Edjop, Joyette and sports activism

Once an activist, always an activist or so they say.

That is why many of us who were so called “tibak” and were part of the late 80s student movement trooped to the movie theatres recently to watch the film “Edjop” — if only to recall through cinema what it meant to have been part of that painful history that still continues to haunt us amid the harrowing current events.

The movie presented through a dual narrative lens of Edjop’s daughter, champion tri-athlete and runner Joyette Jopson. It used certain parallelisms on the rigors of running and activism; the struggles of both father and daughter.

I will not dwell much on the correctness or error of Edjop’s ideology but more on the thought that Joyette was on the right track in pursuing the angle of injecting Sports as a medium to perhaps continue the struggle of his father to seek truth, justice and the fight for a more humane and just society.

Normally for spectators like us, there is a phrase we reach for whenever an athlete says something inconvenient: “keep politics out of sports.” It sounds tidy, almost self-evident. It is also, historically, false.

Sport has never been a neutral zone insulated from the world around it — it has been one of the most effective stages for political expression precisely because everyone assumes it shouldn’t be.

That pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. Muhammad Ali refused Vietnam War draft induction into the US Army in 1967 and paid for it with his title and a criminal conviction, later overturned, but the act itself reframed what an athlete’s public platform could be used for.

A year later, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists against racial inequality on the medal stand during the Mexico City Olympics — a gesture that lasted seconds and is still being written about more than half a century on.

On the same note, Billie Jean King turned a tennis exhibition into a referendum on gender equality. National Football League player Colin Kaepernick’s knee became a template that spread across entire leagues. Iranian footballers at the 2022 World Cup declined to sing their anthem, while fans in the stands turned a global broadcast into a platform for a domestic protest movement their own government could not fully suppress.

What’s striking is how many different mechanisms this activism has taken.

Sometimes it’s the lone athlete, using personal visibility as leverage. Sometimes it’s the team acting collectively, as when the Milwaukee Bucks’ 2020 anti-police brutality walkout cascaded across the National Basketball Association (NBA), Women’s NBA, and beyond within days. Sometimes the protest isn’t participation at all but the withholding of it — the sporting boycotts of apartheid South Africa, or the tit-for-tat Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984, proved that absence from the field can carry as much political weight as presence on it.

And sometimes, most interestingly, the symbol itself gets repurposed: Nelson Mandela didn’t reject the Springboks jersey, historically a symbol of white South African rugby — he did the unthinkable and put it on, and in doing so rewrote entirely what that jersey represented.

Maybe that is why some of those I know who marched as street parliamentarians before are now immersed in Philippine sports at many different levels of involvement. They really never lost the firebrand spirit to attain triumph through struggle, fostering equality in rules and fairness in competition.

Edjop’s quest for social reform remains a story worth telling and her daughter creatively sought to reframe this narrative uniquely well through an athlete’s perspective.