RM Ph 08/2017

The Final Hours Of Jesse Robredo By Criselda Yabes

Introducing KC Del Rosario

Photographed by BJ Pascual

THE BIGGEST LOSER

Behind the Power Struggle Killing Philippine Sports

BY FRANCIS T. J. OCHOA

I S S U E 1 1 2 ———— C O V E R S T O R Y

CONTENTS August 2017

T H E Y KEEP TALKI N G ABO UT ME

There’s been a lot of chatter surrounding KC Del Rosario; the daughter of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei has garnered a reputation both on and offline, after all. But after Ramon De Veyra looks beyond the rumors, he discovers that KC’s plans go beyond the spotlight of Manila.

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“Manila’s very conservative.

People don’t really understand who I am but they will judge me.

They have no idea who I am.”

KC DEL ROSARIO

PHOTOGRAPHED BY BJ PASCUAL

I S S U E 1 1 2 ———— F E A T U R E S

CONTENTS August 2017

T H E WEEKEN D T H E Y LOST HIM

WHERE GIA NTS TR E A D

OUR LO S I N G S E A SON

Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo was rushing home to Naga for the long holiday weekend when his plane plunged into the sea. Five years after the crash no one saw coming, Criselda Yabes recounts the life and final hours of a beloved politician and father.

Eight decades in, the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex is still standing—albeit in dirt and decay, far from the great triumphs and defeats it has witnessed.

Krip Yuson revisits the hallowed grounds, and the memory of all the sports legends who have walked upon them.

Believe it or not, the Philippines was once a big player in sports, with Filipinos figuring in the best competitions all over the world. Today, however, is a different story as we see program after program flailing amidst politicking and bickering. Francis T.J. Ochoa investigates.

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“That is the Filipino athlete. Try following one closely. Try imagining what he or she has to overcome.

Try not to tear up when they finally get to slap a hand across their chest while the national anthem plays.”

FRANCIS T. J. OCHOA

GA M E OF THE GE NE R A L S Despite a bigger budget and an established fan base, Jerrold Tarog’s Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral refuses to become just another chaotic blockbuster. Emil Hofileña documents one day on the set of a film out to tell an intimate coming-of-age story.

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THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE PAGE COURTESY OF THE LOPEZ MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

I S S U E 1 1 2 ———— S E C T I O N S

CONTENTS August 2017

AGENDA

SPACE

The original Superbrat of tennis, John McEnroe continues to make headlines by acting out in ways that fans have come to dread and expect; we take a look at the best of recent Filipino cinema’s rising staple, the road movie; even in Manila’s snooty food scene, it seems everyone agrees that Josh Boutwood and The Test Kitchen are the real deal.

Once torn between being an artist and being a designer, metal-molding maverick Jinggoy Buensuceso unleashes objects and decor that defy the golden rule of form obeying function; the radical vision of Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass lives on in the fantastical Venini lamps and a show at the Met in New York.

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“Comfort is not an issue. It’s okay to design [an unusual] chair. You will always find someone who will appreciate it.”

JINGGOY BUENSUCESO

THE EYE

TH E S LA NT

We speed off the beaten path with adrenaline, torque, and racing threads laced with all the cool you need for a wild ride; Lucerne Group Managing Director Emerson Yao gives us a glimpse of his 30 years in the tough business of keeping time; French brand Azzaro’s third pillar men’s fragrance wants you to live life in the fast lane.

Mark Duane Angos examines a rising football academy’s from-the-ground-up approach to training for the beautiful game; CF Paderna unveils the online data scrub that ruined the Philippines’ top ranking in budget transparency in the region; Paolo Enrico Melendez ponders the sheer obstinacy that the aging amateur sportsman needs to stay active.

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY GERIC CRUZ

AUGUST 2017

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ON THE COVER Editor-in-Chief JONTY CRUZ Executive Editor JEROME GOMEZ Managing Editor JACS T. SAMPAYAN Features Editor PHILBERT DY Associate Editor PAOLO ENRICO MELENDEZ

Photographed by BJ Pascual Styled by Pam Quiñones Makeup by Anthea Bueno Hair by The Jing Monis Salon Makeup Assisted by Luisa Jardinero

Staff Writer EMIL HOFILEÑA Editorial Assistant PATRICIA CHONG

ART

KC Del Rosario wears a Georgina Sasha one-piece.

Art Director FRANCESCA GAMBOA Junior Designer MARK SANTIAGO Online Junior Art Director ANDREW PANOPIO

Contributing Writers MARK DUANE ANGOS, JACLYN CLEMENTE KOPPE, RAMON DE VEYRA, FRANCIS T. J. OCHOA, CF PADERNA, CRISELDA YABES, KRIP YUSON Contributing Photographers & Artists JOHANN BONA, FRANK CALLAGHAN, GERIC CRUZ, REGINE DAVID, MAGS OCAMPO, BJ PASCUAL, VINCENT QUILOP, PIA SAMSON, JILSON TIU Interns CARLA AGUIRRE DE CÁRCER, JAE ALDE, GELO DIONORA, CARMELA FORTUNA, SAM SIANGHIO

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ISSUE 112

THE EDITOR’S NOTE August 2017

IF I EVER had my own personal Jesus

Christ, it would be Tom Brady.

In all my years on this earth, no one has performed more miracles than the leader of the New England Patriots. The league’s premier quarterback has been dominating the sport for almost two decades now and like fine wine, has only gotten better with age. In the Brady (and Coach Bill Belichick) era of the National Football League, the Patriots have become a Dynasty, winning five Super Bowls, becoming the first team to go 16 and 0, and shattering records almost every year. Most veteran sports fans would consider it sacrilege but for me the NFL begins and ends with Brady. And if you think this is all hyperbole, go back to February 5 of this year when he performed his greatest miracle yet on the grandest stage of them all.

An hour into Super Bowl 51, to be a fan of Tom Brady and the Patriots was to be a fan of getting hit in the nuts a hundred times over. I love Tom Brady more than any other athlete but on that day, a half into the Super Bowl, it was beyond heartbreaking to be a fan. And at the start of the third quarter they were down by as much as 28-3

against the Atlanta Falcons. A margin no team had ever come back from, especially in the Super Bowl. Thousands of NFL fans cheered against the Patriots and the silence from Brady and the rest of New England was deafening. Social media went after Brady hard, rallying against him and throwing the broken-record accusation that he was a supporter of Donald Trump. The Super Bowl was mere weeks after Trump’s inauguration and a divided country went for the easiest target they could find on the most watched sporting event in all of America. For the millions of haters, Brady’s almost certain loss was a testament to the bad karma of (allegedly) being pro-Trump. This, for them, was Brady’s reckoning.

I had never felt that level of despair as a sports fan. Not when the Celtics lost to the Lakers in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals.

Not when LeBron James demolished my team back when he was with the Miami Heat.

It was this Super Bowl, this New England Patriots team that was chasing history, that was facing their most embarrassing loss in the era of Brady, where all seemed lost. With defeat so close, New England’s

JONT Y CRUZ Editor-in-Chief

chance at immortality slipping further and further away. I was ready to give up and just quit altogether. Damn was that a stupid ass decision.

When it was all said and done, Tom Brady led New England to the most epic comeback in Super Bowl history, rallying back from the impossible to emerge victorious 34-28, and winning his record-breaking fifth championship, the most for any starting quarterback. From well inside the jaws of defeat, Brady came back and cemented his legacy as the greatest of all time. It was nothing short of a resurrection.

Super Bowl 51 will forever be my Easter Sunday. The day when all my doubts and fears died and my faith in Brady was confirmed and vindicated.

Few have ever accomplished as much as Tom Brady has, and perhaps fewer ever will. When we live in a world that is just predisposed to disappointment, it is performances such as Brady’s, and his nearly two-decade run as New England Patriot quarterback that turns sports, something that’s nothing more than a glorified pastime, into a goddamn religion.

IMAGE COURTESY OF TOM PENNINGTON/STAFF VIA GET TY IMAGES

The Gospel According to Tom Brady

AUGUST 2017

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ISSUE 112

THE GUEST LIST August 2017

JACLYN CLEMENTE KOPPE is a retired party animal who writes about food and travel in Manila.

When she’s not out eating, she’s running her blogshop, OneBigBite. com. In this issue, she drops by Josh Boutwood’s The Test Kitchen.

FRANCIS T.J. OCHOA started his career with Manila Bulletin and Tempo before becoming a sportswriter at Today, where he spent eight years covering the PBA. These days, he’s the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s sports editor.

FRANK CALLAGHAN is a Manila-based photographer who shoots almost exclusively at night.

He received the Ateneo Art Award in 2015 for Dead Ends and holds a degree in Economics from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania.

JILSON TIU is a photo correspondent for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He also contributes to various magazines across Southeast Asia. In this issue, he meets chef Josh Boutwood and spends a day on the set of Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral.

BJ PASCUAL is one of Manila’s youngest and most in-demand photographers, with over 100 magazine covers and an immense body of work from local and international publications and advertising clients under his belt.

KRIP YUSON is a Palanca Hall-ofFamer and the author of nearly 30 books, from novels, fiction, poetry and essay collections, biographies, travel and children’s books, and coffee table books. He has gained the SEAWrite and Gawad Balagtas lifetime awards.

CRISELDA YABES has published five books, including Sarena’s Story: The Loss of a Kingdom.

She worked as correspondent for the international press in Manila, covering politics, coups, and other major events overseas.

VINCENT QUILOP is an art school dropout turned art director. He’s an illustrator highlyequipped with stock knowledge in the history of art. He has made posters for the short films and Cinemalaya finalists Asan Si Lolo Mê? and Mga Ligaw Na Paruparo.

August 2017

AGENDA

Edited by

JEROME GOMEZ

F O O D + E N T E RTA I N M E N T + C U LT U R E + T R AV E L

to -up the w , o foll raphy ims r a a g e 5-y tobio ennis 1 s i t u s In h f irst a rat of ound b w s N hi inal old YA PA AM orig ehash S .

ST AC to r YJ WO

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This is then the main problem of this followup to his first autobiography: it feels needless.

AGENDA BOOKS

PEAK PERFORMANCE

Big Mac promoting a tour stop in Toronto in 1988.

Previous page: McEnroe serves against Boris Becker in the 1987 Davis Cup Final.

THE OTHER WEEK, I got into an argument

with a friend on Facebook. I had shared a news article about how the young Australian Bernard Tomic, the men’s professional tennis tour’s reigning enfant terrible, admitted he felt “bored” during his first round loss to Mischa Zverev at this year’s Wimbledon Championships. I, along with countless followers of the sport, found this and other similar incidences disrespectful of the game.

“But sports is a meritocracy,” my friend contended, adding that the things one does off the court—however deplorable— shouldn’t take away from one’s being a champion on it. But, truthfully, it does. And professional tennis in particular is littered with bad boys and girls whose theatrics take precedence over their match records.

Take the original angry man on court, John McEnroe, a former world number one who is best known not for his unbeaten record of tournament wins, but for screaming “You cannot be serious!” at an umpire when he was an upstart. He is so attached to that line that he wrote a global bestseller in 2002 and used that as a title.

As if to prove this point, McEnroe is back in public conversation of late because of some unfortunate choice of words in an interview. While going through the media rounds for his new book, But Seriously (Hachette Book Group, June 2017), the 58-year-old got into trouble by saying on NPR that women’s champion Serena Williams would rank in the 700s if she 16 A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

were to play in the men’s tour. This little comment, expectedly, got a lot of flak, with scores around the world calling him out for being misogynistic, politically-incorrect, and gloriously backward.

I’m not sure if this is an important conversation to have; a lot would argue that the Superbrat (The Daily Mail moniker that stuck to him like glue), like many other brash and unrefined public figures, was merely a victim of media itching to appeal to an always-ready-to-be-outraged audience. What I am certain of is that the American has been called much worse over his decades on tour and even off of it. From being a young wannabe who would resort to acting out, cursing, and threatening when calls did not go his way to being an older wannabe who had delusions of his own fame, thinking he can successfully host shows (The Chair, anyone?) or lead a rock band— he’s heard it all.

He shows some awareness of his own flaws in But Seriously, which opens with his memories of his 1984 French Open final against nemesis Ivan Lendl. It was a match that he should have won by all accounts, but didn’t. And he’s carried that chip on his shoulder since—so much so that he somehow desperately envisioned that a match against Lendl on the seniors tour, in front of a sparse crowd in an off-Roland Garros court many years later would help bring closure. He injects a few doses of self-deprecation here and there, questioning his capabilities and

somewhat owning up to the abrasiveness of his persona. But it is wrapped around more of the same mixed bag of humblebragging, a load of name-dropping, and ugly ‘murica conviction that only his perspective matters.

This is then the main problem of this follow-up to his first autobiography: it feels needless. As gratuitous as knocking down a table of refreshments, posturizing menacingly at a lineswoman, and calling an umpire a jerk just because you lost a point. There is no new real insight. It merely plays like another platform for more ego-massaging affectations.

I reasoned out with my friend online that, sure, you can reduce sports to merely winning and losing. But we have to agree to disagree on this personal point: Winning trophies shouldn’t be an excuse to act any way you like, and say anything you want without backlash. Especially when champions with a lot more trophies than you have managed to do so without constantly prancing around like an entitled asshole.

A couple of weeks ago, McEnroe was a guest at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the Serena verbal “faux pas” was brought up.

The Superbrat stammered his way through an explanation while a slightly frustrated Colbert tried to give him an out that he refused to take. At some point he gave up trying to explain himself and pleaded with the audience to just read the damn book.

I’m not sure that would get you anywhere either to be honest. But seriously.

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AGENDA FILM

PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

TWO FUNERALS

GIL PORTES, 2010

THE TRIP: From Tuguegarao to Sorsogon THE PLOT: A funeral parlor mixup causes two bodies to end up with the wrong families. One of the families (led by a fierce Tessie Tomas) travels all the way to Matnog, Sorsogon to retrieve the body of their daughter.

As the absurd comedy Patay Na Si Hesus opens this month, Rogue reflects on what’s becoming a staple of recent Filipino cinema— the road film—and the lessons we took from seven of them

VALUABLE LESSON: Tessie Tomas yelling at people is still one of the great pleasures in life.

WORDS BY PHILBERT DY ILLUSTRATION BY PIA SAMSON

PATAY NA SI HESUS VICTOR VILLANUEVA, 2016

PAUWI NA

THE TRIP: Cebu to Dumaguete

PAOLO VILLALUNA, 2015

THE PLOT: A family of misfits (led by matriarch Jaclyn Jose) drives to Dumaguete in a minicab to attend the funeral of the father that left them.

THE TRIP: Metro Manila to an unnamed province.

It looked like they were heading North, though.

THE PLOT: A poor family, fed up with struggling with life in Metro Manila, tries to make their way back to their hometown on a pedicab.

VALUABLE LESSON: Ultimately, your dog is more important than the father that left you. Also: Bisaya humor is a lot more sophisticated than the government lets on.

VALUABLE LESSON: Films set in abject poverty can have a sense of humor, too.

RELAKS, IT’S JUST PAG-IBIG ANTOINETTE JADAONE AND IRENE VILLAMOR, 2014 THE TRIP: Manila to a beach in Leyte THE PLOT: A teenage girl (Sofia Andres) drags along a guy she barely knows (Iñigo Pascual) on a trip to Leyte to find two lovers that she learned of through a love letter that she once found on a beach.

VALUABLE LESSON: It’s fun to be young and in love, guys.

SAKALING HINDI MAKARATING ICE IDANAN, 2016

THE TRIP: All over.

Zamboanga, Marinduque, Ilocos, Siquijor, and Batanes THE PLOT: A young woman (Alessandra de Rossi), while trying to get over a breakup, travels all over the Philippines trying to find the sender of a series of romantic postcards that showed up at her apartment.

VALUABLE LESSON: I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.

TEORIYA

ZURICH CHAN, 2011 THE TRIP: All over the Zamboanga peninsula THE PLOT: A man (Alfred Vargas) tries to get to know his estranged, recently deceased father by driving to meet his family and friends.

VALUABLE LESSON: Alfred Vargas’ chest muscles are distractingly large.

AUGUST 2017

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AGENDA FILM

POSTER BOY Before big movie stars lure you to their latest movie outings, sought-after poster designer Justin Besana whips up a finely crafted invite WORDS BY EMIL HOFILEÑA PORTRAIT BY JOHANN BONA

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UNLIKE OTHER ARTISTS, Justin Besana

doesn’t sign his works and often sees his pieces displayed alongside others’. Not that Besana feels any bitterness or resentment— as a movie poster artist for almost six years, he is nothing if not humble and quietly diligent, simply happy that he gets to do this sort of work.

It’s a job Besana didn’t see coming.

He discovered his skill while he was an advertising coordinator for Star Cinema, and he’s been in the film poster game ever since— holding the distinction of being the only artist tasked with creating posters for the ABS-CBN Film Restoration Project.

Revisiting the classics of Filipino cinema has allowed Besana to create arguably his best and most high-profile work to date, but he knows that he has to remain just as involved with the industry if he wants to advance his craft. Besana makes time to gain as much experience as he can—taking on projects from movie outfits Quantum Films, Regal Films, and Reality Entertainment, among others, and constantly honing his skills in graphic design, illustration, and photography.

Still, even with so much at his disposal, Besana acknowledges that his mission stays the same from project to project. “Ang poster should have the soul of the movie,” he says.

“So kailangan magke-kuwento ka and at the same time mabenta mo ‘yung pelikula.”

It’s a delicate balancing act that grants Besana a generous amount of creative freedom. While he’s not always able to watch the complete film before starting on a poster, information in the form of still pictures, a movie script, and discussions with the filmmaker is enough to get him started and inspired. “Mostly script talaga ‘yung binabasa ko,” Besana explains. “Mas enjoy ko ‘yung script kasi madetalye. Meron doon na hindi mo napapansin sa mismong final edit [ng pelikula].”

And so, while the easy approach would involve creating a collage of the featured actors’ heads via Photoshop, Besana prefers to set the mood through other visual touches.

For instance, instead of featuring Pokwang and Bret Jackson on the poster of Jason Paul Laxamana’s Mercury Is Mine, the story of a cook about to give up her eatery in rural Pampanga, the artist zeroed in on the film’s

THE SALESMAN

More than just a job, Besana says, it has become his responsibility to draw interest to local movies through his poster designs. From top left: The artist’s works for the restored Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, and Erik Matti’s suspense-horror Seklusyon. Opposite: The posters for Mercury is Mine and Honor Thy Father ditch the traditional collage of actors’ heads.

quirky dark comedy, resulting in an overhead illustration of a fried frog jabbed with a fork.

Restored films, on the other hand, are less open to wild interpretation, given the limited amount of reference material and Besana’s goal to attract both new audiences and longtime fans. The results have proven to be successful, with him finding ways to manipulate old stills to reflect modern aesthetics—from the glossy key art for Olivia Lamasan’s Sana Maulit Muli, to the subtly menacing poster for Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (one of the artist’s personal favorites).

Even if Besana admits that he gets more out of working on restored classics and independent films, he also sees the importance of his role in mainstream projects. He remembers the positive reception he received for his poster of Cathy GarciaMolina’s Unofficially Yours, and how it helped him understand the deeper value of his work.

“I’m not just doing a job,” he reflects. “Naging responsibility din siya sa industry.” It’s a surprising testimony from someone who works so far behind the scenes—occasionally

While a collage of actors’ faces is the easy approach, Besana sets the mood through other visual touches overworked due to the dearth of artists in the business, and occasionally dissatisfied with the lack of training offered to them. But like the stars in the posters he makes, Besana is compelled to move others with his art. “‘Pag nakita [ng mga tao] ‘yung poster sa mall, mai-inspire sila to do better at work at matapos agad, kasi gusto [nilang] manood ng pelikula after work,” Besana states. “You do it for the people, the audience.”

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AGENDA FOOD

MARKING HIS TERRITORY When Josh Boutwood left icy Sweden for warmer climes, he had no idea he was to become quite the big deal in Manila’s snooty food scene.

Rogue meets the chef, and dines in the private kitchen on everyone’s to-book list WORDS BY JACLYN CLEMENTE KOPPE PHOTOS BY JILSON TIU

THIS IS AN origin story.

After all, much has been said about 30-year-old Josh Boutwood’s rise to culinary recognition. His career is well documented, his work largely appreciated in Manila’s trendy food scene. He went the slow-but-sure route.

He did not have a familiar-sounding name to back him up. And while he possesses the boyish good looks to accompany his charming English accent, he chose not to capitalize on them.

Years before we are seated in the dimly lit dining room of The Test Kitchen—the San Antonio Village, Makati eatery where Boutwood and his small army of cooks prepare his signature spin on “sophisticated dining”—young Joshua Boutwood was far away from nosy, judgmental Manila, slowly and deliberately becoming the man we now know.

PEPITA’S KITCHEN

Private Can’t find a slot at Boutwood’s Test Kitchen? Here’s a short list of bespoke dining experiences for you, me, and everyone we know

BY DEDET DE LA FUENTE

It started as a stuffed lechon de leche made-to-order business but with de la Fuente’s knack for entertaining, the venture expanded into a multi-course, fine-dining experience.

Over the years, she has created different theme dinners, the latest of which is the Richman’s Degustation—which includes a foie gras and truffle rice stuffed lechon—which she served to the visiting TV personality Adam Richman. (02) 425-4605

A TÂBLE

BY DULCE MAGAT-GIBB

Between working with Glenda Barretto in Via Mare and hosting parties with her hotelier husband, Magat-Gibb has taken party hosting to a new plane. She has always been used to hosting dinners for friends, unmindful of cost. And she still knows how to throw a lavish feast, her dining room now favored

by Manila’s genteel set for her elegant table settings and refined food choices.

(0917) 862-1800; DULCEMAGATGIBB@YAHOO.COM

PRIVATUS PRIVATE

BY AJ REYES

This is what happens when chefs go, well, rogue. After two years of catering gigs, Reyes and his team decided to set up their HQ on the top floor of a warehouse. The location allows them to keep the overhead low, and gives them freedom to innovate. Clients can choose from five, seven, or 10-course meals.

Privatus also does collaborations and theme dinners; a recent one celebrated the latest season of Game of Thrones. (0998) 590-0996

“My mum is English and my dad is Filipino,” he says. His mother, Charlotte Anne Boutwood, grew up in the quiet town of Cranfield, Bedfordshire, just north of London. In this small community, says the chef, his maternal grandfather is the largest exporter of potatoes. Meanwhile, his mum is in the business of restaurant and hotel start-ups. “She would build them, get them up and running, then sell them,” Boutwood explains. “Much like real estate, really. But with restaurants and hotels.”

His father, Rufo Sacapaño, is from Boracay, born and bred, and the avid sabongero still lives a quiet life there. He owns a substantial patch of land right smack in the middle of all the action. “From that lake in the back all the way to that stretch where (iconic Boracay beachfront bar) BomBom is,” Boutwood explains, “that’s his land.” His parents were the first owners of Fridays, the pioneering high-end resort on the island.

And this is the life Boutwood and his brother Jamie grew accustomed to, shuttling between the UK and Boracay, until their parents decided that the brothers should be settling in Europe with their mother where they could receive quality education.

Kitchen training started early for Boutwood, who learned the ropes from his mother’s restaurant operations. In Europe, it was not uncommon for teenagers as young as 15 to be working in the hospitality industry. In fact, when he tried out for his first job in London and passed, they had to wait until he turned 16 so they could process his working papers.

Determined, Boutwood made the commute from Bedfordshire to London, learning what he could. When his mother decided to get him some formal training in culinary school, he lasted all of two months.

Watching the chef as he plates the second dish of cured pork reclining over an organized jumble of fried cauliflower, popcorn, and heirloom grains, it is easy to understand how the young Boutwood grew restless inside a classroom. “My mom started wondering why I was spending more time in her restaurant’s kitchen than at class,” he offers as he uses tweezers to place wood sorrel over another well-executed dish.

“Eventually, I just stopped going to school. It wasn’t for me.”

During one of his trips to Boracay, he met the blue-eyed Swede Nilla Ström. They made a connection and promised to keep in touch once back in Europe. Soon, love blossomed.

They had their daughter, Malaya, in Sweden, and Boutwood had to work through some of the coldest winters ever recorded in their area.

At the Test Kitchen, while he finishes grilling and plating some prime Angus striploin—with aged celeriac, mushrooms, beef tendon chicharon, and brown butter emulsion—he pauses as if frozen by the memory of that icy cold. “Is that why you moved to Boracay?” we ask. “Yes! Actually, it is,” he replies.

DELICATE BALANCE

Boutwood amongst his kitchen’s aged meat offerings. Inset: toasted brioche topped with uni, dill, seaweed, and powdered shrimp heads. Opposite: the chef’s hands about to add a paper-thin slice of cured pork belly on a bed of fried cauliflower, wood sorrel popcorn, and Brie cream.

“My mom started wondering why I was spending more time in her restaurant’s kitchen than at class. Eventually I just stopped going to school.”

He leaves us to our steaks, either with the understanding that a dish this good deserves quiet contemplation, or to simply escape the awkwardness of having to listen to our moans as we savor the meat.

He is not the type to bask in the glory of his accomplishments. Not anymore, anyway.

From signing the lease for his now defunct restaurant Alchemy in Boracay’s Station 2 back in 2010 up to this point where he is on the verge of opening a casual eatery in trendy Poblacion, Makati, he is decidedly focused on his career. While he supports his growing family—his son Phoenix just turned one— with a cushy corporate job as executive chef of The Bistro Group, the suits keep him happy and content with The Test Kitchen where they

THE TEST KICTHEN IS AT 9780 KAMAGONG STREET, SAN ANTONIO VILLAGE, MAKATI CITY; (0917) 304-1570

pretty much let him do whatever he pleases.

It’s quite the gracious display of trust and appreciation, something normally reserved for a seasoned veteran.

But Boutwood has paid his dues and done his time. And in Manila where someone is always rolling his eyes somewhere, it seems that everyone is in agreement that the quiet, determined young chef is the real deal.

When boys his age were busy getting into trouble, Boutwood figured out what his talent was, then matched it with a determination to do his best. Sitting in his dining room, watching him work, and then enjoying his creation, you recognize it immediately. And just like any journey destined for greatness, it is fascinating to watch.

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BETWEEN OCEANS In his latest show opening at Silverlens Gallery this month, fine art photographer Frank Callaghan follows the rhythm of light INTERVIEW BY JEROME GOMEZ

FRANK CALLAGHAN HAS always assumed the role of a wanderer. Finding himself on the banks of the Pasig river and letting the vista dictate his next step, exploring the alleyways and dead ends of London and finding in them not just the myriad beauty of light hitting structure but also a certain truth about being a stranger in a strange land: one’s freedoms can only go so far.

In Search/Light, his first show after winning an Ateneo Art Award recognition in 2015, the fine art photographer finds himself on more familiar territory, the island of Balesin. And just like in the past, he plays the willing spectator. “I shoot things that happen to be there,” he says, “in locations I happen to be in.” But in this email interview, Callaghan lets us in on the process before he presses the shutter.

ROGUE: You’ve touched on the horizon, the ocean, and the moon in previous shows.

What makes you go back to a subject and decide to explore some more?

FRANK CALLAGHAN: I never start working with a plan in mind. The content of the image is secondary to the process of making. This series began when I was standing on a dark shore on Balesin Island. There was no moon in the sky and the sea was calm and quiet.

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Then, a strong beam of light appeared, as if from nowhere. It shot out toward the horizon, piercing the darkness, then swept across the surface of the sea. I quickly surmised that it was a security searchlight, controlled by someone in a watch tower, hidden from view. After a short while, it switched off and the night returned to inky darkness. The event left a strong impression, and this impression was the starting point of the series.

The obvious subject of Search/Light, this new show, is the sea at night, but is it just a representation of something else you wanted to study or explore, a question you want to pursue?

The sea at night and the searchlight provided the starting point, but the real subject of the work is what happens after that. It is about creating the rules of the series, exploring the boundaries of those rules, then pushing them to breaking point. I tried to hold the composition of the sea, sky, horizon, and beam of light constant. I had to learn the rhythm and behavior of the lights. They were turned on every 30 minutes, for around 30 seconds. I had to learn where the light was—15 or so watch towers are spread around the island. The rhythm of darkness

“I never start working with a plan in mind. The content of the image is secondary to the process of making.”

THE MAN AND THE SEA

All shot in Balesin, the pictures from the new show are the result of Callaghan being hyper-aware of his surroundings and its rhythms. “The shooting happened all at once, over five nights,” he says.

From left: “Search/light 01” and “Search/light 11”

and light was important. In the darkness, I moved and positioned myself and planned what to do when the light came. I pushed the composition in different directions, and allowed elements to come in and drift out. By focusing on the process, and then repeating, I am allowing things to happen by themselves. I find this produces work more interesting than anything I could have planned in advance.

You usually spend time with a certain subject before you decide that this is something you want to focus on.

I shoot things that happen to be there, in locations I happen to be in. It is about waiting for the time to be right to produce work. I don’t really fully understand how a subject becomes what I am shooting, other than that something resonates and I am drawn to it.

Small, incremental decisions and tendencies add up to the whole.

Compared to your very serene pictures of water in the past, or even with your portraits of shanties, there is a sort of palpable tension in these new images. Is this an accurate observation?

I like to keep the interpretation of the meaning of the images open. I find it

FRANK CALLAGHAN’S “SEARCH/LIGHT” RUNS FROM AUGUST 17 TO SEPTEMBER 16, 2017 AT SILVERLENS GALLERIES, LAPANDAY CENTER, 2263 DON CHINO ROCES AVENUE EXTENSION, MAKATI; 816-0044

interesting that you experience a strong tension in the work. What I can tell you is that the pace of the work was influenced by a more pressured pace that spilled over from my other life, the other work I do. [He designs and builds businesses, like Narra Hill in Tagaytay.]

This could be the source of the tension.

Who do you talk to when it comes to your pictures? Who do you listen to the most?

My wife Michelle gets the brunt of it.

Thankfully, she is a good listener and patient with me when my ideas are still unformed. I talk with my gallerists (Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo) from Silverlens, who have been there since the early days of my practice. They bring a more particular and seasoned perspective to the discussion.

Gary Pastrana is curating the show. I showed him the work early on and we had some good conversations. His careful, deliberate way of thinking of and speaking about work is very helpful. I also just participated in a portfolio review held at Pioneer Studios called Transatlantica by Photoespaña. It provided a venue for photographic practitioners, visual artists, and curators to come together and talk about their work. Opportunities like this surface once in a while, and are a good context in which to receive solid feedback.

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JEROME GOMEZ

SPACE DESIGN + INTERIORS + ARCHITECTURE + TECHNOLOGY

TWIN PEAKS The black-loving, metal-molding Jinggoy Buensuceso used to be torn between being an artist or owning the designer hat. Until he realized he would all the more flourish by taking on both pursuits WORDS BY JEROME GOMEZ PHOTOS BY GERIC CRUZ

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IN 2012, a handful of young Filipino

designers who had lived and worked abroad put together a group that shook up what was then a furniture design industry not exactly in its best form, business-wise. It was the perfect time to be daring and experiment, and with the craftsmen and factories provided by a number of manufacturing companies from Cebu, the kids let their imaginations run free. The group was called Epoch Collaboration, which counted Daniel Latorre Cruz, Stanley Ruiz, Wataru Kusama, and Jinggoy Buensuceso among them, today recognizable names individually in the field of design.

While Latorre Cruz, Ruiz, and Kusama all possess a Zen-like aesthetic in their pieces, Buensuceso, who had previously worked in New York and Singapore, even then was the rebellious one, choosing to work with metal despite its difficult nature, and never minding the oft-echoed rule that form should always follow function.

One only needs to look at one of his first creations for the Epoch project—the Doodle chair—to see what he means. “I met this child, a savant kid, who kept on drawing on walls and rooms,” Buensuceso tells me in his home in Tagaytay. “At that time I was trying to get inspiration for a chair because we needed to finish one.” Using childlike random strokes and whirls, the designer and artist mocked up a wire that would form a chair, welding it himself, hammering away to see where his wild idea would take him. People were at first skeptical about the result. Is it functional?

Can you sit on it? “For me our body adjusts when we sit on something,” he says. “Comfort is not an issue. It only becomes an issue if we scrutinize it, but imagine you’re running in a forest and you get tired. You see a log, you

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sit on it, and you adjust. Your body needs to adjust to the shape. It’s okay to design [an unusual] chair. You will always find someone who will appreciate it.” The Doodle chair looks more like an art piece, akin to Picasso’s air drawings, but, yes, one can comfortably sit on it. What’s more, “You can lift it with one finger,” its maker says confidently, “and it can carry a 300-pound man.”

The Doodle did find an appreciative audience. Four containers of it were sent out from the factory in Cebu, and while the financial reward wasn’t much to crow about, the designer with the strong artistic bent kept following the whims of his imagination. These days, his bold metal sculptures grace commercial establishments abroad and locally, like the gorgeous undulating wooden wall sculpture at the Cucina of the Marco Polo Hotel in Ortigas, the waves of leaf-shaped metal screens that embrace the façade of the Deco Central in Clark, Pampanga, and the modern dragon sculpture made of electroplated metal that snakes around a tall pillar at the Green Sun Building in Chino Roces Avenue Extension. In his beautiful home cum studio complex in Tagaytay, where his tall and lithe Great Danes roam, a sculptural piece from his Topography series takes the place of a painting by the dining area. In one corner, a Dau tree buttress of his design takes the place of a sofa (Is it comfortable to sit on? Possibly), under a “hanging lamp” of knotted thick ropes, a soft sculpture almost. Basket-like in shape, the suspended fixture doesn’t hold a bulb in its center, and serves more as a device to spread not light but interesting shadows across the room as soon as the light attached to the ceiling is turned on. It is functional art, yes, but the function is not spelled out.

“Comfort is not an issue.

It’s okay to design [an unusual] chair. You will always find someone who will appreciate it.”

HARD AND SOFT

Works in progress found in Buensuceso’s workshop at the back of his Tagaytay home: detail of the molten aluminum clock, and detail of a lamp, inspired by Japanese baskets, made of knotted soft wires.

The artist-designer dichotomy is something Buensuceso struggled with in the beginning. “Now I realize maybe I’m one of the new breed of designers who can do both, blurring the line between art and design.”

Perhaps it is this quality of being neither this nor that which continues to distinguish his works (although he recently put up the label Beta Design Co. where he “turns art into functional pieces,” while keeping his brutalist furniture available at New Manila Living).

In September last year, Wallpaper Magazine Thailand named him Outstanding Designer of 2016, and this September at the prestigious design exhibition Maison et Objet Paris, he is being recognized as among the Rising Asian Talents—a distinction previously awarded to Liliana Manahan and Buensuceso’s Epoch colleague Stanley Ruiz. Buensuceso was nominated for the award the same year as the two but he’s guessing his works didn’t quite meet the jury’s expectations, his pieces leaning more toward art than furniture.

But things have shifted, and Buensuceso is showcasing a select few of his new works at a 9 square meter space in this month’s Paris including his moth chair (named thus because of the shape it has taken) and his molten aluminum clocks inspired by one of Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings, “The Persistence of Memory.”

“It’s a collaboration with nature,” says the artist-designer of the latter, holding the piece in his workshop, explaining how he melts the metal and lets it take shape by itself, letting “gravity and force set the piece.” Is it art or just décor masquerading as timepiece? Is it just another functional object? Clearly, it isn’t all that simple. When it comes to Buensuceso’s works, nothing ever is.

METAL OF VALOR

Buensuceso photographed with his molten aluminum pieces that he has also turned into tabletops.

“It’s a collaboration with nature,” he says.

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GLASS ACT The radical vision of Ettore Sottsass is on show up to October at the Met in New York, and in the fantastical lamps he created for Venini WORDS BY JEROME GOMEZ

THE ITALIAN BRAND

Venini, with its 95 years of history in luxury glass making, has always prided itself by eschewing the tried and traditional, and championing the avant garde. When its original owners went their separate ways in the mid-1920s, half of the original duo, Paolo Venini went on ahead and signed the era’s most important architects and designers, among them Tomaso Buzzi, Carlo Scarpa, and many years later, Gio Ponti and Fulvio Bianconi. This early resolve to work only with the forward-thinkers continued on for decades. Hence, Venini’s collaboration with the great Ettore Sottsass, the Italian architect and designer, a known radical when it comes to design, who is currently having a moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is hosting an ongoing exhibition of his works, encompassing the wide range of his creations—from glasswork to photography, architectural drawings to ceramics—in a career that spans six decades (Sottsass died in 2007).

Sottsass created vases, table lamps, and chandeliers for Venini (carried locally by Furnitalia), and in 1993 and 1994, the glassware titan issued a series of the architect’s lamps created with the company’s master glass-makers. Looking like space-age characters from a galaxy far away, they emanate, more than light, a kind of humor and fantasy, a world far from the ordinary. Which veritably echoes a Sottsass quote about working with glass and the creation of, beyond tangible objects, feelings: “To imagine things in glass, one feels a very special emotion; one imagines light and colors that one cannot touch, and then—all of a sudden, the light and the colors are there and yet they still cannot be touched, they don’t have weight, they don’t have temperature, they continue to live in our fantasies.”

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Lost In Space

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DARPANAH Comes in milk white, sapphire and pink glass

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BHUSANAM Created in ‘94, made of glass and bluepainted metal

LIGHTS FANTASTIC

The Ratrih (opposite) and the Kiritam (above) are just some of the light fixtures Sottsass created for Venini, the 95-year old Italian glass-making company.

VENINI CAN BE FOUND AT FURNITALIA, CRESCENT PARK WEST, 30TH STREET COR RIZAL DRIVE, BONIFACIO GLOBAL CITY, TAGUIG; 819-1887.

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Promotions and relevant items, direct from our partners

As Lovely as a Tree For Jo Malone, the forest is a place of enchantment, fantasy, and a source of inspiration for its new fragrances

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where people normally reside and travel, the forest is often depicted in literature as the site of the marvelous, strange, and unknown—think magical fairies, centuries-old trees, and curious characters. According to folklore, Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men lived in Major Oak, a large tree found in Sherwood Forest, a nature reserve in Nottinghamshire, England.

The narratives and enchantments within this forest of legends inspire the newest fragrances of Jo Malone: English Oak & Hazelnut and English Oak & Redcurrant.

Master perfumer Yann Vasnier developed the scents with Roaster Oak Absolute as their base note. It’s a unique ingredient that injects sweetness to a fragrance.

The process of creating the Roasted Oak Absolute

is exclusive to Jo Malone London for five years.

“It was really exciting to see the place where the Roasted Oak Absolute was created,” says Jo Malone London Global Head of Fragrance Celine Roux. “All you needed was a gust of wind to smell the piles of freshly cut logs all around you.”

Available locally in September, the English Oak & Hazelnut makes use of green hazelnut and moss notes to capture a more refreshing, aromatic, and natural forest scent. The English Oak & Redcurrant is warmer, taking notes from rose, amber, and white musk. Keen on elevating the fragrance of the English woodland, Roux recommends layering these scents with other notes. Consider combining English Oak & Hazelnut with Basil & Neroli, the English Oak & Redcurrant with Blackberry & Bay, or even the two oak-based scents together. —GELO DIONORA Available at Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati; jomalone.com

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J.W. ANDERSON SWEATER, FOX RACING V2 HELMET AND BOMBER GLOVES

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THE EYE WATCHES

HIGH TIME

HAVANA NIGHTS

As Lucerne celebrates 30 years of bringing in luxury watches to the Philippines, Managing Director Emerson Yao talks to us about the business of keeping time WORDS BY PATRICIA CHONG

A WATCH, one could say, gives one a sense

of importance. Not because of its material, but because of what it represents: an actual need to be informed of time and its passage. It is perhaps this appreciation that has led the Lucerne Group’s growth from a single store in Cubao to the country’s foremost purveyor of luxury timepieces. At Lucerne’s helm, managing director Emerson Yao has seen it all, from the quartz crisis to the mechanical revival. Rogue sits down with one of the industry’s greats for a glimpse of 30 years curating almost 30 watch brands, including Omega, Chopard, Rolex, and Breitling.

What made you go into this business?

Well, we are actually the third generation in the watch business. It was started by my grandfather, but we start counting our history from the time my father started his first store in 1982 in Ali Mall. My brother and I went to work in the shop during the weekends and after school. My father passed away six years later, so we took over at a very young age. I was fresh out of college at that time.

When did your own interest start?

It really started when we took over the business. During the early 80s, the Japanese quartz watch was on the rise. You had your Seiko, your Citizen—Swiss watches were almost on the brink of collapse. We wanted to be different, so we started looking around.

There was no Internet at the time, so you’d really have to travel to Hong Kong, Singapore, sometimes Switzerland. Our eyes were opened. We saw that there was life beyond the brands that we carried at that time.

What was the first unusual acquisition that you made?

That was around 1995. Rolex and Omega were there from the beginning, but they were locally sourced so it wasn’t exclusive.

So the first significant brand that we brought in is Piaget, followed very quickly by Patek Philippe, then IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and

Audemars Piguet. Every year we would introduce one or two new brands. By the late 90s, we were already flying to the Basel fair every year, which was something not a lot of retailers in the Philippines did.

An early acquisition by Yao and Lucerne, Audemars Piguet recently launched its newest iteration of the Royal Oak Chronograph at a Cubaninspired party in Samba, Shangri-La at the Fort. The seven-piece line has several new details including new typeset and transfers and additional luminescent coating for a better readability. This year marks the 20th year of the first Royal Oak Chronograph, which has become known for its thoughtfully designed dials.

The new line is available at L’Atelier Lucerne (777-3387).

From a design point of view, what attracts you to a timepiece?

I like very simple watches—big and very classic-looking.

Do you remember your first watch?

I still have it, though I’ve passed it down to my son already. It’s a Pierre Balmain quartz watch. I got it when I was 20 years old and never parted with it. I would wear it going to work, to events, to celebrate important milestones. I’m not someone so protective that in like 10 years, it still looks new. For me, the more scratches—‘wag naman ‘yung ugly scratches—the more memorable the watch is. They resemble battle scars. Every day, you work, you hit it here and there. It records your life. So someday, when I pass it on to my children, there’s character in the watch.

Those scratches, they mean something.

What do you think the next phase of watchmaking is?

There’s a lot of talk about smart watches, but I think they’re a passing technology simply because you can’t process too much information on a small screen with your hand held up for 30 seconds. That’s very unnatural. But a possible concern is the new generation growing up feeling like they don’t need to wear a watch because they have their mobile phones.

Do you believe that there’s always going to be a place for these timepieces?

I believe there will be. A luxury watch is now like jewelry, an heirloom. They will be around forever. For the quartz watch, of course, they will have to constantly reinvent themselves.

They have to come up with designs so that the young generation will feel that, you know, it’s cool to wear a watch.

YELLOW GOLD BRACELET

B L U E A L L I G AT O R S T R A P

B R O W N A L L I G AT O R S T R A P

S TA I N L E S S S T E E L C A S E

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CASINOROYALE The glamorous crowd turned up for the biggest party of the year, celebrating the second Louis Vuitton store in the country

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IT HAS BEEN a long time since the fashion

crowd had a huge, pull-all-the-stops party, and one can always count on Louis Vuitton to throw such a thing. Last July, to formally open its second store in the Philippines—Louis Vuitton at The Shoppes, Solaire Resort and Casino—the luxury brand threw what could probably be Manila’s biggest party of 2017.

The evening began with in-store cocktails, boasting the added attraction of a French artisan demonstrating how the Petit Malle, the iconic bag that Nicolas Ghesquiere designed, is made. Sofia Elizalde was seen checking out the details of the exotic crocodile leather piece, as were actresses Lovi Poe and Janine Gutierrez.

Later into the evening, everyone was ushered to a transformed gallery space where the famed Katrina Razon and the Australian DJ duo Flight Facilities played dance music that would set the party in full swing. As added entertainment, guests took turns playing around with their camera phones against the seven-foot motionactivated interactive wall which had patterns of the Manila skyline, among them Solenn Heussaff, Janine Gutierrez, movie superstars Nadine Lustre and James Reid, stylish couples Jericho Rosales and Kim Jones, Sam Milby and Mari Jasmine, and Asia’s Next Top Model winner Maureen Wroblewitz, all wearing—what else?— Louis Vuitton.

THE VERY SOCIAL CLUB

1 Andi Eigenmann, Robbie Carmona, Dong Magsajo and Tim Yap 2 KC Concepcion and Aly Borromeo 3 Flight Facilities 4 Jarred Gullas, Jam Acuzar, Gabbi Floirendo, Mariana Zobel Aboitiz, and Monica Floirendo 5 Sofia Elizalde 6 Lovi Poe 7 Christian Gonzales and Stephanie Kienle Gonzales, with Jonathan Crespi and Stephanie Zubiri-Crespi 8 Maxine Medina 9 Janeena Chan and Kiana Valenciano 10 Kim Jones and Solenn Heussaff-Bolzico 11 Mari Jasmin and Sam Milby 12 Nadine Lustre and James Reid 13 Parul Shah 14 Robbie Antonio 15 Daphne Oseña and Vicky Belo 16 Painting a jeepney on a Louis Vuitton trunk 17 a Petite Malle artisan enlightens the crowd 18 Jess Connely, Sam Wilson, Mike Concepcion 19 Teresa Herrera, Sam Richelle, Jigs Mayuga and Pam Quiñones 20 Janine Gutierrez 21 Vania Romoff and Rajo Laurel.

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The Coolest Job In The World The campaign for the new scent had to represent the fast-paced living of the young Azzaro man. It depicts this in a short film starring a suited hero driving around wild Barcelona in a Ford Mustang.

And the man behind the wheel?

Serbo-Norwegian model Nikolai Danielsen, who the brand describes as having the body of “Channing Tatum, the casualness of Ryan Gosling and the menacing handsomeness of Christian Grey.” Such a random combination of names to reference, we’re sure.

But he did own the Catalonian capital like the millennial that he is, with a swagger belying the jittery excitement he was feeling.

Here, he talks about a job that a lot of guys would kill for:

RISKTAKER Azzaro Wanted, the French brand’s latest men’s scent, wants you to be young, wild, and free WORDS BY JACS T. SAMPAYAN

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“LET’S BE CLEAR: it’s not a gun,”

Sadrine Groslier intones with a smile on her face.

The youthful Clarins Fragrance Group president is referring to the bottle design of Azzaro Wanted, the brand’s latest men’s fragrance.

“It could be a barrel of a gun, but it could be a barrel of a clock. It’s primarily a mechanical piece,” she explains. “We wanted to have that idea of power, but that of luxury.”

It is definitely eye-catching, with its rotating cylinder, chromed collar, gold medallion accents, and techno-chic style.

The design is meant to reflect both its contents—a confident concoction of spicy, woodsy, and citrusy notes—and the identity it tries to imbibe. Azzaro Wanted is meant to be the third pillar of the French label’s male fragrances after Chrome and Pour Homme.

While the scents before it are for the latter stages of an Azzaro

man’s life, Wanted is meant for the young man who lives his life with an excitement borne out of risk and rebelliousness. Groslier relates this to the personality of the brand’s late founder Loris Azzaro, a man who knew how to have fun.

“We wanted to have that spirit of Loris Azzaro of knowing how to enjoy life, loving luxurious things, being well-educated, and having savoir-faire,” she says. “If he were alive today, I can imagine he would fit well with millennials,” she says.

“He wanted to gamble with life. Do you know he used to go to casinos and bet everything? Everything.”

In that regard, she believes that there is a universal appeal to the brand, and the thrilling life it espouses marries well with its other values of accessibility, perennity, and loyalty. “In a way, you begin with us and stay all your life with us.”

What did you find particularly difficult to do during filming?

The scene that was shot underwater, with a suit and shoes on to boot. That was the hardest. I thought it would be easy because I had already done an underwater sequence before, but this time it was more difficult. I wanted to do the scene myself, but I was told that I had a double for the action scenes.

I was very disappointed!

And the most exciting?

The scene with the car was fantastic. Every guy dreams of driving a car like that, at least once in his life. I also enjoyed doing the more erotic scenes in the swimming pool and clubhouse! Frankly, the role wasn’t very hard to interpret. Driving a collector’s car, kissing sublime women, wearing beautiful clothes signed by Azzaro... it’s a dream come true! The life of a millionaire, a playboy and a gangster, all in one!

AZZARO WANTED RETAILS FOR P5,220 AND IS AVAILABLE AT THE SM STORE, FRESH, AND ART OF SCENT.

August 2017

Edited by

PAOLO ENRICO MELENDEZ

THE SLANT

Issue

112

OPINIONS + IDEAS + PERSPECTIVES

Kids who would have never come across each other in their day to day lives are high-fiving each other on the field for a good play.

02 Institutional Amnesia

03 Ready. Set. Gout!

MARK DUANE ANGOS

CF PADERNA

PAOLO ENRICO MELENDEZ

Malaya FC is a youth football club that is developing some truly promising players. With socialized tuition and top coaches, the group is redefining grassroots talent development

Recently, news broke of government offices scrubbing an entire term’s worth of public data. A former budget department staff member writes about what this means for accountability

Age, time, and mindset can conspire to make staying active challenging, if not impossible.

But there’s always hope or good old delusion

01 Free to Play

01

Mark Duane Angos g

on grassroots football development

FREE TO PLAY As interest in football continues to rise across the country, a small youth academy in Manila takes a page from its countryside counterparts to make a bold proposition: develop from the ground up ART BY MAGS OCAMPO

ON A SATURDAY morning when most of us are either sleeping off ff the after-eff ff cts of a TGIF hangover or getting up to go on an Instagram-worthy weekend trip, 13-year-old Binggoy is already working in his aunt’s ice shop in Laurel Street, Tondo, Manila.

Feeding an ice-crushing machine a block of ice, he loads the crushed ice in a banyera (tub) until it’s full then drags it over to the nearby wet market. There, chicken and fish vendors buy the ice to keep their meat fresh.

Binggoy makes this trip again and again, money lining his pockets never the end goal of his hard work. This is his contribution to the family’s finances; in exchange, he gets to be fed, though thrice-a-day meals are never an assurance.

He is relatively lucky. His parents may have abandoned him after separating and starting new families of their own, but his grandmother has taken over their neglected duty.

There is someone to make sure that Binggoy will not grow up alone. This is not the case for the other kids of Laurel Street, which is a mere fraction, though a fair representation, of life in Tondo. The movies and teleseryess are right—Tondo can be a tough place for kids to grow up in. Children as young as three work in the streets to help their families while the siren call of vice and criminality is everpresent, ready to reel them in with just the slightest pull.

But this is not the call that Binggoy responds to on this particular weekend. Come noon, Binggoy packs his bags and makes his way toward nearby St. John Bosco Church where two dozen other Tondo kids and a man in his 20s are waiting. He’s Coach Jovert to the kids.

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Shonan Bellmare scouts also picked four players from Malaya FC’s U-15 team to attend a soccer training camp in Japan. Binggoy, who was part of that group, exclaimed,“Hindi na lang kami Tondo boys, Tokyo boys na rin!”

Binggoy and the group then take a 10-minute tricycle ride to the nearest PNR station. After riding a decrepit train for some 40 minutes, they hop out at the Taguig station and walk another 15 minutes to reach an Army field that has been claimed as football grounds by a hundred kids ranging from six to 16 years of age. For the next three hours, these kids in their yellow training uniforms will learn about passing, controlling, and dribbling a soccer ball with their feet. This is Malaya Football Club (FC).

True to its name, Malaya FC is a nonprofit organization that offers free football education for children from impoverished backgrounds. It also provides uniforms, shoes, socks, shin guards, and most importantly, the opportunity to travel and play in various youth soccer tournaments in and out of Manila.

“Soccer or football should be free,” says Atty. Frank Martin Abalos, president and founding member of Malaya FC. “Any child who wants to play the game should be able to play it.” Malaya FC is certainly trying to change people’s perception of the sport, which is associated with the well-to-do.

Akin to a socialist economic policy of taxing the rich to pay for the poor, Malaya FC has around 30 paying members among its 140 kids. These players and their parents pay for their football education and help sustain the day-to-day operations of the club. Their generosity allows Binggoy and kids from Tondo to play football; it has also paved the way for Malaya FC’s dynamic membership, one that truly cuts across all socio-economic classes. Kids who would have never come across each other in their day-to-day lives are

now high-fiving each other on the field for a good play, patting each other on the back for encouragement, and piling up on each other to celebrate a winning goal.

“Call us naïve but there is a part of us that believes football can bring about change, break the cycle of poverty, and have a positive impact in any community,” says Abalos.

Maybe Abalos and his cohorts in Malaya FC are on to something. Four of the club’s players were recently invited to play for Colegio De San Juan de Letran in exchange for athletic scholarships. Other schools and universities have also expressed interest in recruiting the club’s players. JP Voltes FC, a Division 1 team playing for the Philippine Football League, is currently in talks with Malaya FC for the latter to be in its youth development program. The partnership could soon make it possible for the Malaya FC boys to form the bedrock of a professional football team in the country.

Partnership offers have not been limited to the local scene. Japan’s J. League, one of the premier professional football leagues in Asia, has already reached out to Malaya FC. Coaches from Shonan Bellmare, a Japanese professional football club playing in the J. League Division 2, have conducted clinics and provided technical assistance to the club.

From this invitation, Malaya FC’s U-13 age bracket was able to join a soccer tournament in Tokyo where it played against top Japanese and Brazilian teams. Shonan Bellmare scouts also picked four players from Malaya FC’s U-15 team to attend a soccer training camp in Japan. Binggoy, who was part of that group, exclaimed,“Hindi na lang kami Tondo boys, Tokyo boys na rin!”

As new and exciting opportunities constantly open up for its players, Malaya FC is proving that football is more than just a game. “What I really like about Malaya FC is how it’s trying to change the Filipino mentality about football,” says William Gueridonn, former Philippine Azkals player and now the head coach of Malaya FC’s U-13 squad. “I grew up in Germany, so dreaming to be a professional football player or a football superstar is easy. Here, it’s different, it’s almost impossible. Malaya FC is showing these kids that it’s okay to dream big and there is a path forward. I think that is a good place to start to grow football in this country.”

By the time training ends at around six in the evening, Binggoy stays behind in the field to take extra shots. Whether it’s to unlock the mystery of bending a soccer ball toward the goal or to delay his impending return to the harsh realities of Laurel Street, we do not know. Whatever his motivation, it would pay off later in the week when he scored a goal in one of Metro Manila’s major youth soccer leagues, a goal so magnificent it could have inspired the Shakespearean quip from English soccer commentator Ray Hudson: “The world is his oyster and he’s got pearls for feet.”

With Malaya FC’s help, it’s entirely possible.

AUGUST 2017

43

02

CF Paderna

on our lack of an archiving tradition

INSTITUTIONAL AMNESIA What began as a personal shock turned out to be an institutional outrage, as a writer-researcher explains what happens when a public is denied historic data across multiple terms of government

THIS BEGINS, OF course, with my own story.

It was early in July this year, and I was still awake in the wee hours, doing perhaps the most banal thing in the world: scrolling through tweets I’d posted in my private Twitter account, entertaining the wildly original idea of making my account public.

God knows why.

I hesitated. “Man, if I’m gonna make this account public, I should probably get rid of my more incriminating posts.” Tweets that were harshly critical of the government, for example. Tweets that showed I was prone to commonplace, embarrassingly self-conscious activity at 2 a.m. I kept scrolling.

And then I saw it: a tweet I posted in April 2015. “We’re No. 1 in ASEAN and No. 23 in the world,” I announced to my humongous following of 63 Twitter users. I had re-tweeted a post by the official Twitter account of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), which my team under the Public Information Unit (PIU) managed in those days.

The news I was sharing? That on April 2015, the Open Budget Survey found that the Philippines was Number One in budget transparency in the ASEAN, and that our country was found to be among the most improved globally. This was a historic achievement that we in the DBM were happy to share to the public and our media partners. That same success was our own assurance to the citizenry: “Hang in there, folks!” we wanted to say. “We’re doing our darndest for budget transparency, and here’s some proof!”

But the tweet I shared wasn’t there. In its place: “This tweet is unavailable.” I clicked on the embedded link, and was led to a page that should have been the official DBM Twitter

44 A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

account. Instead, it contained little else besides this cheerful note: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

I sat up in bed, uncomprehending. Did they actually delete the Twitter account? I went to Facebook and looked for the official DBM page we had set up and managed. Gone as well. All I could find was the new DBM Facebook account under now Secretary Benjamin Diokno. Nothing we posted from 2011-2016 remained—not the infographics, not the announcements, not the information campaigns we’d launched on the budget process. I was fit to be tied.

I alerted our former chief of staff ff and our former team members. “What’s going on here?” I asked.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” one of them protested. “When we turned over our social media accounts to Diokno’s staff, they said they would set up new accounts. But they also gave us their verbal commitment to preserve our old accounts.”* Archiving the DBM’s social media eff rts under the Aquino administration was not just a question of posterity. It was also supposed to act as leverage for the DBM under Secretary Diokno, because—unlike me— the DBM had an extensive social media base that the new administration could tap into.

The old DBM Facebook account, now unpublished and inaccessible to the public, had more than 33,000 followers, and our staff ff worked extremely hard to maintain a 95 percent response rate for Facebook inquiries.

Meanwhile, the Twitter account we managed—now conveniently deleted—was followed by over 20,000 Twitter users. Our accounts were so well-established and so regularly updated that to this day, members

What’s Wh t’ stopping t i s iis this: prevailing political interests readily dictate the course of government action. of the press continue to tag us via our old Twitter handle. So much for conversation and citizen engagement.

After all, citizen engagement was the purpose of our social media eff ff rts under the guidance of former DBM Secretary Florencio B. Abad. Sure, we received no shortage of heat from the general public when the Budget Department figured in controversy.

The criticism was tough for us, but even tougher for our tenured officials and staff, who labored with extraordinary commitment to implement key budgetary reforms during our term.

Despite the criticism, however, then Secretary Abad was adamant: we needed to continue our public engagement eff rts, so we could find spaces for dialogue with the people. Facebook and Twitter were promising vehicles for discourse, and we maintained those accounts actively until our last day in government.

I was convinced that the removal of our Twitter and Facebook accounts was representative of a vendetta against the Aquino administration, one of many launched since Rodrigo Duterte occupied the Presidency.

And anyway, this wasn’t the first time that the present administration swept our accom-

plishments under the rug to aggrandize Duterte. Surely my colleagues and I would not have done the same.

Except that we did. “Where are the DBM press releases from Arroyo’s time?” I asked former DBM Undersecretary Bon Moya.

“Didn’t we preserve their old website? I’ve Googled all over—“ “We didn’t migrate their press releases to our new site,” he said matter-of-factly.

My heart sank. “We didn’t?”

“No, we were under a tight deadline to finish the new DBM website, and we had to prioritize our own press releases. The website under Arroyo’s term is archived; it’s just inaccessible through Google.”

“Shit…well. Diokno’s team got rid of our social media accounts. I didn’t think we would do anything equal to that.” I thought, too, of my peers who served under the Aquino administration in other agencies, how we harrumphed and banged our fists on the table when our work was summarily erased by the Duterte administration.

“We didn’t do it maliciously,” Bon reassured me. “It’s just that it’s always been that way. We were just doing what previous administrations had done. The Duterte administration is only doing what we did in 2010.”

“But Diokno’s staff gave us their word,” I huffed. “They said they wouldn’t get rid of our old social media accounts!”

He sighed. “You know what they say.

History is written by the victors. That was us then. They’re the victors now.” He paused.

“The sad truth is that the Philippine government is designed for political administration, not for governance.”

I discovered that he wasn’t kidding. As it turns out, a number of government agencies wiped the slate clean when then President Benigno S. Aquino III took over in 2010.

Some websites were built akin to the DBM’s own: they showed almost no trace of the prior administration’s achievements, save for some cursory memos, circulars, and other internal documents.

The fact that our social media accounts were erased or locked away—and more damningly, the fact that razing and rebuilding information is a matter of course for every new administration—betrays the larger malaise in Philippine governance: the lack or near-absence of an archival tradition outside the efforts of the National Archives, and worse, a profound apathy toward creating one. A consequence of this is the impairment of our government’s institutional memory, so that necessary reforms are not always easy to sustain beyond a single administration.

This institutional amnesia extends beyond the halls of government. It is also articulated in the citizenry’s political choices across the decades; we see it in votes repeatedly cast, term after term, for politicians of obvious corruption and inauthenticity. We see it in the clamor for Duterte’s strongman methods, despite the proven horrors of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship. We see it in the visible

support for Duterte’s imposition of martial law in the entirety of Mindanao—never mind the fact that military rule under Marcos birthed abuses of a horrifying scope, never mind that the brutality and persistence of those abuses have already been guaranteed

by Duterte’s trademark fist.

“Perhaps we aren’t the only ones so forgetful,” I hoped. I visited the website of the United States’ National Archives, and was comforted to find press releases that dated only as far back as 2013. But then I peered into the online trove of Singapore’s National Archives, and I withered in my seat. A search for the earliest speeches and press releases transported me to the 1950s, into an archive only the most dedicated researchers might trouble themselves with.

From the 1975 collection, I randomly fished out a press release by Singapore’s Ministry of Culture: it was a scanned copy of the original release, quaint for the typewritten text and the holes punched appropriately in the margins. It was a sight both heartbreaking and encouraging. Heartbreaking, because, damn, I wish we had that same cherishing for the information artifacts of our public institutions. Encouraging, because hey, if Singapore can do that, what’s stopping us from doing the same?

What’s stopping us is this: prevailing political interests readily dictate the course of government action. In this country, the desire for electoral achievement can overshadow the cause for the citizens’ welfare. It is this desire for political dominance—aggravated

in no small measure by a comically elastic multiparty system—that urges us to obliterate some narratives in the history of Philippine governance, and consequently, the collective and essential narratives of our own people.

But why announce the successes of the previous administration if we despise them, if it might be to our political disadvantage?

Because that kind of transparency is exactly what citizens of any functioning democracy deserve: a clearer picture of the government’s failures and achievements from President to President, a means to arrive at a nuanced appreciation of the country’s progress (or, god forbid, the lack thereof). When we refuse the obligation to archive the government’s stories, we refuse our own obligations to accountability—and in the long term, our obligations of service to the public.

And so this is borne every six years when a new President comes into power: history is indeed written by the victorious. But the omissions we make in our historical accounts are no less duplicitous than the fictions we invent. In this jigsaw narrative of Philippine governance where the pieces are always missing, in this story where forgetfulness is forced time and again upon the citizenry, the winners remain triumphant in their time.

Everybody else loses—the Filipino people most of all.

The Office of DBM Secretary Benjamin Diokno was reached for clarification on the removal of the previous administration’s social media accounts. No response has been received to date.

FORENSIC EXERCISE

Recreations of some of the data scrubbed from the social media accounts of the Department of Budget and Management. Right: The last Facebook post under the former official DBM account. Opposite: An infographic by the DBM Strategic Communications Unit posted by the DBM PIU on its official Facebook page, now unpublished, in 2015.

AUGUST 2017

45

03

Paolo Enrico Melende ez on the aging amateur sportsman

READY. SET. GOUT! Injury interventions. Stale personal reccords.

Lapsed partnerships. Not a very motivating list for staying active. But to gracefully accept that one’s prime has passed? Unthinkable!

ART BY MAGS OCAMPO

ANKLE BRACE I tore an ankle and was required to wear a brace. My first time between the sticks on the football field after the injury, I was reminded of a report by foreign correspondent and humorist P.J. O’Rourke. The journalist was in South Africa, and was invited to a barbecue with Afrikaan locals of a certain age. They called themselves the Wenwe Tribe. All of their stories were reminiscences; they always began with “When we . . .”

So it began for me, too.

When I was younger, I could lateral pivot from a full sprint without problem. The afternoon of the injury, my ankle twisted so badly I actually heard the ligament make a scrunching noise. Think hot wing popped by drunken fingers. Moist squeegee wrung dry.

Rubber eraser stubbed on tabletop.

When I was younger, I had hurt the same ankle jumping a one-story concrete wall to cut class. And so I could delude myself that the current injury was a compound one, a reaggravation rather than fresh manifestation of failing systems. But rehabilitation proved lengthy, about half a month. And halfway into it and the reality it brought, it occurred to me that athletes of my generation without professional support age like wine, except the boxed kind and with the valve busted and taking in air.

When I was younger, I could hit the field for drills three weeknights in a row, compete in a tournament on Saturday, then join mountaineers the next day for an entire morning of stairwell ramps. With ankle busted and head buzzing with a morbid kind of curiosity, I started looking up journals of sports medicine. Various studies into the performance-recovery cycle of sporting adults stared at me in the face. People my age, many experts claimed, need an extra 72 hours of

46 A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

I quickly tallied my routine. I needed a calendar with nine-day weeks, something not even Recto counterfeiters would abide. recovery to return to baseline performance.

More so from an injury.

I quickly tallied my routine. I needed a calendar with nine-day weeks, something not even Recto counterfeiters would abide.

PATELLA SUPPORT Almost every active individual my age has a good knee and a bad one. And every bad knee is a Greek tragedy—hubris, nemesis, catharsis. I got mine during a skyway halfmarathon with my running partner.

She is a natural runner about half a decade my junior. I can never keep up with her, not during our practice runs up Heartbreak Hill inside the UP campus, not during race days.

But such was the combination of neediness and vanity on the morning of our half-marathon that I didn’t ask her to pace me. And so at around Kilometer 12, my patella locked up and started to bleed internally.

She refused to run ahead. It was an arduous run-walk for the last nine kilometers or so.

About ten minutes ahead of us, a runner my age died of a heart attack. He was a junior army officer.

Pro athletes have a battalion of support staff to keep a minor injury such as mine from devolving into a career-ending one.

Physical therapists. Orthopaedists. Specialists in sports medicine. Take for instance the renowned Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, who took an opposing forward’s knee to the head on the very first minute of their match. He suffered a depressed skull fracture, which is the kind of injury one gets when, say, a riot cop greets a protester with a friendly nightstick bop to the noggin.

It was a horrendous injury. But Cech was back on the field in just a little over a year, wearing a headguard but looking none the worse for wear. He didn’t concede a single goal until the tenth match after his return.

He later transferred out of Chelsea for 11 million Euros.

Nowadays, I can’t even clean my apartment without a patella sleeve. I transferred out of my football team but didn’t get paid for it. I got about 15 Likes for the announcement, though, which was nice.

MOUTH GUARD, ATHLETIC TAPE The average retirement age for sporting individuals is 33. As young as 28 for those in extremely physical sports. I have a different basis in mind, though.

These days I wear a mouth brace on the field, to keep a wisdom tooth from breaking through an already split gum. I also wrap in support tape two twisted fingers on my right

hand. Both split gum and twisted fingers were gifts from two different football players much older than I am. I think they couldn’t accept having been cleanly tackled, and responded respectively with elbow poke to my face, and foot stop on my hand.

When Cech returned to the field healthy if wearing a headguard, his sponsors called him out for not using their brand. And remember O’Rourke’s Afrikaan friends who called themselves the Wenwe Tribe? They were apartheidists. They were reminiscing about being free to abuse black locals.

So those are my criteria for retiring. When you bring nothing to a game but injurous baggage. When your support systems are there to monetize rather than edify.

When you speak of the good old days and everybody else cringes.

FAITH I have a reason to stay active though, despite all the necessary interventions: I love the human aspect of sports. How understanding your body can lead to a better appreciation of your mind. How accepting limits can lead to surmounting them, sometimes unconsciously even. Plus Tumblr says it’s true love when you abide permanent disfigurements.

And there’s grace. Not just physical, mind you. The mental kind, the one that lets you concede a goal and accept that that’s just the way things go. Even the training partnerships that are Grecian in their resolutions.

My knee injury ruined two personal records, that morning. More than permanently screwing my knee, that bit I regret most. And without a rehab team behind me, I turn to writerly imagination for catharsis: I imagine that my running partner doesn’t refuse to run ahead. In my head she runs off, the end of her ponytail swishing to one side then another as though in delight at freedom. The sight of her hits me like a second wind and suddenly I am off again, the skyway appearing beneath me as long as I keep running. Past the offramp onto cramped Alabang. Past Laguna’s sprawling town squares. Past Batangas with its warlords of too small dicks and too many guns. Past the persistent sound of rain and smell of loam in Quezon. Past the mountains of Bicol where various red commands hold their ground.

Always the memory of her sprinting off at twice my stride, at a pace I can never hope to match, every incline a heartbreak hill of its own. Until I am over the Philippine Sea where I stop, the water under me much deeper than the tallest skyway is high, a thunderous splash the last sound before finally, the fanfare of a finish line brass band.

AUGUST 2017

47

The

WEEK END They

LOST HIM On the afternoon of August 18, 2012, then DILG secretary Jesse Robredo wanted nothing more than to be with family in his hometown Naga. But fate had other plans: engine trouble would cause the Piper PA-34 Seneca that Robredo was in to crash off the shores of Masbate, killing him and the aircraft’s two pilots. Five years after the tragedy, Criselda Yabes recreates those terrifying hours from the recollections of those closest to the revered official: his wife Leni, his children, and his aide-de-camp, Jun Abrazado, the crash’s lone survivor

The crew of two pilots were about to do an emergency landing.

Something had gone wrong, but they were giving a thumbs-up sign that it could be managed. The six-seater aircraft was carrying only two passengers: the Secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) and his young aide-de-camp.

Jesse Robredo was rushing to be home in Naga for the long holiday weekend. That’s how it was for him. Naga was his ‘happy place,’ one of the bright spots in the heart of Bicolandia. Naga made him as he made the city good, leaving a stamp of reputation in local politics. That weekend in August 2012, he wanted to be with his wife Leni. He was trying to catch his youngest daughter’s swimming competition but missed it. Still, he wanted to be there. In Naga, he was grounded.

He meant to take the overnight bus ride from Manila with his two other daughters who were working and studying in the capital; and with the family all together, a four-day holiday was going to be a treat.

But as things would have it, Jesse had to fly to Cebu on a Saturday morning, the 18th, for a public speaking occasion the president had asked him to do in his stead. There was a ceremony and he was the guest of honor, eager to take his turn at the podium so that he could fly directly to Naga from there. A private plane offered to give him the ride. It was waiting for him at the hangar in Mactan airport. Take off was at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Jesse’s aide Jun Paolo Abrazado, an officer of the Philippine National Police, sat to the left of the secretary in the plane. He buckled his boss’ seatbelt, but Jesse had the tendency of unbuckling it when he felt uncomfortable. At take off, Jesse was calm even when, at half

50

an hour into the flight, the orange light on the cockpit’s panel started blinking. Jun heard a strange noise. The right propeller had stopped.

The orange light stayed on, now permanently lit.

The captain, who owned the plane, turned around and said, “Masbate tayo, Masbate!” The pilots were initially going to turn back to Cebu but chose the nearest recourse, which was to land in Masbate.

They said it would take only 15 minutes.

“Are we good?” Jun asked, getting nervous and uneasy. The co-pilot, a Nepalese flying student, said yes with his head, and with a smile, gave the okay sign with his thumb.

Still the aide could feel the flight was not going right. He peppered the pilots with questions about the technical state of the plane when he thought it odd that neither of them was giving any indications or warnings at all.

Jesse waved his hand at him, as if to say, leave them be, let the pilots do their job. “Bayae na Jun,” he said in their language. Don’t bother them.

Jun, also a native of Naga, grew up in the city under the beacon of Jesse’s leadership. The Naga he knew was Jesse’s Naga. Making it to the national police, he found himself offered to be one of the secretary’s security aides, and he took it with pride. Jesse was mayor of Naga for 18 years, covering six terms of three years each put together, before he was appointed secretary of the DILG. On that day, Jun wasn’t supposed to be on duty; his wife had just given birth to their first-born, and he was on paternity leave. His senior officers were beat from the secretary’s grueling schedule and

PHOTOS OF SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATION COURTESY OF NATIONAL DISASTER RISK REDUCTION MANAGEMENT COUNCIL

THEY COULD SEE THE LANDING STRIP OF MASBATE’S AIRPORT FROM THE LEFT WINDOW OF THE PIPER SENECA.

LOOKING FOR JESSE

Search and rescue operations for the passengers of the Piper Seneca plane commenced immediately after the crash on August 18, 2012. It was three days later that technical divers finally discovered the plane’s fuselage. The bodies of Jesse Robredo and two other men were discovered inside. Previous spread: Jesse and Leni with, from left, Jillian, Aika, and Tricia Robredo.

had asked him to take his turn. He tried reassuring the secretary who sat beside him to his right, who was still unfazed by any possible danger, as if it was just one of those things and the plane would sort itself out for a landing in Masbate.

“Don’t worry, Sir. There have been incidents like this already, Sir, that only one engine was working and the plane was able to land.”

It was more like reassuring himself. At which point June got a text message from his mother, unexpectedly. He told her they were about to have an emergency landing in Masbate, could she pray for them? He thought about his newborn son.

Later, it would come to his mind that his boss was a fatalistic man, having had so often heard him say in the course of their time together: “Hayaan niyo lang ako, kung oras ko na, oras ko na.”

From Jun’s recollection of that fateful day on August 18, 2012, Jesse Robredo, the man he worshipped like a father, was calm and composed all throughout. He even went through some documents that June had to pick out from his Samsonite backpack—which would save his life at sea after the wreck.

Jun also heard him talking to his wife on the phone, saying “Tatawag na lang akoo Ma.” Ma. Mama. That had to be Leni, his term of endearment for his wife.

Jesse and Leni were on the phone for most of the day, catching up on their schedules. Jesse had already missed Jillian’s swimming competition and so there was no hurry for him to be back, Leni told him so; he could get back to Manila and take the night bus with his two daughters, Aika and Tricia. But there was this quicker ride to Naga, supposedly. “Basta the entire day nagtatawagan kami,”” Leni said of that Saturday when she would last hear from her husband of 25 years.

Don’t bother rushing. “Huwag na,”” she told him, “Sabay-sabay na lang kayo ng mga bata. Huwag ka nang humabol kasi tapos na.”

When Leni got home after Jillian’s swimming competition, she saw her husband’s staff ff in advance of his arrival. She was surprised: he’s arriving today, not tomorrow, right? If Jesse was coming to Naga on that late Saturday afternoon, she decided she would pick him up at the

airport. Jesse’s plane was supposed to land at 4:20 pm; Leni had just about an hour for a quick shower after being under the heat cheering for their youngest daughter do her quick laps in the pool. Jillian’s team won. She drove her earlier to the Starbucks on Magsaysay Avenue that was becoming a trendy hangout, where Jillian and the girls in the team celebrated their victory.

“I was near the airport already, bigla siyang nagtext na pabalik yung plane sa a Cebu. So ako, tumabi ako sa roadside,” which was about a hundred meters away. She drove past the small bridge leading to the airport, after turning from the two-lane highway that would one day, a few years hence, have a life-sized billboard of her, the vice president of the country on a campaign to combat polio.

But there she was, just mere hours before her family’s life would turn upside down. “Ha? Anong gusto mong sabihin na pabalik yung plane sa a Cebu?” Was that what Jesse told her? Why was his plane making a turn back to Cebu? She tried reaching him with her cell phone.

He couldn’t be reached. She didn’t know what to do. If he was going back to Cebu, she might as well drive back home again and wait. She tried calling him again and again but it seemed he was out of the signal’s range.

Finally he answered one of her many attempts. “He didn’t allow me to talk anymore. He said, ‘Ma, tawagan na lang kita, may inaasikaso lang ako.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I didn’t detect anything wrong. Ang imagination ko nakabalik na siya sa Cebu.’” Evidently Jesse had no time to call her about the plane’s supposed emergency landing in Masbate.

If fate had been on Jesse’s side, his plane would have teetered on the runway of Naga, a lonely outpost in the sprawl of green fields. Jesse would have heaved content at the sight of Mount Isarog upon landing.

But the next three days would be the longest for Leni and her three daughters, a tragedy unimaginable in their lives, losing a man who was everything to them, the rock that gave their family a solid foundation.

Leni would never forget the date: August 18 was just as memorable as when she first started work after college and her boss was Jesse.

A love story that bloomed. A whirlwind romance that brought her a

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dreamer who changed politics. Right there in Naga, Jesse Robredo was the man who could never be forgotten.

What Leni could remember was how she first met him.

THE COURTSHIP She was fresh out of the university when she returned to Naga, her hometown. It was a year of imagination and political renewal, after the overthrow of a dictator in early 1986. Leni was in the thick of the transformation, having just completed four years of studies to major in Economics at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, renowned for student activism.

Her next step was to take up a degree in law. Her father had wanted that of his eldest daughter, as he himself was a lawyer who became a respected judge of the regional trial court, the late Antonio Gerona.

Leni was on a high from the EDSA revolt that ushered in democracy, emboldened to join government under the banner of the country’s first woman president, Corazon Aquino. Leni had to persuade her father to a compromise: that she would be allowed to work for a year before plunging into law school.

The summer break in Naga was a series of reunions with friends who had told her about a government agency called the Bicol River Basin Development Program from where she could apply for a job.

There was a new director and the agency had long been planning infrastructure projects in Bicolandia, building bridges, dams, irrigations that would link provinces. That intrigued her, and, even better, her father knew the governor who wrote a recommendation letter on her behalf. The governor’s nephew was the new boss of the government agency, and that was how Leni met Jesse Robredo, the man who would become her husband.

So there she was for a job interview, carefully arranging the governor’s handwritten note over the application form.

“What’s this?” Jesse asked. He seemed slightly annoyed.

“An endorsement,” she replied, straightforward.

“What for?”

It took some seconds for Leni to get the gist of his tone, sensing that he was pouring water on her attempt to get ahead of the ballgame.

She apologized. “I’m sorry. It was a lapse in judgment. I thought it was required.”

“Don’t you know,” he said to her in the most earnest way, “that we are in a different time?’”

In her mind, Leni said to herself, ‘Patay na, hindi na ako matatanggap.’

She didn’t think she’d get the job.

This is a different time: that’s what the man across the table told her. Unbeknownst to them both, he himself was just beginning to set the tone for a ‘different time,’ a different way of running things, a different trend in leadership. To make a difference in the landscape of the country’s political life.

The interview did not even last half an hour. They had small talk about their education; he came from La Salle University but took his masters in Business Administration in Diliman when Leni happened to be there. But she guessed right: she didn’t get the job she wanted, that of being an economic researcher, the first rung in the ladder for an Economics graduate. There was a silver lining for her, however. She could return in a week’s time for another position that would require writing skills. Was she willing to try that out? Leni did not hesitate.

Jesse made her write an essay right there and then.

“What about?”

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“Anything under the sun.”

And that was when, just like that, she churned out ‘The Role of Cory Aquino in the EDSA Revolution.” Jesse was impressed, apparently. He, too, was on the side of freedom; although after his studies he worked for San Miguel Corporation that was owned by one of the dictator’s cronies, Eduardo Cojuangco. He did not hide his political inclinations and sought the track to government service that landed him in charge of the Bicol River Basin Development Program under the tutelage of his powerful uncle Luis Villafuerte, the same governor that wrote the endorsement letter for Leni to get hired.

It took about two months before she received an approval, and she remembered her first day of work was on the 18th of August—and her life since then was going to be one with Jesse, her first boss who was a few years her senior. And in a matter of months, she would be Mrs. Robredo, carrying a duty of love in the years to come.

The courtship was sweet and traditional. Jesse was an old fashioned kind of guy. At work, she could already sense the good-natured teasing going on in the office. The others could see that the boss was obviously smitten since he frequently took the trouble of clambering up to the second floor where Leni had her desk. He also started taking the shuttle bus for the employees, travelling from the city of Naga to the town of Pili in the outskirts where the office was. “True enough, by September, he already asked me out for a date,” Leni recalled, smiling.

There was a fundraising concert by the UP Concert Chorus for the Peñafrancia Shrine, the symbol of religious fervor of Naga that a writer once described as a small city “dripping with salvation.”

September was the month of the pilgrimage and procession.

“I thought of you,” Jesse sweetly told Leni, “because you came from UP.” But he was very formal. He was the boss. She had ideas of him from his fast-growing reputation, one that spoke of being an innovator, a doer, a no-nonsense type of fellow.

Leni did her own little investigation when she had suspected that he was the one who had sent her a social telegram, under the disguise of a man named ‘Gerry.’ Long before smart phones were the connection to romances, they had the bygone days of simplicity. She had a friend at the telegraph office, asking her to find the original note in handwritten form, which had an address of a printing press, and which, as it turned out, was owned by Jesse’s brother.

Only much later would Jesse himself admit that he was that Gerry.

On their first date, Jesse had asked permission from Leni’s parents if he could take her out. At work, he wrote her a letter, one that said, “I hope you can call me by my first name very soon.” Jesse. Not Gerry.

That meant he was beginning to crawl into her heart.

August turned to September and by the time October rolled around, Leni became Jesse’s girlfriend. He wanted the wedding to take place soon, as quick as December being just around the corner. Leni’s father wouldn’t hear of it. “Hindi pwede,” he said to her in the stern growl of a judge, “Hindi ko ‘yan haharapin. Nagkakakilala pa lang kayo.” It was too fast, too soon. Jesse was simply in a hurry, caught by the whiff of boldness and ambition.

Jesse wasn’t so disheartened; he waited. A better occasion might be around May, the month of his birthday, after the congressional elections that he was helping out in. Being the nephew of the governor, he was getting himself baptized into local politics. Coming from an ethnic Chinese family, the oracles in the temple showed a few possible dates for a wedding. It was settled in Jesse’s mind that he was going to ask for Leni’s hand from her parents on his birthday and the wedding would take place a month later, in June.

“I was 22 and I followed him. He did everything for the wedding,

ILLUSTRATION BY VINCENT QUILOP

“Don’t worry, Sir. There have been incidents like this already, Sir, that only one engine was working and the plane was able to land”

LOVETEAM FROM NAGA

Jesse and Leni’s romance began when she started working under him at the Bicol River Basin Development Program.

He was trying to be coy; she impressed him with an essay on Cory and the EDSA revolt.

“Pero Ma’am, a few minutes ago tumawag ‘yung Masbate, mayy sighting ng small plane na nag-crash siya at sea.” him and his siblings. Ako sunod lang ako nang sunod. Tapos sabi ng nanay ko, ‘Ano naman yata, kulang sa preparations.’ Tapos sabi ngg mother-in-law ko, ‘Kasi kumare, ‘yung susunod na a wedding date sa November na eh.’”

Jesse could not wait that long.

“I was in awe of him already. He was very determined, tapos very straight, tapos very proper. He was different ff from all the other guys. Sa kanya, talagang nagbibisita nang maayos, nagpapaalam sa magulang.” Jesse had also taken her to meet his family on the first Sunday right after the UP Concert Chorus date for the Peñafrancia benefit. “Tapos araw-araw nang nasa bahay kaya nung ayaw pa ng daddy kong pumayag, sabi ng nanay ko, ‘Payagan mo na, kasi araw-araw na lang nandito.’”

Jesse did promise one thing to Leni’s father and fulfilled it: that she would go to law school at the leading university there, the University of Nueva Caceres, the old colonial name for Naga, the region’s hub for education and intellectualism. Jesse, on the other hand, joined politics, running for mayor of Naga and winning first in 1988, and winning again for two more consecutive terms as they were bringing up a family. Those first three terms (the limit set in the Constitution for local elected posts) were to pave his daredevilry in governance.

Jesse was ready to sweep Naga to the fore.

In the early years, Leni was teaching economics during the day at a local university (having resigned from the office where Jesse was the boss, for ethical reasons) and taking evening classes to become a lawyer. She wanted to give it up because of the demands of motherhood, raising their first child Jessica, nicknamed Aika. Jesse wouldn’t hear of it, he had to keep his word to her father.

In the province of Camarines Sur, of which Naga (though a chartered city) was ensconced, there were expectations in being a politician’s wife. Leni wasn’t sure she was up to that kind of role.

She gave Jesse empty threats that she would leave him if he were to

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become mayor. Her worry was putting her child (and future children then, two more daughters as it would happen) in an environment that might be dysfunctional, one that might come wrongly with a sense of entitlement.

They talked about it endlessly, she said. “He said he will be an involved father, he will shield us from that kind of life and he’s got to do that. We knew what politics could do.”

The young couple lived with Jesse’s parents, as they were setting up their nest on the second storey of a modest 60s home in a small family compound a stone’s throw from the Centro. The remembrance of those early married years is a framed black-and-white photograph of their church wedding day: Leni in a white dress flowing down to her calf, Jesse in barong tagalog, by the stair wall.

Leni saw that her husband was as strict and forthright and decisive as his father was. Jose Robredo was inflicted with blindness, a disease known as Retinitis pigmentosa. Rather than hide in a corner, the elder Robredo braved through life with discipline and humility, creating whatever he could with his bare hands, whether tinkering with mechanical objects or making furniture. He made a bed for the newlyweds and a desk for Leni to study at. And he led his son to brightness.

There was a cardinal rule early on, that meals should be spent at home. For a politician, that was difficult, but Jesse had to be there, always. They shared the parenting chores as well. In Leni’s words, Jesse was a ‘stage father,’ his presence becoming significant even for the simplest things. He was there for the girls’ tutoring, for their musical recitals, for the games and competitions. That’s why he was so much in a hurry to get to Naga that Saturday in August 2012, to have been able to watch Jillian’s team win if he could have.

Jesse was the world to his family.

T H E FAT H E R On that day Leni didn’t know if he was definitely flying home. She’d gone to pick him up at the airport only to be told he was flying back to Cebu for reasons she didn’t quite know. “Nasaan na si Papa?”

Jillian asked her.

“Eh, tatawag na lang yun kasi busy yata, naghahanap ng ticket kasi bumalik yung plane niya.”

But by around five o’clock in the afternoon, his security staff in Manila called her. “Ma’am nakausap mo si Sir?” “Oo, mga 15 minutes ago.”

“Ma’am, 15 minutes?” He sounded unsure of this.

“Ay, siguro mga 20 or 30 minutes ago na pala.” Was there something out of place, something she could not pin down? “Bakit, kuya?”

“Ma’am kasi, tinawagan ako ni Sir kanina, pinapatawagan sa akin yung tower ng Masbate. Pinapa-clear, pinapabuksan ‘yung airport kasi mag e-emergency landing.’

Masbate!?

“Sabi niya sa akin Cebu.”

“Hindi Ma’am, Masbate.”

“Okay.”

“Pero Ma’am, a few minutes ago tumawag ‘yung Masbate, may sighting ng small plane na nag-crash siya at sea.’

It didn’t quite sink in right away. Could it be them, Jesse and his aide? “Ma’am, sana hindi. Pero I’ll keep you updated.”

It was only then, after she’d tapped the phone conversation closed, that a wave of numbness swept over her. She knew there could not have been a late afternoon flight landing in Masbate, and a plane crashing was too much of a coincidence. She tried reaching Jesse again but there was no answer.

Leni looked around her for an answer. There was Jillian playing the guitar, her hair still moist from the swim. “Nasaan na si Papa?” the girl asked again.

“Anak, parang may nangyari na masama sa plane ng Papa mo.”

Jillian burst into tears. “Punta tayo sa church.”

Leni realized she couldn’t bring herself to drive, the numbness having taken hold of her. Her mind flew elsewhere, to the thought of her two daughters in Manila. They’d have to be told. She rang up Aika, the eldest of the three. Aika would have to look after Tricia, the middle child who was daddy’s girl. The one who played the violin (and her father would be there for her practice even though the classical music would put him to sleep). When she got a summer job at McDonald’s, her father was there, popping up for coffee and fries.

Aika was at a basketball game at the Araneta Center in Cubao, rooting for her home university Ateneo de Manila. She was a big fan of basketball, rarely missing a game. She was waiting for a friend who was running late. Checking on her cell phone, she saw there were missed calls from her mother. That was unusual. As a matter of habit, Aika knew that her mother would rather send a text message than to ring her up. Call me back.

“If you ask me what happened that day, I think maalala ko pa siya by the hour, where I went, what I did,” Aika said. “And I think I was in denial. When my mom called me up, my instinct was to call Dad.” Because it was Dad who would know what to do, who would fix any problem, but it was Dad who was gone.

When she heard her mother on the phone, there was no question that she had to leave the game and get home for Tricia before the news broke out. She phoned her sister and told her to meet her by the lobby of their condominium in the Scout area of Tomas Morato. Her nerves were wrecked and she had to ask a friend to drive the car for her.

Telling Tricia about what happened was the most difficult thing.

“She was my dad’s favorite.” They had this middle child thing—both Jesse and Tricia born in between siblings. “She had always felt na ‘yung dad ko lang yung nakakaintindi sa kanya. I dreaded that moment. It was difficult enough as it was that my dad’s plane was missing, what was more difficult was telling her about it.”

Dad was the center of the universe. Even though politics consumed him within the sphere of Naga, Jesse was there for the girls, three daughters who were born six years apart. For Aika, she grew up watching him run the city as mayor as though it was his day job, no

big deal to it, and managed the children like a ‘tiger parent’ (in the words of the girls) or a ‘stage father’ (which was Leni’s description) in their tight-knit family. The girls had to try their best; they had music lessons as well as sports. Piano. Guitar. Theater. Swimming. Tennis.

Papa was there to tutor them after class, especially in the Math subject that he was good at.

Aika was the first child born just six days before Jesse was elected mayor for the first time in 1988. She grew up in the home of her grandfather who was blind, a hereditary condition that afflicted the Robredo genes. Jesse and Leni later moved to a three-storey apartment type of home, which was to be their own, although it remained within the family property on Bulusan St. People seeking Jesse did not go to their home despite the political culture in small towns. Jesse made them go to the mayor’s office at the city hall where he himself would be first thing in the morning. In the eyes of his daughters, he was like any other father who was a doctor, or an engineer, or an office employee. It didn’t feel any different.

In school though, their classmates knew the difference—“Honor sa class ‘yan because she’s the daughter of the…”—forcing the girls to work harder, to prove that dad’s day job had nothing to do with their good marks. In fact, dad made them work harder, privilege didn’t come just like that.

‘They really push you to study, to join this and that...” And equally they saw their father succeeding at his work, the mayor who changed the game in Naga, winning all election battles from the start, completing three consecutive terms, and then taking the mandatory break from elected office before he could seek another round which he pursued, winning all the three terms again. By then he was a key member of the Liberal Party, organizing the campaign for the presidential bid of Benigno Aquino Jr., the only son of former president Cory Aquino.

Jesse had already bested the seal of good governance. His years of being Naga’s mayor made possible the complex mix of traditional politics and accountability.

Aika remembered most her close and personal chats with her father when he stayed with her in Manila. She already finished college at Ateneo, graduating from management engineering, got a job, and was renting her first condominium in Makati near her place of work. In the brief spells he had running Aquino’s campaign in 2010, he’d crash at his daughter’s place.

“When he would be in Manila doon siya natutulog sa akin. Eh ako super tipid because I was paying for my electricity, for everything. So I don’t turn on the aircon... But when he’s there he turns on everything. Tapos magte-text pa siya, ‘In-on ko ‘yung aircon mo ha. Tapos naligo pa ako para dagdagan ko yung electric bill mo.’

“Feeling ko, during that time niya ako nakita as an adult. He would tell me about mga problema nila sa campaign, na may issue si ganito at ganyan.

“Feeling ko ‘yung kwentuhan siguro namin from that point on mas equal na, na he can tell you about the things that he was worrying about...Feeling ko, ‘yun ‘yung pinaka-alone moment naming dalawa.”

He was pushing her to pursue a masters degree but she worried this might disrupt a career she was building for herself. These conversations that Aika said had reached a level of maturity for her carried on until her father took on the national scene. But the girls weren’t too happy when Aquino appointed him to the cabinet portfolio of interior and local government.

Jesse was catapulted from a small city to a grand scale and they were not ready for that. Tricia, for one, had a violent reaction.

She recalled the day her father was appointed secretary. He was tutoring her for a Math exam for the following day. His phone was ringing wildly. He ignored them and stayed with her, him sensing that she was against his new job. “It was so difficult to accept but I knew his heart was in the right place.” Tricia, too, had moved to Manila when it was her time to take up college, also studying at the Ateneo for an undergrad course in medicine.

Despite Jesse’s work load they had their bonding time on Friday nights when Tricia, who wasn’t much of an extrovert, would rather spend the evenings watching basketball games with her father. “There was his constant presence. For 18 years he was there when I woke in 55

the morning, pag-gising ko andiyan na siya.”

She just turned 18 exactly a month before the tragic plane crash.

She was paranoid about deaths. She ran through the profiles of past DILG secretaries on Google, reading that one had died in service. “I had this crazy idea na baka yung dad ko… when I realized how dangerous the job could be, because he’d be dealing with the police. Eh, alam ko medyo madumi yung ranks ng police that time, so parang sabi ko, ‘paano kung yung dad ko … parang ma… ganun din yung maging fate niya?’ I wasn’t being selfish, it was more of natatakot ako na baka ganun din yung mangyari sa dad ko.”

Sige, I’ll see you in the morning.

Ok, sana maabutan pa kita.

That was her last moment with her dad, the night before he flew to Cebu on August 18. He came home late and this time she was studying for an exam in her History class. He brought home a pasalubong, their favorite cashew nuts that she nibbled on. And in the morning, he was there rushing to get out of the condominium for his flight. He had his breakfast of Vienna sausage.

Since he became DILG secretary, he had to move to the capital from Naga, staying at a condominium owned by his sister and in which Aika and Tricia could stay with him as well. Aika was already starting her career with an energy company and Tricia was deep into her university studies.

In between his tight schedule in Cebu, he managed to send her a text message before her exam that morning, the rah-rah dad following the day-to-day lives of his daughters.

I didn’t do too well.

Tricia was annoyed for having burned the midnight oil just to get the answers right but she didn’t think she did such a good job in History.

It’s okay, anak. Don’t be stressed. I’ll see you later.

They were going to take the evening bus to Naga after his Cebu trip in the Visayas. “Just take the bus with us, hindi mo rin naman mahahabol kasi it’s almost done”–Jillian’s swimming competition. It was just impossible and so in Cebu, Jesse thought he lucked out when a private plane offered to fly him to Naga, taking a quicker flight crossing the mid-section of the archipelago.

Hintayin ka pa ba namin later?

No, anak.

Tricia got the last message twice, the last one beeped on her phone later in the afternoon, and not long after that, Aika was on the phone telling her, “Come down to the lobby, come down!”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I’m on my way home. I need to talk to you.”

She saw Aika sobbing when she got in her car by the condominium lobby.

“Tricia, may nangyari sa plane ni Papa.”

“Oh my God, hindi totoo ‘yan.”

The shock had made her mute and the tears welled up inside her.

Distorted images of the plane flashed across her mind. Where did it crash? How? Why? “I didn’t know what to think. Gusto ko magwala, parang I wanted to talk… parang I wanted to talk to him now.” Gaining some sense of the news, the two sisters drove to a nearby Sacred Heart church in New Manila that was their father’s refuge.

The two sisters took the bus that was to take them the entire night of travelling. Aika asked a cousin to join them, to be one with them in their pain and grief. On the way Tricia saw the sign of morbidity, of grave markers on a roadside business. No, it can’t be. His name won’t be there next. She didn’t like what the universe was telling her. There could still be hope. Her father could still be alive.

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She fell asleep in the bus. She dreamed of her dad. He was alive. He was happy. But in the dream, he had no legs. He had injuries but he was alive. ‘I’m okay, don’t worry about me,’ he was telling her, a reassurance that would come to pieces within hours upon reaching Naga.

When they walked through the door of their home, Leni broke down, her entire being etched in the pain of loss. She wept like she had never before. The girls had never seen her in that state; their mother was always a composed figure in their eyes, a strong woman who knew her place. She decorated their new home in the style of simplicity, with elegance, uncluttered, beholding the triangular statue of the patron virgin of Peñafrancia, in a living room replete with happy family pictures captured in capiz frames.

Jesse wasn’t there. Jesse was somewhere in the sea, his life cut short by an accident that would upend their lives.

Jillian was napping on Leni’s lap in the couch. Her mother’s shaking emotions roused her.

“Nahanap na ba si Papa?”

There was no answer. And she, too, wept with her mother. The man who was the light of their lives was not going to walk through the door. “‘Yung reunion naming mag-iina, yun talaga nag-ano sa akin na nawawala talaga si Papa. We’re not here because it’s… a long weekend, we’re here because my dad’s missing. It was hard, the next couple of days were hard,” said Tricia.

“When you look out the window, what you see were trucks talaga of media waiting for someone from the family who’s gonna talk kasi we were very private at that time. We didn’t talk to anyone. Stand-by lang talaga sila doon and marami ring nagmamahal sa dad ko, which is nice talaga kasi sila yung mag-alaga sa amin. And… hindi natatapos ‘yung novena sa bahay.

“We didn’t have to ask people to do it for us. Talagang sila na ‘yung nandiyan, they would set up the novena and will only ask us for permission na, ‘Pwede bang mag-novena kami sa bahay niyo, ganitong oras?’

Hindi kami nawalan ng tao, laging may nangyayari, people gave us food kasi alam nila hindi kami nakakakain…

“Punong-puno yung bahay at the time. I’ve never seen the house that full. So, hindi kami napabayaan ng mga minahal ng dad ko.”

The plane took a sudden swerve to the right, turned up before a nosedive into the sea, a vertical plunge that ended the life of Jesse Robredo and the two pilots. It happened in a split second. Jun Abrazado heard a blast that broke his ears, and when he awoke, water was up to his waist, rising fast. He choked on salt water tasting of fuel.

His hand went to the right side where Jesse sat. Empty. He struggled to unbuckle his seatbelt.

As the water crawled up to his neck, he squeezed himself out of a hole. He made it to the surface and saw the water swallowing the tail of the plane. Fighting against the waves, he saw a tiny black object in the distance. It was his Samsonite backpack and he swam to it, clutching onto it for life. Just then a banca came paddling toward him. Tulong! Tulong! Tulong! He kept kicking to stay afloat, which felt like an eternity. The boatman and a small boy pulled him out of the water and into the boat.

His entire being was in agony. Sitting there in the expanse of the sea, the boat bobbing, the shock hit him. After his struggle in the water, he seemed to have frozen when he was rescued. He made it, but his mind went blank. His presence of mind returned to him when they reached the shore. Where were the others? Where was his boss? He asked the boatman to take him to the police station where he could call for help. Search and rescue was underway on a wide scale, it included divers going deep to find Jesse Robredo.

Three days later, the nightmare revealed itself.

PHOTO OF SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATION COURTESY OF CAAP MEDIA AFFAIRS; PHOTO OF FUNERAL COURTESY OF THE PRES. COMM. OPERATIONS OFFICE; CELL PHONE IMAGE COURTESY OF RAPPLER

He choked on salt water tasting of fuel.

His hand went to the right side where Jesse had sat. Empty.

SEARCH AND RESCUE

Clockwise, from top: Then DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas arrived in Masbate the day after the crash to monitor rescue operations; Robredo in his home in Naga City; the fuselage was found about 800m off shore at a depth of nearly 200 feet; the Robredos at the state funeral; a message from Robredo aide Jun Abrazado to Pacifico Talpacido of the Philippine Public Safety College public affairs office just before the tragedy.

W h e r e

GIA PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANK CALLAGHAN

For eight decades, its bleachers had witnessed great triumphs and defeats, its grounds graced by sports superstars from Babe Ruth to Bjรถrn Borg to David Beckham. Surviving the threat of destruction early this year, the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex remains standing amidst decay and neglect. Krip Yuson recalls a lifetime of walking its hallowed grounds and keeping score

T r e a d

NTS

WHEN IT COMES TO WHAT WE USED TO CALL “RIZAL MEMORIAL,” it’s all a matter of highlighting memories, from as far back as six decades ago.

As a Bedan throughout my elementary and high school years—all of the 1950s—I enjoyed a boyhood that forged an early relationship with the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex. Well, make that specifically the Rizal Memorial Coliseum for that entire decade of basketball allegiance when we chanted: “Stand on the grandstand, beat on the tin can, who can, we can, Animo San Beda, beat …!”

It could be Ateneo, La Salle, Letran, Mapua, or Jose Rizal College— whose cheerleading contingents, all male, occasionally paraded a live eagle tethered to a bar held aloft by guys in blue and white; or as archers clad in green, bearing bows and arrows; or as knights, gymnasts, and dancers.

Oh, the halftime spectacle was a special treat. For Bedans, it meant welcoming a troop of young boys, mostly portly, who pranced into the hardcourt as “Little Indians”—naked but for loincloths and headdresses while brandishing tomahawks.

“Umpah, umpah, umpah, umpah, Beda, Beda, Beda, Beda, fight, fight, fight, fight, ey-o kim-kum-kawa…” The gibberish was heartfelt and infectious. And when it inspired the Red Lions to win a game, we rose with fervent pride and sang our victory anthem: “From Mendiola to the battlefield, march the sons of SBC, bearing banners of the red and white, waving for a victory!”

I was about nine or 10 when my dad started to purchase season tickets to the NCAA basketball games. That meant all of 10 regular games on a round-robin basis among the six collegiate teams, and when we were fortunate to make it all the way, higher-priced tickets for the semifinal and final encounters.

Our school had a tradition to uphold, after all. When I was just in 60

Grade 2 at the age of six, in 1951, San Beda had beaten Ateneo for the championship, then repeated the feat the following year.

Our Red Lions were led by “King” Caloy, or Carlos Loyzaga, to this day still widely acknowledged as the best ever Filipino basketball player, given all his sterling achievements as a national team stalwart who also figured prominently in international competitions.

But in 1953 and 1954, for some reason or other, perhaps an injury or scholastic deficiency, our star center at 6’3” couldn’t suit up for the Mendiola squad, so the Blue Eagles also took two consecutive championships.

The year 1955 featured a climactic showdown, with Loyzaga back in the Bedan fold. What was at stake was the fabled Zamora Cup donated by the family that crafted championship trophies— to be claimed by the NCAA team that would win the first three championships in the 1950s.

Once again it became the Red Lions and the Blue Eagles that would match up in the finals. And the comebacking Loyzaga spelled “The Big Difference”—to earn his lifetime sobriquet. San Beda took the Crispulo Zamora Cup home to Mendiola—a feat that still figures in hoopdom recollections to this day.

Given that backgrounder on my school’s claim to greatness in varsity basketball, it became natural for all Bedans to take pride in this pedigree. In fact, two of the strongest memories I had of my early years in the Mendiola campus were of the day a banner was unfurled over the main gate, announcing a 1-2 Bedan finish in the bar exams sometime in the early ’50s, and the celebratory bonfire in 1955 when we won the NCAA cage crown and with it the Zamora Cup. While I have also savored the memory of seeing the gigantic “King Caloy” up close and personal when he once ran around the track field

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

The back entrance to the baseball stadium, which has seen home runs from Lou Gehrig, Akinori Iwamura, and even baseball legend Babe Ruth.

THUNDERSTRUCK

OPPOSITE: ARCHIVAL PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LOPEZ MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

Rizal Stadium’s wear and tear is obvious on the dirty walls of its grandstand, which stands along Adriatico’s dusty roads. Opposite: An undated photo of the stadium from The Manila Chronicle.

Those were the years that filled up memories with more distinct highlights of the NCAA’s glory years: seeing the burly Charlie Badion of Mapua execute his patented “bicycle drive,” and that one time La Salle’s gangling center Kurt Bachmann got roughed up by Badion, provoking Bachmann’s mestiza mother to rush into the court with a threatening umbrella. ”

on campus, I don’t seem to treasure any distinct memory of that particular championship game held at the Rizal Memorial Coliseum.

My dad and I must have been there watching the momentous game live, before proceeding to the campus for the bonfire. I’m sure he had taken to acquiring those season tickets beginning the previous year when the sports complex had been reconstructed in time for the 1954 Asian Games after being ruined during the Japanese Occupation of World War II. Initially, the entire complex had been inaugurated for the 1934 Far Eastern Championship Games, with specific venues for various sports such as track and field, football, baseball, swimming, and tennis besides basketball.

Eventually, I was to learn that the landmark that welcomed us on Sundays had been designed by architect Juan Arellano as a sports facility with outstanding Art Deco features. I do recall marveling at the main coliseum’s impressive façade with its gridwork of squares and what looked like circular icons within them. Then too, the various sports played in the assorted venues were represented by minimalist iconography.

It was always a thrill to line up for the queues leading to the ticket-takers.

Entering the coliseum, one smelled the freshness of its confines in the early going, that is, when the team one would root for was playing the first game of a doubleheader. When one came for the main game, that freshness had dissipated. At the time, large blowers did their best to ensure air circulation and reduce humidity.

One tried to avoid sitting behind the steel columns that held up the roof from the four corners. If I remember correctly, the best tickets for the lower box and reserved sections were for Sections D and E, and on the other side, Section I. Such seating came with the privilege of a central view.

Going clockwise upon entering these areas with numbered seats, the A and B sections were behind the southern goalpost, with B and part of C perilously behind the dreaded columns, ditto F and H behind the next two columns that flanked the northern goalpost, and farther on, maybe Section K behind the last column.

Dad took me to the games until I entered high school, after which I often went on my own, or met up with classmates. Those were the years that filled up memories with more distinct highlights of the NCAA’s glory years. These would include seeing the burly Charlie Badion of Mapua execute his patented “bicycle drive,” Loreto Carbonell of SBC pump in his unerring jumpers from the wings, and that one time when La Salle’s gangling center Kurt Bachmann, who was sometimes seen as a challenge for Loyzaga, got roughed up by Badion, provoking Bachmann’s mestiza mother to rush into the court with a threatening umbrella. A sheepish Badion quickly escaped her ire.

In those high school years, another feature enveloped the environment outside the landmark on the corner of Vito Cruz and F.B. Harrison Streets.

Apart from the motley assortment of curbside vendors with their corn,

peanuts, siopao, ice cream, popsicles, soft drinks, and cigarettes, past which one zigzagged on the sidewalk, sometimes the element of fear, or at least a modicum of concern, attended the short walk from Taft Avenue to the stadium and back—especially back. Especially after a Bedan victory over Letran, which was known to deploy tough guys who couldn’t take a defeat.

We were advised by our own version of street scrappers to wear our PMT belts to the games. These had heavy metal buckles, and could be whipped out as weapons in case we were set upon. We trooped together in large packs as a deterrent, but there was no telling when a late afternoon or early evening could wind up in a rumble.

Games even against the Lasallites, whose campus was just next door, were considered safe; most were seen as relatively disciplined despite the tisoyy braggadocio. Ditto with the Atenistas who had to come all the way from the farthest reaches of Quezon City. JRC and Mapua fans were also no problem, since most didn’t even seem as passionate over basketball as the more frequent champs. It was the rough-and-tumble boys from Muralla who often caused problems after a game. But Manila’s Finest were aware of this propensity, so that their presence in the area often prevented any escalation of occasional fisticuffs. ff My senior year in Mendiola was rewarded with yet another

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were inscribed to honor historic home runs. The first had been by Lou Gehrig, way back in 1934 when the stadium was barely a year old. It was Babe Ruth who hit the second homer, presumably on the same day when the touring New York Yankees began a couple of exhibition games against what must have been a Philippine selection—at the time superior to the Japanese as Asian exemplars of the game.

Much later I was to learn from a sports broadcasting mentor that a Cavite pitcher, Armando Oncinian, had struck out The Bambino in the second game. The year 1935 turned out to be the last year the legendary slugger played. He retired after a brief stint with the Boston Braves of the National League (not the American League’s more famous Boston Red Sox where he had started his career). It was with the Braves that Babe Ruth hit his last three home runs. Conceivably, the one he hit out of the park at the Rizal Baseball Stadium was his fourth to last. Memory wobbles a bit in this area, however, as I seem to recall having seen at least two wall markers for Babe Ruth. So he could have homered twice in Manila.

A couple of decades later, a postseason tour of the Pacific saw the return of the New York Yankees together with baseball legends Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle.

A fellow sports lover from UP Diliman and I began to frequent RMSC as wide-ranging sports fans. Boxing events were also held at the stadium. We followed the early careers of eventual world champions such as Rene Barrientos and Pedro Adigue. This was in the mid-‘60s, half a decade after Gabriel “Flash” Elorde had won his title at the momentous inaugural event at the Araneta Coliseum in 1960.

Sometimes we lazed away on Sunday afternoons at the baseball stadium, where Filomeno Codiñera Jr. was the star. We became tennis fans, and witnessed the last years of the aging duo Felicisimo “Mighty Mite” Ampon and Raymundo Deyro, who still represented our country in the Davis Cup, with Johnny Jose and Cesar Carmona as doubles specialists.

International tennis stars also came for indoor exhibition matches at the stadium. One of these was Manolo Santana, the Spanish superstar who was ranked the world’s No. 1 in 1966. Another was the mustachioed swashbuckler John Newcombe of Australia. But that was a decade later, in 1975, as part of the ATP World Tour on outdoor clay courts. Again memory wobbles, but we could also have seen the great Rod Laver play an exhibition match in the basketball stadium, sometime in the mid-‘60s.

We were advised by our own version of street scrappers to wear our PMT belts to the games. These had heavy metal buckles, and could be whipped out as weapons in case we were set upon. We trooped together in large packs as a deterrent, but there was no telling when a late afternoon or early evening could wind up in a rumble.

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ARCHIVAL PHOTO COURTESY OF LOU GEPAL OF MANILA NOSTALGIA

championship, of the 1960 Red Lions that hadn’t been seen as a contender, but whose balanced team play behind captain ball Tata Carranceja bucked the odds. To recall that team’s other names, there were our stocky young center Alberto Reynoso, who went on to become a prized national team mainstay, Ramon Ascue, Pepe Oyson, Boy Roxas, Joselito Juni, Bill Villanueva, Gopal Singh, Mon Ballesca, Acuña, Arceo, Castelo, and Feliciano.

While high school graduation meant an end to watching the NCAA cage wars at “Rizal Memorial,” it didn’t mean a long separation from the venue. In fact, camaraderie with a new set of friends at UP Diliman eventually meant getting to know the rest of what the sports complex had to offer.

Oh, earlier in my boyhood I had enjoyed a treat from an uncle who took me to a couple of games at the baseball stadium. It was an altogether different ff experience for a spectator. The stands were mostly unfilled, with the breezy, leisurely afternoons going by in relaxed fashion, in keeping with the game’s laid-back nature. Hotdogs and peanuts were consumed lazily throughout the three hours it took for a game to finish.

On the far-away centerfield walls, the names of baseball greats

GUT TERBALL

Even the Philippine Sports Commission’s Bowling Center, built decades after Rizal’s original structures, appears poorly maintained with paint peeled away and parts of its walls chipped off. Opposite: The opening ceremonies of a sports tournament in 1958.

WHEN WE WERE KINGS

The Coliseum faces the chaos of Vito Cruz, the sidewalks of which are lined with stall vendors, pedicab drivers, the homeless. Opposite: The Coliseum in 1936, two years after it was built.

The names of baseball greats were inscribed to honor historic home runs.

The first had been by Lou Gehrig, way back in 1934 when the stadium was barely a year old. It was Babe Ruth who hit the second homer, presumably on the same day when the touring New York Yankees began a couple of exhibition games against what must have been a Philippine selection.

We also followed some seasons of UAAP basketball, bearing witness to Robert “Sonny” Jaworski’s development from a burly athlete without a shot to an all-around player and intimidator. We also saw the start of the UE Red Warriors’ dynasty under coach Baby Dalupan.

But it wasn’t until the late 1960s, when I lucked in with my first regular media job at ABS-CBN News, and got assigned to the Sports division, that I became even more familiar with the RMSC. It was our grizzled boss, Ric Tierro, then known as the “Dean of Philippine Sportscasters,” who personally tutored me on how to cover a baseball game.

It was simple. One did it with the help of a Mongol pencil. Ensconced on a dugout for our live radio broadcast, Mr. Tierro showed me how to tap or snap the pencil on the base of the large microphone facing us. This was to simulate the kind of contact a bat made with the ball.

Of course, the tricky sound effect ff came a second or two after the live action.

It didn’t take me long to get the hang of it. A tap for a fly ball, a muted one for a bunt, a sharper tap for a legitimate base hit, and a solid snap to simulate a long field hit or the rare homer.

Soon I was left off ff on my own. And eventually a UP buddy and I gained enough of Mr. Tierro’s trust that he began assigning us to also cover tennis matches on live radio. On RMSC’s tennis courts, young blood had taken over.

Eddie Cruz steadily rose up the ranks, from a ball boy in the Larap (now Jose Panganiban), Camarines Norte shell courts to Manila’s national tournaments.

After Ampon and Deyro, Cruz ruled Philippine tennis for a decade, and took up the cudgels for Davis Cup representation together with the likes of Sammy Ang Jr. and Macky Dominguez.

Eventually, Araneta Coliseum took over the staging of most basketball games, from the commercial league (and eventually the PBA, starting in 1975) to both of the collegiate leagues. So it was in Cubao’s altar of hoopdom where I eventually saw the transition of players like Francis Arnaiz, Joy Cleofas, Marte Samson, and Chito Afable of Ateneo’s fabled squad to professional basketball, along with their contemporaries from UE’s killer group with Johnny Revilla, Rudolf Kutsch, Rudy Soriano, and Epoy Alcantara.

By the time The Big J teamed up with Arnaiz for Toyota’s legendary PBA rivalry with Crispa, the old basketball stadium on Vito Cruz (eventually Pablo Ocampo Street), had passed on to deep memory.

In 1989, when Björn Borg and John McEnroe revived their famous rivalry at Rizal’s tennis courts, I made it a point to be there, momentarily refreshing affiliation with a sports shrine.

Then after what seemed like an era, I set foot at RMSC (for the last time) in late 2011 when global icon David Beckham and the LA Galaxy played a match against the Philippine Azkals at the football stadium. It seemed like old

times after the game (in which Beckham bent an exquisite long drive for a goal) when I led my date quickly out of the gates and hotfooted it past the street vendors all the way across Taft where we had parked off ff St. Scholastica’s College, several blocks away. Now even that is a long-ago memory.

With the RMSC now threatened with urbanization—in our country, unfortunately synonymous with yet another commercial mall development — indeed we appear to face another tragedy: seeing another institutional bulwark of memory bite the dust.

Thanks to a recent declaration as a National Historical Landmark by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines and as an Important Cultural Property by the National Museum of the Philippines, the eight-decade-old sports complex may still be preserved, owing to the National Cultural Heritage Act. Only fitting and proper, we should think.

Many of us may not have made it to the National Stadium when The Beatles performed live on July 4, 1966, but countless other recollections—of the feats of sports giants from Babe Ruth to Caloy Loyzaga, the diminutive Ampon to the Big J, Björn Borg to David Beckham— must have already clothed the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex with such heritage that it cannot ever be undressed, much less deconstructed. To do so would be to render the collective memory of generations in shameful deshabille.

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If social media is where you find the next big star, then the spotlight is shining bright on KC Del Rosario. The daughter of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei talks to Ramon De Veyra about her upcoming plans of working in film and why you’ve really seen only 2% of the real KC

PHOTOGRAPHED BY BJ PASCUAL STYLED BY PAM QUIÑONES

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IT’S NOT TOO LATE YET IN THE NIGHT, AND THE ROOM ISN’T VERY CROWDED,

and KC Del Rosario and all of her 23 years sits at the bar and takes a tentative sip of the absinthe she’s ordered. The pale green liquid seems to glow, seems to have been concocted in a lab. Seems to promise some kind of odd adventure like in ’80s movies. “Behold my 70% alcohol!

Look upon me and beware my blackout potential!” She offers a sip and I try it. It tastes exactly what I assume a 70% alcohol drink tastes like.

Earlier this evening, KC said, “I don’t really drink a lot, but I love absinthe and scotch.”

Later this evening she’ll say: “I love alcohol.”

A cursory online search of KC Del Rosario yields precious few facts.

Instead, there are a lot of exaggerations, untruths, some haterade, and your usual comment threads that quickly turn into a cesspool of toxicity. While not in showbiz per se, she has a number of friends who are, and is used as fodder by unscrupulous showbiz blogs. Who does she hang with? Who is she dating? Who is she wearing? Where was she seen? Was shade being thrown? She occupies a space that is, shall we say… showbiz-adjacent. It’s a fact that doesn’t escape her. “I find it interesting why people want to follow me,” she says. “I’m not in showbiz, I’m not an actress, I didn’t seek fame. It’s strange.”

Maybe not so strange. “Pretty young woman with famous friends” is the origin story of some celebrities. One of them even married Kanye. But let’s not be reductive.

Here’s something that is true about KC. She is the daughter of a prince of Brunei. Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of the sultan, one of the less conventional of Brunei’s royalty. While I’m not 100 percent sure that this confers upon her the title of princess, who wants to mess with that narrative? This is definitely one of those families that would be featured on Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. How many people do you know own a bunch of tigers and leopards? What’s that? You’re friends with Chavit? Okay, fair enough. We’re talking about the kind of wealth that actually could buy you, your friends, and this club, were they so inclined. The kind that dictates that members of her family have armed escorts when in Asia. The kind that would explain what you might see on KC’s social media posts: designer outfits, nights out (or in) with friends, travels to exotic locales. Or it could just be a young woman in her early twenties enjoying her life.

A young woman who also took up fashion design in two schools on different continents.

So much chatter online, almost none of it from KC herself. Let’s amend that somewhat.

“I grew up in London ‘til I was about 13, moved to LA until [I was]

about 16… I did my senior year at Brent and I graduated at 17.

“After Brent I went to Raffles Design Institute; I went there for two years, graduated in fashion design. Then I did a few courses in London at Central St. Martins, fashion design too, then I did fine arts the next year.”

She attended third grade in Brunei, but apart from that hasn’t spent a significant amount of time there, though she’ll visit occasionally for a weekend to see her father, and look in on the aforementioned tigers and leopards, which are kept in “like, a giant aviary, but with tigers instead of birds.” They’re very well taken care of, she’s quick to reassure me. They even breed the tigers now. “You can play with some of the cubs, but past a certain age it’s just the handlers.”

Even though she majored in fashion design, of late a different siren has been calling to her. “Right now I’m thinking of taking up film, either in LA or New York or Paris. That’s what I really wanna do. I’ve done fashion design… I feel like I will pursue it eventually, but as of now I’ve been really into film. I wanna get into that more and I like editing short clips, videos. If you look on my Instagram, I just have fun, just editing things with friends. Just iMovie, nothing serious. I’ve been interested in film for years but I never pursued it, never studied it. Even when I was studying fashion design I was already editing small videos. I wanna do fashion films; I like those quirky artsy short ones, ones with a concept.”

I ask her about editing and what she likes about it. “I like the flow… everything precise. When I’m editing I add music, so I like to edit to the beat, and go with the song. It always takes me so long to find the perfect song but when I do I fully commit. Sometimes I’ll start with the song; it’s more rewarding.”

She lists her top five movies, and it’s a varied list. Factory Girl, the Edie Sedgwick biopic starring Sienna Miller; Julie Taymor’s Beatles tribute Across The Universe; Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting; Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla; and Tim Burton’s Big Fish. She loves Ritchie, Burton, Sofia Coppola. One of her two cats is named Gaspar, after controversial Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noe. She recommends Mr. Nobody, with Jared Leto (“That’s one of my favorites. I like psychological films as well as art films”). “And that old film, the one with John Travolta…” “Grease?” I venture. “Saturday Night Fever?” Her eyes light up.

“Pulp Fiction!”

But having only recently finished with her matriculation, the classroom setting isn’t what she has in mind. “I have a friend in LA and she’s a director, and I think I can be an apprentice and learn the ropes that way. I’d rather do that than go to school; I feel like I’ll learn more behind the scenes of actual filmmaking than sitting in class.”

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When I ask about the shift from her major, she takes a moment. “I was in fashion school and it kind of took me away from my passion.

That sounds bad, but if I did it a different way… When I was in London it challenged me more; it was different from here.” Since then it’s been a mix of things here and there, nothing long-term. “I’ve been traveling a lot. I’m very picky about jobs; I’ve learned to be careful. I consult my mom a lot more on those.”

Other things she is into: polo this year, because of her dad. She goes to each of his games. I say it’s not every day you meet a Polo Club member who actually plays polo. I wonder aloud about its risky reputation, but she’s not worried. She’s been riding horses since she was young. Because of course she has.

Music, obviously. “I’m into everything. Not country. Weirdly I have 30,000 followers on Spotify. I don’t know how that happened but I like making playlists.” I imagine it’s possibly bleed-through from her 100,000+ Instagram followers. Or cross-pollination from her 28,000 Twitter followers. Of her favorite kinds of music, she offers: “House music, that Euro vibe. Hip-hop. Electronic. I like the classics, like Marvin Gaye.”

She wants to get into art directing. For both fashion and film. She’s interested in being a fashion editor someday.

KC Del Rosario and all of her 23 years is still a work in progress. For her, the future is still a moving target.

74

After a while, she’s at work on a cocktail. Later I’ll learn she prefers Johnnie Walker Double Black to cocktails, but her friend said this one was good so she got one. I get the same one myself and it actually is good. Refreshing and light, very much a summer cocktail. It has juniper berries and we end up asking the bartender where they get their supply of juniper berries. Turns out they’re imported by a deli.

“I’m a bad liar,” she’ll say, apropos of nothing. She gives an example, about trying to get out of going out without hurting anyone’s feelings. “But I tend to giggle. I won’t be able to hold it.”

It’s a peculiar thing when I can find online what’s supposedly the dating history of someone who is non-showbiz. Some names I recognize, some I don’t, some ring a bell. There’s a model, a scion of a scion, an athlete. I don’t know if any of it is true.

KC shot onto a lot more people’s radar when rumors began to circulate about her and [REDACTED], based on pictures of them hanging out together. At the time she was only 19, still studying in Raffles, and the onslaught of curious gossipy onlookers as well as rabid fans of a supposed jilted party, fans who had painted a digital target on her back, was more than she was used to. “It got to me then,” she recalls. “I had no control over what people were posting about me.

I was never in a relationship, but this person’s ex was talking and it just blew up and I got tagged as the bad person but I wasn’t even dating this person.

“I’m more guarded now. I’m single, not seeing anyone, not looking to see anyone.”

We start to talk about the mutability of reputations, especially in such a gossip-loving culture, one steeped in “Catholic” traditions. “I think my image here is just as a party girl, but that’s not really me. I mean, I’ll go out, I’ll have fun. Who doesn’t? But I’m also very chill.

Manila’s very conservative; people don’t really understand who I am but they will judge me. They have no idea who I am.”

Naturally this begs my next question: “Who are you?”

She looks at a loss, hands in the air. She tags in her friend Sean on her other side: “Help me out, Sean.” He looks up from his phone, says “People don’t know how much of a down-to-earth person she really is.

People see her as this princess, this spoiled rich girl, but she’s really not. I hang out with her every single day and I know her well enough to say that she’s just like everyone else but wittier, funnier, nicer than most people I know. People are so intimidated by the exterior that they don’t have the guts to talk to her.”

“It’s Manila,” KC resumes. “People talk. People will introduce me as a princess of Brunei and they’ll be like ‘no way’ so immediately they have this thing in their head. They expect something. But then I’ll just have a casual conversation with them and they’ll be surprised.”

I ask if it gets to her. No, she says. “It’s what I’m used to. It’s not accurate. People see I have a certain kind of life and maybe that’s why they follow me but I don’t know how else to live my life because that’s normal to me.”

I ask what the process was like, getting used to being “Internet famous.” When complete strangers feel they have a claim over you, or are owed a response. Or sit in judgment. Or cast aspersions.

“It was just time. These people don’t know you. They know five percent of me. Only like two percent of my Camera Roll ends up online.

I’m still growing up, still figuring out stuff. Having haters is annoying, obviously, but I learned to get over that because they don’t know me. I know me. My friends know me. My family knows me.”

And for KC, that’s all she needs.

She talks about her favorite places: London, Paris, Dubai, LA. The best parties she’s ever been to were in Dubai. When she was staying in London she would go back and forth to Paris, where her father used to have a house. In LA she got rid of her British accent.

She tells me about being in Tokyo with her sister, them entering a tattoo parlor because her sister wanted to get one, but her getting one instead. Going down her back, it says “Dream.”

I ask about another tattoo, a finely-detailed one of a rose on her wrist. “There used to be a heart there. It was for an ex,” she says, rolling her eyes. She points out how you can just almost kinda sorta see the outline of the heart in the petals. I ask why a rose, and KC Del Rosario and all of her 23 years says “Because like roses, love dies.”

Then she giggles.

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“People see I have a certain kind of life and maybe that’s why they follow me but I don’t know how else to live my life because that’s normal to me.”

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Philippine sports does not lack in great rivalries, but the fiercest one today is happening behind the scenes. And no matter the winner, it seems the biggest loser is the Filipino athlete. Veteran sports journalist Francis T.J. Ochoa reports on the politics and plays for power inside the country’s highest sporting body, and the volatile feud between POC president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco and basketball legend and PSC commissioner Ramon Fernandez

THE GOING HAS BEEN GOOD FOR THE NATIONAL SPORTS ASSOCIATIONS (NSAS) that enjoy a good relationship with the country’s two regulatory and administrative bodies, The Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) and The Philippine Sports Commission (PSC). Money, equipment, and nutritional support have led to improvements in competitive performance, but rarely to a degree that surpasses records from as recent as a decade ago. And for NSAs out of favor, there hangs the ever-present risk of one’s hard work not paying off, and the sense that one’s competitors aren’t being good sports.

Here, veteran sports journalist Francis T.J. Ochoa dissects the impact of longrunning POC president Peping Cojuangco on national sports, and the unfortunate power play that has been pushing to the sidelines what should be everyone’s top priority: the welfare of our athletes.

We also gathered some of the most important local names in Olympic competition to share their insights on how things were, are, and should be, as they are forced to maintain an intricate balance between top physical conditioning and political maneuvering.

Together these narratives, at once competing and complementary, give us an exclusive look at a playing field that is not necessarily level, and the change required to better look after our athletes. After all, they are on the frontlines, devoting the prime of their lives to gain pride for a nation desperate for it.

With interviews by Jae Alde, Carla Aguirre de Cárcer, Patricia Chong, Gelo Dionora, Emil Hofileña, and Sam Sianghio Images courtesy of JP Canonigo of Istoryadista, Celso Limjuco Dayrit’s “The Olympic Movement in the Philippines,” Ching Del Rosario, Meredith Oliveros, The Lopez Museum and Library, Philippine Taekwondo Association, Wushu Federation of the Philippines.

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Bill Velasco Sports Analyst

How has our performance in boxing been over the years?

We’re not doing as well as we should be. There are a lot of factors. On the government side, constant change of administration means change of administration in the PSC. Secondly, the programs of past administrations have not really been clear. Now they’re establishing training centers all over the country, which is a good thing. It will take a few years for that to kick in. And then changes also internationally: back then, you could send a complete 12-man roster to qualify for the Olympics, now there are less slots. Because the countries themselves that organize the Olympic games really feel the strain of spending so much money for an event that will eventually bankrupt their country.

But at the core, no matter how great your horse is, if your rider is terrible...

Ryan Gialogo Ateneo Boxing Club Coach

GLORY ROAD

Clockwise, from top: The 1952 Olympic-bound national basketball team; a discus thrower at a Philippine Army track and field meet; the 1960 national basketball team; the 1995 World Taekwondo Championships in Manila; DLSU’s 1979 national champion taekwondo team.

Give us a snapshot of a boxer’s life.

The training is regular. And national team members are in-house. Which is good. I don’t know about now pero normally lahat ng national team at athletes ay may allowance. And meron din silang national team-issued jackets, uniforms, sapatos, ganyan.

Now given that, ‘yung training, at least twice a day.

Some, if not all, athletes have part-time work also. So sa gitna, ‘yung mga national athletes, nagtuturo ng boxing, or minsan sa schools they act as trainers or coaches. Nagagasgas ang athletes dahil bukod sa kulang ang nutrition ay may trabahong kailangang isingit. Ang afternoons dapat libre ‘yan, dapat tinutulugan ‘yan.

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nyone who has ever covered a sporting event in the international arena knows this to be true: It is so easy to fall in love with the Filipino athlete.

Whether he is standing just outside a funereal dugout, leaning against the wall of a coliseum tunnel with red-rimmed eyes about to brave an interview just minutes after missing out on a championship slot, or biting a gold medal while fighting back tears of joy after an emotional singing of the national anthem, the Filipino athlete is worth rooting for.

Because no other athlete, from any country as emotionally invested in sports as the Philippines is, has to go through what the Filipino athlete goes through.

From makeshift programs crammed into short discount-budget training periods to oldschool coaching methods to faulty leadership, the Filipino athlete goes through a lot before he or she even starts thinking about beating the opposition.

the training. But at least it was a nice experience. Great crowd, great people. I can actually tell myself that i [sic] overcame the extraordinary.”

I overcame the extraordinary.

This from a guy whose performance in an event that was about grace and finesse had as much of both as a drunken bull cannonballing into a party pool.

But that is the Filipino athlete. Try following one closely. Try imagining what he or she has to overcome. Try not to tear up when they finally get to slap a hand across their chest while the national anthem plays.

Almost impossible.

THE 2017 SOUTHEAST Asian Games will once

again lure the Filipino athlete out of his training grounds and into competition arenas scattered all over Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian capital will serve as the petri dish where the country’s performance will be scrutinized, dissected and graded by a nation hungry for old-fashioned tales of triumph.

Tom Carrasco, in an article in a major daily,

But that is the Filipino athlete.

Try following one closely. Try imagining what he or she has to overcome.

The Filipino athlete is never the besttrained athlete in the field. The Filipino athlete is never the best equipped. The Filipino athlete is never the healthiest competitor. The Filipino athlete never carries the most number of wealthy sponsors going into competition.

And yet, somehow, the Filipino athlete makes do. Somehow, the Filipino athlete is never without a fight.

“We were ready to give up our lives for the country,” said Marc Pingris after playing through a couple of leg injuries in what is still the country’s most dramatic basketball victory—a semifinal conquest of perennial Asian bully South Korea during the 2013 FIBA Asia championship.

And the Filipino athlete is never without hope or optimism.

Minutes after horribly botched dives, JD Pahoyo came up with a very positive spin on the performance shared around the world during the 2015 Southeast Asian Games.

“This was the first time I felt this great intense pressure,” Pahoyo wrote on his Facebook page. “Hooo, one event is over. One more to go. I failed one dive and the rest of my dives were shittier than what i [sic] did during 84

already warned that another poor performance by the country would spell doom. He didn’t exactly say for whom. But he also didn’t have to.

The country’s national sporting program is under the guidance and leadership of the Philippine Olympic Committee, whose president, Jose “Peping” Cojuangco, Jr., has been the subject of criticism from almost all sectors outside the national Olympic body, which has become some sort of a carefully constructed echo chamber of his allies.

Cojuangco came into the POC leadership on a message of change. That was in 2004. Years later, the clamor for change meant he needed to be on his way out. In an editorial run by the Inquirer, the paper didn’t mince words—and numbers— to support the clamor for fresh leadership in the POC. “Consider this: Since Cojuangco took charge of the POC in 2004, our SEA Games gold medal count has gone down from 113 when we hosted in 2005, to 41 in Thailand in 2007, 38 in Laos in 2009 and 36 this year. If Cojuangco were CEO of a corporation, the board would have forced him out by now,” the Inquirer wrote.

This was in 2011.

So many editorials followed that, at one point, feelers were sent to the paper for a

Chot Reyes Gilas Pilipinas Head Coach

What is Filipino basketball’s international status? We’ve made great strides over the past 10 years, since we took over the program in 2007. With the current basketball leadership under Mr. (Manny V.) Pangilinan, we are now ranked 28 from 66 in the world. We were also able to compete in the FIBA World Cup in 2014, after more than 40 years.

Where’s the bulk of developmental support coming from? Maybe because there is such a huge private support for basketball, government support is more administrative. If you look at the National Basketball Program for Gilas, or Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, there is practically zero state financial support.

Our feeder system is similar to the United States. Are there alternatives? There’s an excellent basketball program in Australia, which is run by the Australian Institute of Sport. That’s largely government funded.

The ideal situation would be a combination—very strong government funding augmented by private funding.

Enzo Flojo Basketball Analyst

Basketball has become a legitimate part of our culture. Many Filipinos are at the very least casual fans of the sport, and follow it in various forms. It’s a sport that transcends boundaries in terms of having players move into different fields like showbiz or politics. It has even created or strengthened a lot of subcultures like hiphop, sneaker culture, streetball, etc.

What’s the ideal national structure for the sport? An ideal situation would be having one governing body for basketball that approves and is able to enforce rules on all the leagues, teams, and players in the country. Funding should come from the public, whether it’s through the government (prone to corruption, though) or through direct public funding like what some associations do in the States. As for the athlete pool, it should be filled by the very best players in each age group, and with full cooperation and submission from all the leagues, teams, and players.

R

“PAEN AFAEL

OM G” NEP

UCENO

ROBERT “SONNY” JAWORSKI

Sean Guevara SEA Games Bronze and Silver Medalist, High Jump

Have things changed since your competitive days? Noong 1999 na player ako, at yung mga player ngayon, halos ganoon pa din. Di naman maarte ang mga athletes. Kasi galing sila sa low to middle class. Cowboy lang. Game, fight. Pero sa totoo lang, basic na basic ang kulang. Pagkain, tirahan, supply. Equipment din. Minsan kinakargo ng coaches.

What’s the effect? ’Yung mga athletes at coaches natin, kaya ang aga pa nag-ki-quit na, kasi wala kang security dito. Athlete ka ngayon, kinabukasan pag tanggal ka na, ano pension sa iyo ng government? So instead na directed ang focus mo sa training, iniisip mo pa iyong nasa likod mo. Saan ka pupulutin after ng laro mo?

Cojuangco came into the POC leadership on a message of change. That was in 2004. Years later, the clamor for change meant he needed to be on his way out.

Arniel Ferrera SEA Games Gold Medalist, Hammer Throw

Track and Field used to be one of the most watched sports. Noong panahon ng Gintong Alay, napakasikat ng athletes in the persons of Lydia De Vega, Elma Muros, Simeon Toribio. Sa ngayon, iyon rin po iyong target namin: Maging katulad dati na sikat na sikat, televised. In terms of talent, nandiyan naman. Ang talent natin nasa province. Mayroon dito sa Manila pero kakaunti lang.

What improvements would you suggest?

Naniniwala ako na ang isa sa mga susi diyan ay iyong consistent na programa, pumalit man ang administrations. Kasama na rin iyong mga coaches.

Henry Dagmil Current Holder, SEA Games Men’s Long Jump Record

What’s ground zero like? Our sports is full of politics. That’s why it’s hard to get a gold medal.

If they think you have a shot, they’ll have your back. If not, or even if you’re injured, they’ll act as if they don’t know you. Kung hindi ka gusto ng namumuno, hindi makakatanggap ng support nang maayos. Kung sino pa yung sports na walang medalya, basta malapit sa chairman, ‘yun ang malaking makukuha.

Has the POC made any impact in developing your field? No impact. Bakit? Nakakaabala pa nga sa mga programa ng every NSA. Kung hindi ka gusto, hindi ka nila dadalhin, or pag-iinitan pa ang presidente ng NSA.

meeting to clarify certain issues. No meeting ever took place.

Instead, right after a fresh wave of criticism following the 2013 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, Cojuangco made his most vicious attack on Philippine sports media to date.

“Don’t listen to those characters who wrote things about being this and being that,” Cojuangco told athletes as he awarded cash incentives to medal winners.

“Dalawang klase lang ‘yan, mga jukebox, ibig sabihin kapag nahulugan ng pera, hindi na lalabas ‘yung kanta. ‘Yung iba naman, masyadong tatanga-tanga, hindi nakakaintindi ng sports.”

It was a massive PR shift from the POC chief, who had, until then, fought off critics by spinning silver medals as “near-golds” that could have bumped the Philippines up the SEA Games ladder a few steps. Cojuangco had always been on the defensive when it came to dealing with barbs from the media.

But on that day, he and ally Philippine Sports Commission chair Richie Garcia, went out and accused the media of being paid hacks. Or just plain stupid.

But the numbers don’t lie.

Ramon Fernandez, a current PSC commissioner who has been hot on the heels of Cojuangco since his appointment early in the Duterte presidency, has been Cojuangco’s fiercest critic.

“Sports in the country has really suffered because he has held on to his position for so long,” Fernandez said. “What we really need right now is a change of leadership.”

The four-time PBA MVP, who brings an

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athlete’s perspective into the government’s sports-funding body, went all out to call for Cojuangco’s resignation, openly supporting Ricky Vargas, the boxing association chief, when he ran for the POC presidency. Vargas ran on the very same platform that swept Cojuangco to the top sporting post in the country: Change.

But Vargas was given very little chance to unseat Cojuangco. In fact, even the Maynilad top honcho himself admitted the POC’s existing electoral framework was set up so that the current leadership could perpetuate itself in power. He called his candidacy a David-and-Goliath challenge to Cojuangco.

“The problem is Goliath is not allowing us to go to battle with him,” Vargas said, after the POC Comelec said Vargas did not attend enough POC board meetings to qualify for the presidency.

“If you look at that rule, which is not even

for a vise-grip hold on the POC presidency was put in place. According to critics, Garcia, who now owed his return to sporting relevance to Cojuangco, became no more than a rubber stamp for Cojuangco’s programs.

“Peping was practically both POC president and PSC chairman at the same time,” Fernandez said. “He even attended PSC board meetings.”

The problem is that both the POC and the PSC are independent bodies whose functions are widely different. The POC handles the country’s elite sporting programs while the PSC provides funds for those programs as well as those for the grassroots development of sports. But with Cojuangco having control of both bodies, he was in the position to get national sports associations (NSAs) to toe his line.

That is why Cojuangco’s stint in the POC has been very divisive, with several NSAs getting into leadership disputes. For a lot of these NSAs, those disputes ended up with a Cojuangco ally

With Cojuangco having control of both bodies, he was in the position to get national sports associations (NSAs) to toe his line. in the by-laws, only [Cojuangco] and his group would qualify. Just allow an election.

Let us run,” Vargas urged.

It was not happening.

And for yet another POC election, Cojuangco ran unopposed. Previously, Manny V. Pangilinan, the head of the country’s national basketball federation and Vargas’ boss, had tried to muster support for a run at Cojuangco. When Pangilinan realized that he could not get numbers, he backed out of the race.

This time, Vargas felt he had numbers, but none of them in the open.

“The 12-year dispensation has caused them to fear coming out,” Vargas explained.

“That is the reality we are now in.”

HERE’S A LITTLE context to explain Vargas’ statement.

Before the Duterte administration, Cojuangco had Malacañang’s ear, despite the somewhat lukewarm relationship with the Palace’s current tenant then. Cojuangco, already a long-time POC president by then, did something that had been unheard of previously in sports: He “nominated” officials to the vacant posts in the PSC. Eventually, his bet for the PSC chairmanship, golfing buddy Richie Garcia, got the presidential appointment and the dynamic

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taking over the national federation.

So the clamor for change, which many thought would build into a crescendo following Vargas’ announcement for candidacy, became muted rumblings.

RAMON FERNANDEZ’ Facebook page hosts

several of those rants. Anyone fed up with the Cojuangco style of leadership can post a comment or more on several threads dedicated to exposing Cojuangco’s shortfalls as POC president. Some posts include documents that purportedly show unliquidated spending of government funds for a festival hosted for Asian Olympic officials that Fernandez says never served its purpose.

Commenters range from irate sports fans to former PSC officials to former and current athletes to ousted NSA heads to current NSA heads. Take away the often-emotional responses and the discussion is as in-depth as it can get in the world of Philippine sports.

And as varied as the responses are, there is an umbrella statement that seems to govern the threads: Change in Philippine sports can only come from the top.

Fernandez has pounced on every opportunity to call for that change.

The latest case in point? Cojuangco’s insistence that the country host the 2019 SEA Games after PSC chief Butch Ramirez announced

Robert & Julie Divina Philippine Judo Team Head Coach and Former Athlete, respectively How are we faring in competitions?

J.D: Our athlete, John Baylon, was in the Olympics four times. I think he is ranked 25th in the Olympics. Another is Kiyomi Watanabe, who is now training in Japan. She ranked third in the last Asian Games.

How has the POC been supporting you?

R.D: Full support!

J.D: All the necessary trainings and equipment are financed now. Judo is a sport where the individual is the one who receives the medal, not the team.

We receive medals individually. We have eight men and eight women in each team.

Igor Mella Training Director, National Taekwondo Team Would you say that there was ever a golden age? I wouldn’t say a golden age, because consistently naman, yearly as I recall, we produce medalists. It can be for a younger age group, or a different category, so you can’t really pinpoint a winning streak.

How do you think training for the sport can improve? The application of the science to the sport, which should also require facilities and funding. Other countries, when they go to championships, they’re complete, from doctors to specialized coaches. They bring their own beds for clinics to use, pati gadgets for rehabilitiation.

Kirstie Elaine Alora Lone Filipino Taekwondoin, 2016 Olympics What are the major challenges that you’ve encountered? In my honest opinion, our facilities don’t cater to the needs of all the athletes. Rusty equipment, malfunctioning treadmills, etc. The safety of athletes should be a major priority. With faulty equipment, accidents are inevitable.

On the flipside, what support do you rate highly?

The government provides for the budget every time we compete in tournaments, which is our best window for learning opportunities and experiences.

S A LVA D O R D E L R O S A R I O

MIKEE C OJUAN

GCO JA WORS

KI

There is an umbrella statement that seems to govern the threads: Change in Philippine sports can only come from the top.

Mozzy Ravena Former UST Tigress, Voleyball Analyst

How is your NSA doing? It’s new. So it will take a bit of time to fix everything because it has been turbulent recently. But hopefully, it will happen, with the right people coming into the NSA. Has funding changed, with the new NSA? Oo. There is funding coming from the government. But if you want to raise the level, the private sector should help us a lot, and that’s been happening now. I could see sponsors helping out the national team, and then giving them the best exposure and the best coaches. That requires money.

Otie Camangian Former Captain, Philippine National Volleyball Team

that the government was backing out of its pledged support for the event. Cojuangco had picked up the hosting when Brunei had announced that it could not host the 2019 SEA Games.

But with the war in Marawi in Mindanao, Ramirez, a close ally of President Duterte, announced that government money that would have been poured into the hosting of the 2019 Games would be better off used to rehabilitate the war-shredded southern city.

Cojuangco, of course, would not take the decision sitting down.

After an emotional POC general assembly, Cojuangco and his officers drafted a decision urging President Duterte to reconsider the PSC stand. Ramirez dismissed the appeal.

After all, Ramirez said, he had already briefed the President on the logic of backing out of the hosting and the Chief Executive agreed with the recommendation.

Cojuangco said he was going to use certain channels to get a meeting with the President so he could present to him the unified POC decision.

“Let him try to host the SEA Games without government support,” Fernandez dared.

And thus came about more fodder for Fernandez’ online tirades against Cojuangco.

AND IT IS NOT that Cojuangco is taking

these verbal fireballs from Fernandez sitting down. Fed up by the barrage from the basket90

How’s national volleyball doing?

Nationwide, there are a lot of people playing volleyball. You know why? Kasi unlike basketball which is male-dominated, for volleyball, male and female. Halos pareho siya, nakakaangat lang ng kaunti ang mga babae. Kaya in terms of participation, there’s a lot, compared to earlier times.

There’s also a lot of money in volleyball now. Example: just invite a UAAP player to give an inspirational talk or message during a tournament.

And they will say, “How much?” Ako, naiiyak ako sa ganoon.

Gone are the days na dinadala ka sa ibang lugar, bigyan ka nga lang ng pampamasahe, masaya ka na, e. Pameryenda, masaya ka na. You’ll inspire a lot of people. So ngayon, conditional. If you give them something, then they will go. If not, manigas ka diyan.

How big of a challenge is fixing things? We still have enough time.

Sana mag-give way itong mga matatanda, if they really are patriotic and concerned about this sport, give up. Give it to the young blood with integrity, passion, skills, and even knowledge.

S A LVA D O R D E L R O SARIO

RICHAR

EZ D GOM

BEA LUCERO

Ral Rosario

In an ideal world, Peping Cojuangco’s plan seems like the best way to rejuvenate the country’s sporting prowess.

Asian Games Gold Medalist, Swimming

Is there a big difference between our past and present performances? I think in the late 60s until the early 70s, and even into the early 90s, from, let’s say, going to the Asian Games, we would win medals. Not exactly gold, but either silver or bronze. And then recently, such as at the Asian Games, I don’t think we’ve won. Makikita mo iyong transition.

In the past, we would have named personalities that qualified for at least the semifinals in the Olympics. Now, not so. Qualifying for the Olympics, yes, but qualifying for semis, finals, no. That’s been hard.

What do you think led to the dip?

I think it’s really hard to pinpoint, exactly. My thoughts only are that we have slowly gone out of national training programs, national training teams. These days we have different coaches and bring athletes in only a few months prior to the event.

What’s the ideal way to fix things?

We now get a situation where the PSC cannot do it alone. To me, we need the help of the Department of Education, and then the private sector to form a national program.

Case in point: training. You get a situation where you’re training and then all of a sudden you have to leave for a competition. Your school would say, “Oh no, you can’t do that.

You have to concentrate on school.”

Then the athlete is put on the spot.

You also need a unified program.

Right now, the NCAA is running a different calendar. So is UAAP. And then you have the NSA running a different program. And then minsan iba pa ‘yung calendar ng Philippine Sports Commission.

And that’s just for the student athletes Yes. Palaro(ng Pambasa) is a bigger problem! It has its own calendar, too.

ball legend, Cojuangco went where very few people thought he would go in his skirmish with Fernandez. He dug up the old gamefixing charges against Fernandez.

“He used to fix games when he was with Toyota,” Cojuangco said. “Do you want a sports leader who can throw a game away for money? How would athletes feel if they had that kind of a leader?”

Cojuangco later said he had unmasked Fernandez’s real motives.

“Look at Fernandez’s statements. They (The PSC) want to take over sports,” he said. And Cojuangco, the 82-year-old former political power broker, wasn’t one to allow those alleged attempted takeovers.

Fernandez called Cojuangco’s response to his accusations “pathetic” and added that it was a typical ploy ripped out of traditional politicians’ playbooks.

“That’s the trapo way,” Fernandez said. “He’s just trying to divert the issue.

He should simply answer all the issues raised against him.”

The basketball legend later filed a libel case against Cojuangco over the game-fixing accusations.

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, Peping Cojuangco’s

plan seems like the best way to rejuvenate the country’s sporting prowess. After all, one of the things Philippine sports sorely lacks is leadership continuity.

Every time there is a change of administration, programs get affected. Priority programs of the previous leadership get shelved in favor of new ideas the current leadership wants to try. Every head of the POC or the PSC wants to establish some sort of a legacy during his term.

Cojuangco is no different.

“I hope to establish an honest-to-goodness training center for our athletes,” Cojuangco said. “Something that we have been trying to do. But we’ve always been blocked by government interference.”

“This time, we have private entities committed to fund the entire project.”

But legacy projects such as these take

time to be completed. In fact, Cojuangco has been talking about plans for a truly national training center since his first run as POC president (POC presidents serve for one Olympic cycle. This is Cojuangco’s fourth term as POC chief). And he has yet to break ground on that project.

Even if, as he proclaims, a sponsor has been secured for the construction of such a project, it will take more than one Olympic cycle to finish the national training center.

And there is no assurance that the next POC president will be willing to inherit the funding and administration of a legacy project belonging to his predecessor. Chances are, that POC chief will try to come up with his own legacy project.

Unless the next POC president would still be Cojuangco.

An expert interviewed for this article was asked if that seemed like a possibility, a remote one even, seemed stunned that people think it could not happen.

“Never underestimate Peping Cojuangco,” the sports expert, who asked that he not be named, said.

It doesn’t look like anyone is underestimating Cojuangco.

He has stared down his fiercest critics, held two election runs where he went unopposed and continues to hold court surrounded by close allies. This despite the clamor for him to give way to fresher, more inclusive leaders who can best represent the interests of the Filipino athlete.

AH, THE FILIPINO ATHLETE.

Where is he, where is she, amid this chaotic call for change in Philippine sports?

Where he or she always has been: In the trenches, preparing for battle. They are in training centers here and abroad, overcoming every obstacle to try and bring pride to the country with victories in major sporting competitions abroad.

The ironic thing is, the Filipino athlete is the best person to fight for change. If the Filipino athlete suddenly decides to sit out every major sporting event until the 93

The ironic thing is, the Filipino athlete is the best person to fight for change.

The ideal solution would be for the volleyball athletes to sit out their tournaments and demand unification from their sport’s leaders.

The two warring leagues cannot withstand the negative press that will come from a boycott of the country’s most popular athletic stars outside of basketball. And yet, a unified boycott is impossible.

A volleyball player who spoke off the record presented the obvious reason.

“A lot of players are scared,” she said.

“They have so much riding already in their careers. For some, this is all they have. If they do make a stand, they risk losing roster spots.

Who will come to their rescue?”

EACH TIME WE NEED HEROES, we reach for

our athletes.

We celebrate in their successes and ride on the wings of their triumphs like they are some sort of tangible patriotic pride we can push into the faces of other nationalities.

Remember how fun it was to travel to different countries during the height of Pacquiao’s weight-class crushing juggernaut to the pinnacle of boxing? Long before the eight-division champ decided to dabble in politics and chuck awkward three-pointers in professional basketball? Every time people found out you were Filipino, they’d beam and say “Pacquiao!” And you’d give them the thumbs-up, like you were Pacquiao himself, as if being Filipino allowed you to inherit his greatness and show it off to the world.

And yet, when our athletes need heroes, who do they reach for?

Who can they count on when there is an obvious need for change and everyone else is too busy protecting turfs to help push for that change?

THERE IS NO GUARANTEE that Ramon

country’s sports leader elects a fresh set of officials who can implement change in the sporting infrastructure of the country.

But that fight does not belong to them.

Because if the Filipino athlete focuses on fighting for Philippine sports, who will fight for the Filipino athlete? These are people who come from humble corners of the country, whose training allowances often fly back home to augment the family income.

Who picks them up if power-hungry sports officials call their bluff?

Look at the situation over at volleyball.

The sport currently has two semi-professional leagues, leaving athletes to pledge loyalty to one or another. A unified volleyball community would be a powerful tool in further capitalizing on the sudden reemergence of the sport as a mainstream fan favorite. Instead, players and fans have to choose sides, leaving the sport tiptoeing on a precarious edge.

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Fernandez’s running duel with Peping Cojuangco will end up initiating change in Philippine sports. It’s going to take a lot to break apart the current POC administration and install new leadership. The best chance for the opposition is to ride out Cojuangco’s term and make sure there will be an eligible candidate to challenge him once the next polls come around.

Even if Cojuangco insists that he is not what ails Philippine sports (his allies have dragged the money issue up, saying that unless government support increases, we can never be a sporting power), it is clear he is no longer its savior. He is no longer the white knight he once was when he rode into the POC promising reforms. He no longer has the monopoly on fresh ideas, nor does he have sole command of the understanding of what athletes need, what they go through, and what it will take to bring them to the next level.

There must be sweeping reforms in the POC and it must start at the top. They must fight for the athletes. Because wherever they are, no matter how much of an underdog they may be, they always fight for us.

Cyrus Cruz Founder, UP Weightlifting Club

Give us your perspective as a relative newcomer. I started around 2013, when I joined my first competition at the Philippine National Games. From then, compared to now, mas marami na ang nagwe-weightlifting in general, but obviously the competitions have not yet developed so much. Kaunti pa lang ang competitions e.

How about internationally? For the international scene, I will really give credit to crossfit. When weightlifting became popular in the States, in my opinion doon na nagsimula na kumalat lalo. Alam mo naman, kung ano ang popular sa US, dito din. Tapos iyong crossfit, na naniniwala ako na nagpapopular sa weightlifting because weightlifting is actually part of what they do in crossfit. Hindi sila pure weightlifting, but because of crossfit, naintroduce yung weightlifting to them.

For someone outside of an NSA like you, what has support been like? Hati-hati yung support, but I think that’s typical of every sport. Although because of Hidilyn (Diaz), obviously nanalo siya, so tumaas daw yung funding, pero I can’t really say na nafefeel ko na siya.

How would you develop talent? Start really young. For me, the grassroots program is really a big contributor to the success of weightlifting in every country. Weightlifting training is really an investment. Months or years of training to get the technique, kasi technical ang sport. So it’s a risk.

Sa China kasi and other countries, since malaki yung pool nila, dun sa program with one million weightlifters, may sure ka nang 100 na olympic level. So sa kanila, they can live or eat. May allowances and benefits, and actually they become celebrities in their countries. Sa atin, kapag yun yung gagawin natin, pwedeng suntok sa buwan.

ERIC BUH AIN

HERG IE B AC YA DA N, A RNEL M A NDA L

D I V I N E W A L LY, F R A N C I S C O S O L I S

Jerrold Tarog’s Heneral Luna legitimized local blockbuster filmmaking for a new era, earning over 200 million at the box office, reigniting in audiences an interest in Philippine history, and transporting the director into superstardom. Now he and his producers are faced with an even more monumental task: coming up with act two. After a day on the set of Luna’s highly anticipated sequel, Emil Hofileña finds that Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral isn’t simply a case of history repeating itself

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of

e er ls PHOTOGRAPHS BY JILSON TIU

THERE IS A CELEBRATION IN THE TOWN PLAZA, FAR AWAY. BUT THEY SAY THE GENERAL IS COMING, AND THAT IS ALL THEY NEED TO HEAR. The villagers rush out across the mountainous countryside, less anxious about the heat as they are about arriving late. They scale a hill and dash through the market, rounding the corner before finally slowing their pace.

Every seat at the center of the plaza has been taken. They content themselves with a standing view under the shadow of the church. There are hundreds in attendance: simple folk like them, soldiers in their imposing blue uniforms, ilustrados with their umbrellas and impractical suits. And shining as white as the rumors say, right in front of the stage, is General Gregorio del Pilar.

This is, of course, not actually del Pilar’s hometown, but somewhere in the middle of Tarlac Recreational Park, where the crew of the film production company Artikulo Uno has built, from scratch, an entire set made to look like a late-1800s plaza complete with second-floor balconies, the façade of a church adorned with statues of saints, and a modest marketplace tucked away in the corner, replete with real food. Large panels of green screen fill in the rest of the background.

The houses are authentically somewhat dirty, with stains and flecks of paint dotting even the smallest surfaces that won’t get a second of screen time. I try to ask how long it took for this set to be constructed,

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but the best answer I get is a sigh, followed by an approximation: “Months.” I hazard a guess on how high the budget of the film is. The producers I’m talking to look at each other and answer, “Higher.”

The only exact number I get is this: it is Day 8 of an estimated 55 in the production of Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral.

Off site lie the skeletons of additional sets still under construction: more old-world houses and a train station that’s been completely stripped back down to its wooden base. Unexpected rainfall ruined what had been built so far, meaning the crew would have to work overtime after hours to get back on schedule. It’s 10 a.m. and the sky is clear and blue, but I ask if there’s a contingency plan for bad weather. Monina de Mesa, TBA’s head of publicity, says defiantly that it won’t rain. (TBA is the film conglomerate that includes Tuko Film Productions, Buchi Boy Entertainment, and Artikulo Uno). Ting Nebrida, president of the conglomerate, laughs. “Mag-aalay ako ng itlog kay Santa Clara,” he says. There is a casual but focused energy to this massive set that is shrouded in secrecy and leaves the weather to chance; after all, technically speaking, believe it or not, this is still an independent production.

RALLYING THE TROOPS

From top: Talents were given custom outfits to ensure the film has a look that is both authentic and consistent; Tarog and his lead actor Avelino between takes. Opposite: Over 240 extras gathered for the plaza scene.

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HISTORY IN THE MAKING

Clockwise from top left: Aquino, SiguionReyna, Avelino, Zamora, and Robert Seña react to a play; Villaflor on break; lastminute makeup touches; assistant director Cris Aquino takes in instructions from Tarog.

Off-off site behind a small hill is a holding area where everyone has meals together. I half-expected to find director Jerrold Tarog here, kept at a distance from the chaos of the set, but Tarog has, of course, been on set the entire time. I’m led inside a small house between the church façade and a very real carabao, and find Tarog at his command center, patiently observing the monitors in front of him. There are currently around 240 extras on set (all of whom are wearing tailor-made outfits) and dozens of crew members in sporty attire constantly sprinting across the plaza. But the director remains mostly quiet. During long breaks, he plays some Phoenix and The Strokes through the speakers spread around the area.

“It will never go according to plan 100 percent,” Tarog says. Goyo went through extensive pre-production after its predecessor Heneral Luna premiered in 2015. Research on del Pilar was exhaustive and pre-prod meetings would last for hours on end every day, with Tarog and his team reviewing every detail of each scene to make sure they were as well equipped as possible going into filming. “Everyone knows what he or she is doing,” says Paulo Avelino, who plays the title role.

“We always have a time schedule that we have to follow, we rarely finish late, and we only shoot a few scenes a day. When you see people working hard and knowing their roles on set, you have nothing else to do but to just concentrate on what you have to do.”

In addition to his roles as editor and musical composer, Tarog’s job as the film’s director is to maintain the tone and emotions he wants the audience to feel. “And from that point, scene by scene bine-breakdown ko—how to pull off this scene, that scene, how a scene from Scene Number One connects to Scene 130. It’s a process of going back and forth with the material.” Tarog’s set is workmanlike and controlled, but he knows that there will always be things left to chance. “Marami pa ring bagay na hindi ko pa rin alam kung mapu-pull off ko,” he admits.

“But I do it anyway. I just plan for it.”

Luna itself was considered an enormous gamble by everyone in the local film industry—an P80 million historical epic and the first film from Artikulo Uno, then a fledgling studio. It teetered on the edge of

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“I wrote a script I loved, Jerrold made it a script I adored,” Rocha beams. “He’s our David Lean.” getting pulled out of cinemas with only a total two-week gross of P59 million, before unprecedented word of mouth and a deluge of Lunathemed internet memes boosted the film up to a P100-million third week gross and kept it in cinemas for over two months.

Still, despite the enormous hype and pressure this Cinderella story places onto Goyo, producer Ed Rocha is just happy people have been receptive to their vision. Rocha came up with the idea for Heneral Luna in the 1990s, and it was picked up and dropped three times until Tarog got a hold of the project. “I wrote a script I loved, Jerrold made it a script I adored,” Rocha beams. “Jerrold. Is. A. Genius. He’s our David Lean. He used a big background for an intimate story. And that’s what he’s doing here, like in Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia. For me, he has the same vision. Yeah, he’s our David Lean.”

The audience cheers as the stage in the middle of the plaza fills with actors. It is a production celebrating the life of the beloved general. A band begins to play.

The soldiers are stoic as they stand watch, blocking the villagers from getting a clear view. An actor with a large basket of cotton ascends the stage from the left, and a sudden gust of wind blows the cotton into the air. White specks whirl through the plaza like snow from an imagined Christmas. The children seated in front gape and clutch onto their dolls.

ART IMITATING LIFE

Goyo’s plaza scene sees Gregorio del Pilar, having returned to his hometown, attending a theatrical production celebrating his own life. Members of Dulaang UP perform the play-within-a-film, which was directed separately by Dexter Santos.

This is a problem. Because the wind blew the cotton all over the set, Tarog and his team figure that they now have to throw cotton into every single shot in today’s sequence. Of course, they could also do another take of the previous shot and keep the cotton under control, but why wouldn’t they want to use a shot that looks so good, even if it was unintentional?

The next shot planned is a tracking shot of Avelino and co-stars Carlo Aquino, Rafa Siguion-Reyna, and Arron Villaflor, the camera placed behind them as they stroll down the middle of the plaza to their seats. On the monitors, the shot is clean: the plaza is busy, children playing, villagers passing through, and everyone waving at the general. Behind the scenes, the crew is running a marathon.

The camera operator keeps in step with Avelino, while another crew member with a large electric fan darts to the side, making sure not to collide with any of the seated cast. Glued to the side of the man with the fan is a crew member holding the basket of cotton, hurriedly throwing the material into the wind. Further behind, two other people are holding onto the fan’s wires, keeping them over the heads of those seated. The shot ends, but they have to do another take. Someone’s tumbler was caught in the frame.

In between takes, aside from hiding tumblers behind lamp posts

and inside clay pots, most of the crew are still keeping busy with their own tasks. The crew member with the cotton tries to figure out if there’s a more efficient way of spreading it around set. Cast members dry their clothes and TBA interns holding umbrellas continue to fly across the plaza. Tarog elects not to have lunch with most of the cast and crew, deciding instead to stay and focus on planning the next part of the sequence. Theater director Dexter Santos speaks with the stage actors, all played by members of Dulaang UP. Somewhere on set, Susan Yap, the governor of Tarlac, is dressed in her own period costume for a cameo appearance. Somewhere else on set, film reviewer Richard Bolisay, while not a crew member, is taking notes for a book he’s writing. It’s an all-star set if there ever was one.

But even if all signs seem to be pointing to Goyo as a more explosive and glamorous follow-up to Heneral Luna, Artikulo Uno wants to manage those expectations right away. I overhear producer Joe Alandy: “They think we’re going to give them Luna again, but we’re not.”

Many viewers saw Heneral Luna as a film with a clear political statement: that of rejecting hero worship and holding ourselves accountable. With John Arcilla’s impassioned cry of “Bayan o sarili?,” Luna is credited with reigniting interest in Philippine history, primarily among the youth, and motivating more Filipinos to research, to talk about politics and history, and to vote. However, it quickly becomes clear that everyone on the Goyo team has a common understanding that they aren’t simply trying to replicate exactly the kind of impact Luna had. Viewers who are expecting another war film with a protagonist as brash and audacious as Antonio Luna might be surprised to learn that much of Goyo’s conflict seems to occur within.

“This is an existential journey of a guy who may not start as a hero but ends up a hero—his evolution,” Rocha explains. He makes it clear that, to him, Goyo isn’t a political film, instead describing del Pilar like a matinee idol, or a chick boy, even. “He has a girlfriend in every town,” producer Fernando Ortigas adds, calling the film a love story when compared to Luna. The romantic interest who was most important to

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ON ALL FRONTS

In post-production, the rest of Del Pilar’s hometown will be digitally added onto the green screen panels bordering the area. Below: The play about Del Pilar is a complete work in itself, featuring its own costumes, music, and choreography.

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SHORE LEAVE

Behind one of the plaza’s many facades, a talent steals some sleep off-camera. Despite an early-morning call time, talents are required to stay on set even between takes.

Below: Talents and crew members mingle and help each other with their costumes.

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SOLDIERING ON

On the Goyo set in Tarlac, after wide shots of the play about Del Pilar are taken, interactions between numerous characters in the audience are filmed separately. Below: Jojit Lorenzo and Robert SeĂąa, who play photographer Miguel Laureano and Don Mariano, respectively.

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del Pilar, according to Tarog’s research, was Remedios Nable Jose, a woman who remains a half-completed puzzle, given the relative lack of historical writing on her. Gwen Zamora, who portrays Remedios, had to fill in the blanks wherself. “She’s not what I thought she would be. I see her more as a carefree, aloof type of girl.” In other words, according to Zamora, she’s “the one that got away.”

This is not to say that Goyo won’t have the same sort of intensity that Luna had. Avelino clarifies that, even if del Pilar would be considered a millennial in this day and age, Tarog had no intention of watering down the history into something modernized and artificial.

Instead, Avelino calls it a dark coming-of-age film. “It’s about how a child is brought to war,” he says. “About a boy who had to grow up and who had bigger responsibilities on his plate.” Del Pilar was, after all, only 24 years old when he was slain at the Battle of Tirad Pass—far too young for someone to fully comprehend love, war, and his own mortality. “He comes to that point in one’s life,” Ortigas says, “where you realize that there’s something bigger than your own interests.”

Tarog takes it a step further and offers the frank summary, “about a fuckboy learning how to deal with the responsibilities of being a soldier.” While researching for the film, he came across an essay by Apolinario Mabini that captured what he felt was at the center of Goyo’s character. “Criniticize niya ‘yung Pilipino society, na kaya tayo natalo sa giyera kasi isip-bata tayong lahat. Reading up on Gregorio del Pilar’s life, meron ngang ganyang factors—na isip-bata siya.”

However, this Mabini essay appealed to Tarog in more ways than one. I ask him how he felt about some viewers misconstruing Heneral Luna’s message (as well as that of Angelito, the short film bridging Luna to Goyo)—instead of becoming more self-reflexive, these viewers’ response was to begin quoting Luna to pit candidates against each

Bliss is popularly seen as a critique of the cycle of abuse and the working conditions in Filipino film and television productions— masquerading as a psychological horror film. Discussion on the issue of unreasonable working conditions in the local industry spiked last year when directors Wenn Deramas and Francis Pasion both passed away due to heart problems. And while Tarog admits that the film is not a direct reference to any one experience (“Lahat ‘yon, kwento lang sa akin ng mga tao”), it’s earned Artikulo Uno more fans and a reputation for ambitious storytelling.

The big surprise, then, with Goyo is not how much of Bliss you can see among the cast and crew, but how the set is so devoid of horror.

Barring logistical nightmares and the odd case of appendicitis, the set of this big-budget historical epic is disciplined, efficient, and generous to its cast and crew—and finishes on time. At around 5:30 p.m., more or less on schedule, the cast and crew begin to wrap up. I ask De Mesa if Tarog isn’t planning on squeezing in some night shots into the schedule, and she says that it’s all been taken care of in pre-prod.

Incredibly, night has yet to fully set in, and this big-budget historical epic is done for the day. Granted, this was just Day 8 of an estimated 55 and the worst might still be coming, but Avelino doesn’t think so.

“Considering how organized the production is, I doubt anything major will happen. I’m sure there won’t be any drama.”

An hour or so later, the stage is disassembled and the plaza goes dark. With the help of one blazing studio light, crew members take down the green screen panels and ferry them off on their backs.

Off-off site, the talents regroup and await the vans that will take them home. “That’s our policy,” Rocha states. “Everyone from the extras, we make sure they have water, shade, food. We may spend more, but that’s what matters.”

The legacy of Heneral Luna hangs over the production of Goyo like a coat of arms—a reminder of what local filmmakers can achieve. other, or to rally fanatic support for their own candidates. “I kind of deliberately chose a theme that kind of addresses that response,” Tarog reveals. “So ang tema ng [Goyo] is actually about immaturity.

Marami pa rin siyang sinasabi about Philippine society. Marami pa rin.”

The sun is getting low. Rainclouds begin to gather. Some of the villagers have tired of standing and retreated indoors. The children have either fallen asleep or have not stopped crying. The ilustrados continue to chat. The ground is littered with cotton.

A small group of soldiers leans against the brick façade of the church. Their eyes have not left their posts, but their bodies are exhausted. One of them props up his rifle on the ground and hangs his hat on the barrel. Another soldier notices a civilian sitting nearby. He leans toward him and asks...

“Taga-media ka?” one of the talents asks me. He sees the ID I had been given at the start of the day. I say yes. He tells me to listen close, and tells me to print what he’s about to say. He tells me that, among all the films he’s been an extra in, “Ito ang unang beses na inaalagaan kami nang ganito.” Shortly after, he and the other soldiers move out from under the shadow of the church and return to set.

The legacy of Heneral Luna hangs over the production of Goyo like a coat of arms—a reminder of what local filmmakers can achieve given the right combination of money, talent, and sheer luck. But on a huge set like this one, where so many of us who follow Hollywood entertainment news expect to witness chaos and toxicity, another Artikulo Uno production casts its shadow more subtly: Bliss.

Directed once again by Tarog and released in March this year,

“They’re the backbone of the whole thing,” Ortigas insists. “We’re all brothers and sisters—” “—And slaves to cinema,” Rocha adds.

“And it’s a good feeling. Everybody’s happy,” Ortigas continues.

“We’re all human beings and we’re supposed to work with each other. Aside from that, I don’t see any logic for people being nasty or anything like that.”

Tarog echoes Ortigas’ sentiments, emphasizing that he refuses to impose his own style of meticulous, pre-production-heavy filmmaking on anybody else. “Hindi ko masasabi na hindi sila efficient kasi, para sa kanila, ‘yun ‘yung creative process nila,” he says, referring to filmmakers who prefer intensive improvisation. “My concern is really just trying to do my best with my own projects. I can only speak for myself.”

I ask how the rest of the local industry, especially studios who still encounter and create conflict on set, can right their ships. Rocha chimes in, “We’re not here to be the crusaders. We just hope people will start doing the same—financial support and encouragement.”

Goyo is set for release sometime in 2018, if all goes according to the time schedule. The production still has a whole lot of shooting days to burn through—not to mention a whole lot of money—but the team is keeping its eyes on the ultimate prize: not a glowing review, not a spot in a film festival, not even an Academy Award (though Ortigas reckons that that would be nice), but the Filipino audience.

“The ultimate recipient is the Filipino people. We want to bring them back to Filipino films,” Rocha says. “Let’s educate them, inform them, elevate their consciousness. Let’s give them the best we can.

They deserve the best we can give.”

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AUGUST 2017

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Ten and Over Not even a tropical storm could stop a Rogue party ten years in the making

THOUGH THE STREETS of Makati’s central

business district were empty of people and wet with rain that Thursday night, the top floor of the Lepanto Building was a different story. At the art deco style Penthouse 8747, Rogue Magazine’s anniversary party drew a crowd—all there to congratulate new editorin-chief Jonty Cruz and to celebrate ten years of telling tales of lifestyles on the edge. Grade A cocktails like The Conyo and Famous Rogue made their way to the hands of guests—among them past cover girls KC Concepcion, Iza Calzado, Ellen Adarna, Megan Young, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Janine Gutierrez, and Lovi Poe. Society figure Maurice Arcache, who graced the cover of this year’s March issue, arrived early. Past Rogue editors Jose Mari Ugarte, the magazine’s founding editor, and Erwin Romulo showed their support, along with past contributors such as photojournalist Raffy Lerma and broadcast journalist Jeff Canoy. DJs Jess Milner and Quark Henares supplied the music for the evening.

The Rogue 10th Anniversary Issue Party is brought to you

by Tumi. Special thanks to The Penthouse 8747 and Printcafe Print & Paper Co.

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

First row: Megan Young; KC Concepcion; Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Jeff Ortega; Rogue editor-in-chief Jonty Cruz; DJ Jess Millner; JP Anglo and Camille Malapas; Sam Del Rosario; Vivian Ramsey and Victor Magsaysay. Second row: Martine Cajucom; Ben Wintle and Iza Calzado; Lovi Poe; Anton Del Rosario and friend; Mich Dulce and Ramon De Veyra; L’Officiel Manila editor-in-chief Pam Quiñones and Carla Humphries; Chesca Gamboa, Cindy Go, and Mags Ocampo.

Third row: Ellen Adarna and Mai Mai Cojuangco; Rajo Laurel and Nix Alanon; Devi de Veyra and Jose Mari Ugarte; Maurice Arcache; Gino Rufino, Shawn Yao and Quark Henares; Raffy Lerma and Jerome Gomez. Fourth row: BJ Pascual, Janine Gutierrez, MJ Benitez; Ina Estacio and Dex Fernandez; Ralph Mendoza, Sam Potenciano, and Bea Ledesma; Erwin Romulo, Philbert Dy, Andrew Panopio, and Eric Melendez; David Milan; Mario Cornejo and Jun Sabayton.

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August 2017

JOE CANTADA, sportscaster “MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES,” he would intone about

an unlikely shooting streak. “Turns garbage into gold” was his description of a lucky loose-ball play. “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” he confessed when he got the facts wrong.

The late Joe Cantada’s booming baritone defined how a generation listened to—and watched—sports in the Philippines, and behind the voice was a man larger than life. As a teenager, he broke a 19-year-old national weightlifting record without even knowing it. He was Ateneo’s boxing champion back when the sport was still part of the NCAA. From there, Cantada took over the airwaves of formidable radio station DZHP for 20 years and would go down in history as the ring announcer for the 1975 Ali-Frazier fight, Thrilla in Manila. Soon, everyone would know the man behind the voice as he began to face television cameras for the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), coining hundreds of terms and phrases that made it into the country’s basketball lexicon and standing at the front of the sport’s highest-rating era.

“Kayo!” he bellowed at the cheap seats one time at an opening ceremony, pointing at the crowds gathered there. “Kayo ang PBA!” Cantada was a man’s man, through and through—but he will always be remembered for also being a fan’s fan.