WHILE many parts of the world are slowly opening their once-shuttered stadiums to sports, the Philippines remains among several countries that have not figured out how to come to some sports normalcy in the middle of the pandemic.
The PBA, the country’s most popular sports league, has been holding meetings to solve the riddle. But try as it might, it continues to face a blank wall, unable to determine the best way to resume the season.
Will it be a bubble like the NBA’s? Will it be like Major League Baseball in the U.S. and European football with their strict testing protocols but with players allowed to go home?
Will it be held out of the country after Dubai offered to host the tournament?
Even as the PBA remains confounded by options that are expensive (the bubble), risky (home-venue-home), or totally absurd (Dubai), weeks go by with no real solution in sight. Maybe, when it finally figures things out, the year is over and so is its season.
While this is going on, the University of Santo Tomas is being treated like a punching bag following the discovery that its basketball team held a clandestine camp in Sorsogon, hometown of its coach Aldin Ayo, in the middle of restrictions disallowing any form of team activity.
In this light, unsavory tidbits have come out of that basketball camp. Among them, that the gym where the training was supposed to have taken place is owned by Ayo and that P3 million was allotted by UST for board, lodging, and the use of the gym. Inadequate and unhealthy food was also supposed to have been served, one player fell sick but denied medical care, and that some players wanted to leave but were stopped.
Blame it all on Covid-19. The virus has put the country to its knees, subdued sports, crippled the economy, and erased human contact. Worse, it has made us go for each other’s throats.
Teams are being placed under investigation, with coaches, team owners, and managers being threatened with fines and sanctions for alleged breach of health protocols — yet not a pip is heard from the public even as government officials continue to mismanage its response to the pandemic.
Thank goodness there’s Yuka Saso. The teenager is not only setting records for herself in golf, she’s providing a Covid-19-battered country some relief in the middle of much frustration.
She has gone where no Filipina golfer has before. In a span of two weeks, the soft-spoken, sweet-smiling Filipina-Japanese has won consecutive golf championships in the rich Japanese LPGA Tour. In that same period, she banked a total of over P22 million. Three weeks earlier, she was fifth in her Japanese professional debut, which was good for another P4 million. In all, in three tournaments in Japan, Yuka has pocketed P27 million.
Just last Sunday, in winning the Nitori Ladies Championship in Hokkaido, she netted P16.5 million. To put that in perspective, the highest-paid PBA player — for example, San Miguel Beer’s June Mar Fajardo, a six-time MVP awardee — brings home about P5 million a year. Yes, a year. Yuka earned three times that in four days.
As a Filipina athlete, her feat is so out there. No one so young has racked up such an incredible series of successes. You end up wondering why very few Filipinos, male or female, are investing in golf. The sport, as Yuka Saso has shown, can pay huge dividends for one with the perseverance and, of course, the talent to go all in.
We may really have here a golf star who can challenge the world’s best, maybe not now but surely in the years to come. After all, Yuka is just 19, a teenager, whose best years are yet to come.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not only Yuka who is forging a path for Filipinos in women’s golf. Three others — Bianca Pagdanganan, Dottie Ardina, Clariss Guce — are battling the best in the LPGA Tour, the world’s toughest women’s golf tour.
Now, if only their Filipino male counterpats can follow suit, that indeed will be more good news amid a pandemic.
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