Cavsclobber Warriors

I CAN’T wait to see the banner headlines in the sports pages of today’s newspaper. If the fourth game of the NBA title series had been played when I was the sports editor of The Freeman, I would have chosen Cavs Clobber Warriors!— yes, with an exclamation point to drive the gloom deeper into the hearts of the griefstricken Golden State nation.

I am not a Cleveland fan, I will forever be a Laker faithful, in good and in bad, mostly bad in the recent past, times. But I love teasing my smug GS-adoring friends whose sense of entitlement grew with each 48 minutes of playing time since Game 1 to Game 3.

The Warriors will in all probability still win the 2017 NBA title, the Cavs having accomplished nothing more than delaying the inevitable but that was a statement win by Lebron et al.

Put your brooms back in the closet, my grieving friends. Better still, sell them at 21% discount in commemoration of the gaping margin in Game 4. There is going to be no sweep.

About my favorite Lakers, we will be back next year or the year after next or the following years. I can and will wait.Patience is still a virtue even if sometimes it can make you (look like) a fool.

Levity aside, I’m saddened by the reported killing of the Bien Unido (Bohol) Mayor Gisela Boniel allegedly by her husband, Nino Rey, a board member of the same province. I know the Boniels because they used to be our next-door neighbors. (Haide Acuna’s mother, also a Boholana also lived in an adjacent house).

I played basketball with Nino’s father and uncles, one of whom would later play varsity ball in the old Cebu Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) for the Cebu Polytechnic School.

We lost contact when both our families moved out of Urgello. I would later learn that Nino’s parents, Cosme and Marina (not Maria as reported in the papers) went home to Bien Unido where he became the mayor in the 80s. Nino must have been very young then because I can’t recall having seen him in the neighborhood.

But having known his family, I find it hard to believe that he has grown to be the monster that he is now being pictured in news reports. If he did shoot his wife, as all eyewitness accounts tend to show, it must have been for a very strong reason. Like passion for example, the kind that blinds men to reason and turn them into beasts.

Newspaper reports, quoting the victim’s best friend, hint of a third party in the marital relationship but are hazy on the details. Jealousy is not exculpatory but it can paint a more or less accurate picture of the offender’s suspect frame of mind at the time of the commission of the wrongdoing. In any case, I hope justice is done in the killing, assuming that there was one since Gisela’s body has not yet been found.