My Manny!

My dad and I had a great old time watching Manny Pacquiao demolish Ricky Hatton yesterday at BMW Libis. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I had my point and shoot camera ready, the fight was over so quickly that I didn't have any time to take any pictures. Upon reflection, the brevity of the fight magnified the beauty of the experience of watching it live: for five glorious minutes, every single Filipino in the world was united in a victory as complete, as invigorating, and as joyful as anything else the Filipino people has experienced in recent memory.

And because I am fond of beating figures of speech to death...


The joyful conquest of Manny Pacquiao is much like this photo of Manuel and myself. Manuel is notoriously hard to photograph. He's the strongest-willed of all my children, and his reticence is legendary in the Borra household. Manuel will do as Manuel darn well pleases. So this picture, despite the paucity of aesthetic qualities to recommend it, is as much a victory as I can expect when it comes to pictures with my second-born.

Enjoy!

When a Point is More Than a Point

I came across this interesting article which read Greeley girls basketball team beats Boulder school 94-1. Like most people who read the article, my heart went out to Boulder school, and partly because my formative years were spent hating the Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid and rooting for the underdog in The Bad News Bears, I was ready to spew vitriol at Frontier Academy (Greeley), proof positive that I didn't really outgrow my childhood traumas, I just acquired a wider vocabulary. But then I read that:

"I've had 100 points scored on me before, and I think it's important to respect the game and to respect your opponent," Frontier Academy head coach Nathan Buxman said this morning in a phone interview. "We show the most respect for our opponents by continuing to play hard."

As my wife and I continue to struggle raising our kids, it's tempting to sometimes give both our kids and ourselves a free ride every now and then. Sometimes we all feel that, with the current state of local and international affairs, the world is harsh enough on the people we love. Shouldn't we extend some compassion their way?

Then I realize, as a parent, that I'm not supposed to make it "easier" for my kids. I'm supposed to make their every experience mean something. Whether it's magnifying a magical moment or letting them take their lumps just like everybody else, all I can really do is make sure that whatever they go through is worth it all, in the end.

So thank you Frontier Academy for not taking it easy on Boulder. It's a welcome reminder of how our struggles, in the end, should mean something.

Acquired Tastes: The Ateneo Blue Eagles, 2008

I was probably one of the few Ateneans who, until the Finals round of the UAAP, remained blissfully unaware of the miracle that had been building since the start of the season. Belatedly, I tried to get myself up to speed regarding the many fascinating factors that contributed to the Blue Eagles emerging as the 2008 UAAP Men's Basketball champions for both the Juniors and Seniors Division but found, to my delight, that there were too many to digest quickly. Rather than share my ignorance regarding the delightful development of Rabeh Al-Hussaini, or the quiet leadership of Chris Tiu, or the humility with which Norman Black conducted himself by giving all due praise back to his players, allow me to share, instead my joy.

Blue Eagle the King!

Liveblogging: Ateneo vs. De la Salle!

Given my almost dismissive attitude towards the basketball rivalry between Ateneo and La Salle, it should come as no surprise that I am devoting this entry towards live blogging their final encounter this UAAP season. As Winston Churchill, who was then quoted more famously by John F. Kennedy, once said, "I would rather be right than consistent." There's no denying the simple fact that for many of my friends, the Ateneo-La Salle game represents more than just a frenetically charged hoops encounter between two storied rivalries. It's an event of, if not quite biblical, then certainly epic proportions.

Besides, in lieu of braving it out with the rest of our hoops-crazy friends, we decided to watch the game, suitably fortified with chips and drinks, at St. John, the preschool that my sons go to.

2:16 pm.

Just went over Rafe Bartholomew's response to the good-natured ribbing he got over his New York Times article on the Ateneo-La Salle rivalry. Judging from the elegantly irreverent entries he posts on his blog, I believe him when he says that the New York Times editors had a lot to do with the blandness of the published work.

Ralph just came in to set up. He reports that the other members of our Ateneo barkada finally got tickets to the game. Just when Ralph starts warming up, Tina starts talking about work. Ralph quickly decides to activate Robo-Ralph, a barely functional operating system that he trots out during emergencies so he can continue to work on something more important. It's sort of like Parallels Desktop for the Mac, only funnier, because Robo-Ralph is unfailingly polite, and almost as bland as a feature article on Philippine sports worked over by the New York Times. Good times!

2:35 pm.

Still no Papot, or Ther. My sister Joey, her husband Mike, and my godson Miguel are here though. In totally unrelated news, I still can't find a picture of La Salle hotshot JV Casio, though there are millions of pictures for Ateneo shooter Chris Tiu. Anyone care to posit a theory for this?

Robo-Ralph's busy trying to look for "work" to do, while Ralph tries to figure out how to configure to couches in front of the TV so that people can watch, grab food and drinks, make snarky comments, and not cut in front of the TV. The logistics involved in the entire operation are mind-boggling. He might need diagrams soon. Joey's bugging Ralph about his arrangements. Fortunately, Robo-Ralph is still active, so her sarcasm is met with pleasantries. Deep inside, Ralph is dying. But in the interests of the ol' alma mater, he will make sacrifices. "To give, and not to count the cost..."

2:47 pm.

Papot and Ther are here! Now the whooping can start in earnest.

2:57 pm.

The endless dancing on Studio 23 was beginning to grate on all of us. Thank God, the pregame's on. There's some shooting game going on, and Mike begins the festivities by commenting on the performance of the Ateneo alumni shooters. "And that zero was brought to you by the Ateneo!"

Robo-Ralph's still doing "work".

3:07 pm.

Game time! Nobody can work an audience into a frenzy like my old professor, Sev Sarmenta. He's using his best stuff right now, and the crowd goes wild! Well, the St. John crowd goes wild, at least. Happily, Sev looks much the same, and the touch of silver seems to be working wll for him. Some men would kill for his full head of hair. I'm babbling, I know.

Still no game. The suspense is killing Ralph. Both of him.

3:23 pm.

Finally! Ateneo wins the tip. Not that it means anything, in the greater scheme of things. Turnover! On the next possession, La Salle scores. Damn! We have to find a solution to that trapping defense.

Thank God that Malabes remains the shooter who can't shoot. He's keeping Ateneo in the game. Francis Zamora and I had a conversation about him last night. He's trying to find ways to keep Malabes chained to the bench.

3:38 pm.

Long strips Maierhofer, but his pass is almost picked off before Escueta retrieves the deflection before being fouled going to the hoop. He he. I just wrote "Long strips Maierhofer". I'm suddenly afraid that a Google search might find me lumped in with pornographic or slash fiction sites.

3:43 pm.

Salamat with a picture perfect drop pass to a cutting Al-Husseini. I don't know what annoys me more about the previous sentence: that I have to concentrate while spelling Al-Husseini, or that I ruined a perfectly good alliteration by specifying that Salamat delivered an excellent drop pass.

3:48 pm.

And an Eric Salamat steal makes it 14-16. La Salle's on top, but a succession of heady plays from Salamat got Ateneo within two. I'm still resisting the urge to make the all-too-obvious pun. Still, Salamat!

4:08 pm.

I'm starting to worry, and not about the team. Ralph's about to burst a vein, and Chris Padilla is the oldest man in the room, so we might have a problem if Ateneo doesn't win. Every possession is a cardiac concern.

Malabes continues to provide hope...for Ateneo. May he never stop looking for his shot!

End of half, and La Salle is ahead, 29-26.

4:35 pm.

"Ateneo has never beaten La Salle four times in the same season." Not that Samsung Mobile is trying to put even more pressure on Ateneo. Facts are facts, after all. Here's another one. "Samsung has never sold more mobile phone units than Nokia." Two can play that game, Samsung.

For some reason, the "big" men of Ateneo, and I use the term here loosely, have played underwhelming basketball. If it weren't for guards Chris Tiu and Jai Reyes we would still be scoreless.

4:40 pm.

Arao finally gets the ball in the post. Two points! More of that, please!

Eric Salamat and Ford Arao go to the line two more times and nail all their free throws. La Salle is up, 40-39, but Ateneo's on a run. Isn't life grand when your players nail their free throws? Norman Black seems to agree, as he's showing more color now than at the start of the coverage. And no, I'm not going into color at this point. Suffice to say, Coach Black was a trifle pale when the game began.

5:01 pm.

Our "big" men have yet to assert themselves in this game, while our guards are killing themselves penetrating and dropping off to our hapless behemoths. This doesn't look good. I could live with a defeat, but Ralph and Chris are on the verge of collapse.

Ty Tang is killing us! He's nailed several shots to beat the shot clock already.

5:06 pm.

Salamat makes a gutsy drive, and one, to put Ateneo within six, 55-49. Hope springs eternal.

5:23 pm.

Jai Reyes for 3! It's now 60-62, La Salle ahead with 12 seconds. We have to foul.

5:24 pm.

We fouled the wrong guy. Rico Maierhofer, concluding a sterling performance at the wing, ices it with a free throw. La Salle wins 65-60. Chris Tiu winds up with more rebounds (8) than any of the Ateneo "big" men. Should we even dignify them with the term "big" after this disastrously Lilliputian effort? I'm exhausted! Congratulations to the Green Archers!


Photo Credits:

Picture of Chris Tiu comes courtesy of Aaron Vicencio's Photo Galleries.

Flotsam and Jetsam: Ateneo-La Salle, iTunes U

I came across Raphael Bartholomew's studiedly fair, but nicely bland article on the rivalry between Ateneo and La Salle through my good friend Jayvee Fernandez, blogger wunderkind extraordinaire. Funny how basketball seems to embody quite a lot of things to quite a lot of people in the tropical paradise that I call home. A shame about the, I suspect, many factors that Mr. Bartholomew had to take into consideration in writing his article, which really hamstrung the piece as a whole. Still, it provides me with an opportunity to plug Jayvee's site, A Bugged Life, where he comes up with decidedly more interesting geeky fare such as the entry entitled Undressing the Inspiration of Souls, Descendant of Seneca, That Which is Named Omnipotens, Son and Daughter of Leviathan. A mouthful, but only in the sense that it should be full in a Godiva sort of way.

It's been awhile since I visited iTunes U, but only because I had just finished Professor Hubert Dreyfus' wonderfully disputatious lecture series on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy in the University of California Berkeley section. They have quite a number of prestigious universities involved now, with one or two surprises from the lesser known institutes of higher learning. I'd recommend Al Gore's lecture "The Earth in the Balance" in the Stanford Environmental Science section. Good stuff. He should never have lost to Bush, but then, he talked like a Windows 98 NE version of the fabulous Tiger OS Gore we all know and love now.

Encomium: Kurt Vonnegut and David Halberstam

I have always associated the summer months with reading. When I was younger, I always looked forward to summer vacation not particularly because of the many trips that my family would take, either to the beach or to colder climes, but because of the opportunity to meet up with old friends and perhaps meeting some new ones; summer was when I would read. In the same way that extended trips outside the metropolis seemed to provide my parents a much needed respite from their work, burrowing inside a good book seemed to put everything in perspective for me: that this almost intolerable heat, this unbearably long car ride, is a necessary cross to bear on the way to a much nicer place to read in.

This summer has not been kind to writers. First, I said farewell to an old friend, Kurt Vonnegut, whose passing was marked by a wonderfully poignant entry from Jessica Zafra where, in her grief, she wisely lets his work speak for himself, a gently elegant compromise that was carried further by The A.V. Club when they listed down the "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will".

More recently, journalists of all stripes have been mourning the death of Pulitzer-prize winning reporter David Halberstam, who met an untimely end on April 23, 2007 in California. Such was his passion for life that he employed the same unbridled fire and discipline with which he penned his more "serious" works (such as his unyielding coverage of the Vietnam war) towards his supposedly "lighter" but disarmingly profound meditations on sports. A good introduction to Halberstam and his profound influence on American culture in general would be Clyde Haberman's moving obituary piece in The New York Times and the more sentimental, but well-documented encomium penned by Henry Abbott of TrueHoop.

Rest in peace, my friends. Thanks for all the summers.

Photo Credits:

Picture of David Halberstam comes courtesy of Wikipedia.

Picture of Kurt Vonnegut comes courtesy of Reno and its Discontents.

The I.C.C. Cricket World Cup, via "The Wanker!"

Ever since Sports Guy penned his entertaining, and ultimately misguided guide to the English Premiere League, I've been a Michael Davies fan due, oddly enough, to Simmons'preview of Chelsea:

Celebrity Fans: Michael Caine and fellow Page 2 columnist Michael Davies. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to find a different team than Davies so we could have heated e-mail exchanges and use insulting words like "wanker."

After hurriedly googling (which, according to Wikipedia's entry on google is an acceptable term to refer to "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet"), I discovered that Michael Davis is not only charmingly funny, in that particularly deprecating British sort of way, but he is remarkably astute about what makes distinctly European sports worth following. Check out the mercenary work he did for ESPN, for starters.

He has another column on the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports (which, if you've been paying attention, I've mentioned a second time without directly linking to) which helps demystify the wonderful world of cricket for us ignoramuses so thoroughly Americanized that we hardly know that the sport exists, much less, means so much to people worldwide. Enjoy the link, but not ESPN!

Picture of Michael Davies comes courtesy of (sigh) that which must be acknowledged, but not enjoyed. Damn my enslavement to proper citation, even to sports organizations dedicated to thoroughly homogenizing sports news content!

Wonder at the Australian Open

The Australian Open celebrates some kind of a miracle, as Serena Williams wins the Women's Singles Crown with a resounding 6-1, 6-2 victory over Maria Sharapova. Regardless of how even the casual tennis fan would regard either Ms. Williams or Ms. Sharapova, I just love it when the underdog wins. Ms. Williams has served notice: she's back!

Photo Credits:
Picture of Serena Williams comes courtesy of English People's Daily Online