Sporting days

Sporting days | Daily Tribune

Nevertheless, we must pay momentary attention to the “beautiful game” and the ongoing World Cup, even as we scratch our heads and feign boredom.

We can’t possibly ignore the World Cup’s engrossing underdog stories and rivalries that most of the world is talking about. Nor can we forgo the pleasure Argentina’s Lionel Messi or Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo or France’s Kylian Mmbape or Japan’s Samurai Blue, the only Asian team on a deep run, bring.

And besides the stories of underdogs and certified football geniuses, the World Cup explains so much about identity and nationalism. The World Cup is a swirling pot of identity politics and national pride.

In the recent perceptible words of the wonderful essayist Adam Gopnik: “For a few hours, geography will matter less than identity.”

Surely, for a few hours the players will reveal that identity depends less on geography than on self-perception, less on where you were born or raised and more on how you choose to feel.

How this came to be so is because football’s current great stars and talents mostly play the rest of the year in football pitches and stadiums away from their home countries.

Superb talents playing for their countries only once every four years during the World Cup testifies to the worldwide diaspora of sporting talents, of their dispersal all over where only the monied can enjoy them.

Hereabouts, we see it often. Count how many of our talented homegrown basketball players have transported themselves to other sporting cultures for the handsome pay.

We excuse it, of course. We can never really support their talent or afford to pay for the true rich pleasures from a specific sport that only geniuses can bring.

Still, the pleasures of self-perception and self-feeling count. For, as with the rest of the world, we poor Filipinos, too, as a people, want to be celebrated and to count as belonging on the world’s sports stages.

Speaking of which brings us to the singularities of Pacquiao and Alexandra Eala, the two who “create hope where once there was despair.” Pacquiao is now a worldwide icon. Eala is on the cusp of that revered status.

Eala, as I write this, is about to set foot on the Wimbledon courts, tennis’ most prestigious event that began last Monday. Ranking 30th in the world, Eala is the first-ever Filipino seeded in Wimbledon.

So many words of praise and awe have come Eala’s way in her year-long grind on the tennis tour. Through her many Filipinos now know and appreciate tennis.

So much so that once she steps on Wimbledon’s grass court, and hopefully goes much further, we’ll even be more at a loss for words to exactly describe our feelings and swelling pride.

And perhaps what we can do is to pray that she continues to have a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy spirit. For Eala is not only a gift to the country but is the Filipinos’ gift to the world.