Osmeña lost, but...
The Golden State Warrriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers play the third game of their best-of-seven National Basketball Association (NBA) championship series this morning. I would not be surprised if some surgeons have rescheduled elective operations and if lawyers have asked for a second call in the hearing on their cases. Why, even the late Ricardo Cardinal Vidal had to rearrange his prayer schedule so he could watch the games of the Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. He told me so himself.
I am amazed at how we take basketball seriously. It’s not even our basketball; it’s the NBA. But that has not prevented us from analyzing the moves of LeBron James as if we have played with him in Ramos for a long time or from talking so familiarly about Stephen Curry as if he was our neighbor in Duljo.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. What is wrong is when we carry our affection for a team to a point where we behave like certain fake news peddlers, a.k.a. bloggers, when we believe that our team or a player has been wronged.
Two friends nearly came to blows after an argument over whether JR Smith intentionally tripped Klay Thompson in the first game or not. Another pair had a similar experience after exchanging taunts over who was more hambugero: LeBron James or Draymond Green.
It’s easy for me to say this, I must admit, because the Los Angeles Lakers are not playing -- they did not even qualify for the playoffs -- but when we watch, let’s just enjoy the game and win or lose, life moves on. The value of the peso versus the dollar will still be horribly low and the Currys and the Jameses will be flying on chartered jets and we will still be riding in jeepneys. Just have fun, shall we?
An Osmeña ran for Congress and lost. Happily for Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s fans, she ran in the United States, not in Cebu, and under the Republican Party, not the BOPK.
Aloysius Rosell, a friend who used to be a campus editor in Cebu, told me yesterday that Cristina Osmeña O’Rourke got only 23% of the votes in yesterday’s primaries and her name will not be in the ballot in the run-off elections that will be held later as only the top two vote-getters qualify.
Osmeña ran in California’s 14th congressional district which includes parts of San Francisco and Daly City. A registered Democrat, Rosell said he voted for her even if she ran as a Republican because she was a fellow Cebuana. Too bad, many compatriots (there is a large Filipino community in the area) did not see it similarly.
Osmeña was identified in an old Inquirer article as the daughter of former senator Serge Osmeña. Her campaign website described her as an “immigrant and a political refugee.” It said that she immigrated to the U.S. at the age of six “when her family opposed, then fled, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.” She stayed in California until 1986 when Marcos was ousted by People Power.
She was educated in the University of California in Berkeley and “settled into a 20-year career in the financial industry at Investment banks and Investment management films.”
Rosell thinks Osmeña was just “feeling out” when she ran, suggesting that she will probably run again. Which goes to show that in the U.S. as in the Philippines, once a politician, always a politician.