BLEACHERS BREW EST. MAY 2006

Someone asked me how my blog and newspaper column came to be titled "Bleachers Brew". It's like this, it's an amalgam of sorts of two things: The bleachers area in the stadium/arena where I used to sit when I would watch baseball, football, and basketball games and Miles Davis' great jazz album Bitches Brew. That's how it got culled together. I originally planned on calling it "The View from the Big Chair" that is a nod to Tears For Fear's second album, Songs from the Big Chair. So there.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

On this hallowed (and muddied) football ground


This appears in my column WOOLYBACK that appears in interaksyon.com

On this hallowed (and muddied) ground
by rick olivares

When I arrived at the Villareal Stadium in Roxas City, Capiz, to catch the football competition of the 16th University Games, the first thing that came to my mind was: are these some prehistoric warriors doing battle out here?

Truthfully, it was players from the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons and the University of San Carlos slogging through the mud. Was the Battle of Somme like this? It was literally a battle of inches because the short passing game was almost non-existent. Powerfully kicked balls traveled for short distances before they were stopped not by defenders but by the mire. And the players, caked with mud (think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Predator movie where he was all covered in muck), moved forward and backward as if in a ghastly primordial tribal war.

No comments:

Post a Comment