This appears in the Monday January 2, 2012 edition of the Business Mirror.
A poignant
start to 2012
by rick olivares
The year 2011 was a very good one for
me. I rebounded from a couple of tough years were I felt like I was slugging it
out against Manny Pacquiao so I had to do a Joshua Clottey to survive. If there
has been anything that I have learned the past decade or so is that there is no
reason to leave the good ship of hope. So on to 2012 it is!
As much as most of us would like to
look forward, there is the matter of the victims of Typhoon Sendong who dropped
more than a load of coal on the Christmas stockings of the people of Mindanao.
Typhoon Sendong battered the Mindanao region and left the entire
nation as well as the international community shocked and grieving following
the grisly aftermath that included a terrible death toll.
But even as the country seems to constantly bear the brunt of
nature’s wrath, such disasters also bring out the best in the Filipino people. And
the football community has organized a charity football match between a mixed
squad of national players and club players and Internacional de Madrid, a Spanish league side, that will be played on
Jan. 7th at the Rizal Memorial Stadium at 4pm.
One might say that in the midst of tragedy, how can one think of
sports?
Not everyone can physically help in the relief efforts of Ground
Zero. Help and succor can come from a sense of normalcy and from fund-raisers.
In 2001, Major League Baseball gave a massive lift to New
Yorkers and Americans who were reeling from the terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A little over a decade after that infamous day that forever
changed the world, we as a nation we have a chance to stand as one with the
victims and let them know they are not alone through football.
To paraphrase the late Bill Shankly, “Football is much more than
a game. It is about life and death.”
The game itself transcends borders, languages, beliefs, and cultures. Whether
rightly or wrongly, it binds people. It’s a call for nationalism and Croatia
made its feelings known through a match that preceded the Yugoslavian Civil
War. In the African country of Ivory Coast, when Didier Drogba plays, the
warring factions of their long internal strife would stop shooting at one
another. In Libya, the defiance of the football national team and its
supporters galvanized the popular uprising against a long-time dictator.
And now, “the beautiful game,” as Brazilian football great Pele
once described football, will provide badly needed relief to the thousands and
thousands affected by Typhoon Sendong.
“Dili kamo nag-iisa” is more than a football match. The match’s
title is an amalgam of Visayan and Tagalog and is meant to show the strength of
unity and purpose that if one of us suffers, then we all stand together to care
for one another thereby being far stronger. “Dili kamo nag-iisa” is to date the
most meaningful football match in our nation's history because it is organized
to raise funds for the victims and let them know we care.
Right before kickoff, messages of hope will be read in Tagalog,
Visayan, and Spanish. And the entire crowd at the stadium will be enjoined to
sing the Gerry and the Pacemakers classic “You’ll Never Walk Alone” that they
remade from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musicale Carousel.
Almost as soon “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was released as a
single by Columbia EMI in July of 1963, the song was quickly adopted by
Liverpool Football Club as their anthem. The song has become so popular that
other football teams such as Celtic, Feyenoord, Twente, Cambuur, Borussia Dortmund,
Kaiserslautern, Borussia Monchengladbach, St. Pauli, Darmstadt 98 and Tokyo all
sing the anthem in their home matches.
It’s a stirring song of comfort, hope, and encouragement. And no
doubt, the song, and more importantly, the charity football match, will touch
the hearts of many to provide much needed support to the people of Mindanao.
And the match serves notice that our men’s football national
team does more than represent the country. They play for our people. And that
should serve as a fitting springboard when they begin their campaign in the AFC
Challenge Cup and the year-ending AFF Suzuki Cup.
- 0 -
The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) has been chosen as the main
beneficiary for the monies raised from this event and the LBC Foundation are
working with the organizers to maximize collecting and distributing donations.
No comments:
Post a Comment