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BY LUIS BUENAFLOR JR.
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Ateneo Black Eagles
A NEW TEAM came out of the dugouts during last Sunday’s UAAP basketball game at the Araneta Coliseum, the “Ateneo Black Eagles”.
It’s not really a new team per se but an “old dog” with a new color. According to news reports, the school administration asked the players and their supporters to wear black instead of the school colors which is blue as a sign of protest against the so called “extrajudicial killings.” It turned out that the same was asked by the school administration of their opponents that day, La Salle, to also wear black.
What happened that Sunday was the Araneta Coliseum was a sea of green as the La Salle team and their supporters all were in the school colors of green and only the Ateneo team and a few supporters wore black. Of course, to add salt to their wounds, La Salle trounced Ateneo. Poetic justice I guess.
Sports and politics are not a good mix, especially if sports are used to advance an ulterior motive such as this game which is to try to make it appear that there is a ground swell of people against President Rodrigo Duterte.
Well it didn’t work at the expense of the Ateneo basketball team. The La Salle team came with the purest of intentions which is to play and win the ball game which they achieved.
Unfortunately for Ateneo, they allowed themselves to be used for the self-serving whims of their school administrator Jett Villarin SJ (is he a priest, what priest would call himself Jett?).
According to a parent of one basketball player, this Jett Villarin had some sort of talk with them and told them that the government is killing poor people and compared it to martial law, hence they should wear black instead of the school colors. Which led some of the players to wonder, when the government sent 44 SAF troopers to be massacred in Mamasapano, why didn’t we also wear black?
Wait a minute, isn’t this the Jett Villarin who had as Guest of Honor in one Ateneo affair Imelda Marcos? Yes folks, the Imelda of the shoes and martial law fame. And isn’t Jett also the one who had wacky pictures with Madame Imelda after he accepted with open arms a generous donation from her? Hypocrisy, “you bet” said fellow writer and friend Lorraine Marie T. Badoy.
Using sports to forward an ulterior motive, particularly politics, always ends up in a disaster i.e. the 1970 Munich Olympics slaughter of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (the Olympics was a success despite that), and the most infamous of all, the 1939 Berlin Olympics wherein Adolf Hitler, yes the very one, used it to promote Aryan supremacy only to have his German white runners eating the dust of black Jesse Owens four or six gold medals in track and field.
Come to think of it, at the height of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Catholic Church or the Jesuits for that matter never lifted a finger to help the Jews while they were massacred, not even asking the faithful to wear black shirts.
I commend La Salle for being true to yourselves and not allowing the selfish whims of the oligarchs and hypocrites to use you for their self-serving motives. I was never a fan of La Salle as memories of that 1970 National PRISAA Finals in secondary football where we lost 2-1 to La Salle Greenhills somehow remain. But just by wearing your school colours and not black, I say Bravo!
Ateneo, really, what can you expect from the school that produced graduates like that nincompoop Noynoy Aquino, the epitome of incompetence Mar Roxas, and of course, Kris Aquino?/PN
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