities, I’ll just tell you how the winner, Agnes Davonar, deserved to get the award.

For a while, though, Miss Davonar’s tally nosedived. If I got pissed losing a hundred votes, she lost 500 each day for three days, while the second placer, some dude who talked about himself and his drunken what-have-you, gained 1,500.

But in the end, she won. She gained some 3,000 and that obnoxious No. 2 lost 2,000.

Miss Davonar, a tennis buff, wrote about how kids have turned her favorite tennis court into an impromptu pitch and how one chance encounter with them one day touched her life.

One day, while buying from a soy milk vendor, the kids’ ball went out of bounds, to her. They asked her to kick back and she did, poorly.

The ball sailed to a dirty gutter and the guilt-ridden teacher opted to sate her conscience by buying them soy milk.

She also got to talk to the kids, who were poor and couldn’t afford school.

This is my favorite part: “Football was not only part of their daily life, but it is a place to comfort themselves in the midst of life’s difficulties, poverty. Football offered them laughter in search of happiness at this moment.”

See? All’s well that ends well.

As for me? Well, there’s always a next time.

And since the World Cup is four years away in Brazil, I’ll just eagerly wait and see if Sony Ericsson will conduct a similar contest for the French Open or Wimbledon.
Who knows?

TOO LATE THE HERO. Mandaue City could also do better next time the Cviraa comes around.
The Cviraa was held last February and not a few of Mandaue’s athletes won golds, especially in track and field, and got the chance to represent the region in the Palarong
Pambansa.

The national meet ended yesterday and guess what?

Mandaue City’s politicians are busy passing the blame on why funds for the city’s athletes for the Cviraa still haven’t been released.

The City Council said they are not to blame, while another said the mayor isn’t to blame, either.

Hmmm.

Will both parties finally work on the release of the funds? Say, in time for next year’s Cviraa?

I once said in an Internet forum that when it comes to sports, we’ll have a hard time catching up with the world’s best.

But when it comes to politics, we set the bar.

MILESTONE. Let’s all grab a beer and have one for pareng Al Mendoza, the only guy I know who played a round with Phil Mickelson.

Al, who pens All Write for the Sun.Star Network, turns a year older today.

All write!!!