SBP, NBA and broken-hearted Pinoys
PATO Gregorio made a rather strong state ment against the NBA after the league for bid Cleveland Cavaliers player Jordan Clarkson from playing in the Asian Games.
Pato, now with the Philippine Olympic Committee, said the “NBA broke the hearts of 100 million Filipinos.”
He added: “Your Philippine sports leaders worked ‘round the clock. So many sleepless nights. We were one clearance away.”
Such strong words. Problem is, two weeks before the NBA broke the hearts of 100 million Filipinos, Gregorio and the Samahang Basketball ng Pilipinas broke the hearts of 100 million Filipinos by saying it won’t send a team to the Asian Games.
I had hoped, of course, that Clarkson would get to play but I wasn’t surprised by the NBA’s denial. This isn’t football and Fifa, leagues like the NBA and the EuroLeague, whose clubs pays for the salaries of the super stars, have a bigger say on player availability for national team duty than their football counterparts. Just imagine the furor in football if, say, Manchester United prevents Pogba from playing for France in the qualifiers?
In basketball, the clubs and club owners get away with it and even if Fiba tried to pattern its World Cup qualification after Fifa’s international windows, it still wouldn’t get football-level cooperation from the clubs. For the Asian Games, the NBA even pointed out that its agreement with Fiba is only limited to its qualifiers, the World Cup and the continental games (Asian Cup), and the Asian Games isn’t part of it. convincing. In the story, it rained for forty days and nights until the highest mountain was covered with water. It has been raining for almost entirely a week day and night now. In some areas, the rain is not continuous but still the flood came up. I will not go as far as telling that we are acting badly today that’s why we have flood. I can only say that we are doing something wrong to cause the flood to rise so quick.
The thing is flood kills people and all living things. People have died already because of drowning. Thousands have been forced to live in school buildings and basketball courts because their houses were half-sank. Livestock that are left behind may also end up dead. A lot people have lost their means of living and so they need to start from scratch again. The difficulties we suffer because of flood may give us an idea what kind of “hell” did the people at the time of Noah suffer, if the story was true.
Like the message of the great flood in the bible, every flood that visits us remind us of change of attitude especially towards the environment. Climate change seems like a distant concern but if we could only realize that we are now feeling the effect of it. In Manila Bay, trucks have to dispatch 26 tons of garbage. This is similar in other parts of Metro Manila. We have an unreliable drainage system in the country. They were not built to last unlike in other countries where people can go down below because they are so big. The problem is we have a problematic drainage system and we keep dumping our garbage on the streets and on rivers.
We are lucky to live in the heights of the mountains because it keeps us away from the flood. But we have not taken care of our trees so there’s nothing to hold our soil anymore. We have created our own problem by giving away our trees in exchange of technologies. We did not maintain the balance because we have chosen this technologies we label as progress over nature.
Flood is another face of mass destruction. People have no power to go against it and things can only be done to prevent it. God promised that no such thing as the great flood will happen again by putting the rainbow on the sky but it does not mean that no flood will come again. The flood we have today is our creation, not His. So, take care of the environment. It is different when we know that we have trees keeping the soil intact no matter the pour of rain. The sleep would be sounder.