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Villaflor: The Footballer is a Lonely Hunter |
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Sunday, 20 July 2008 |
 By Noel Villaflor
Footnote
CEBU (SunStar) - The Cebuano footballer and the artist are kindred souls. Among the many things they share in common, the pursuit of one’s craft in this burgeoning metropolis can lead to a dead end.
The writer who seeks to be read faces a wilderness. Who publishes poetry or fiction these days?
The footballer asks a similar question: Where can I play?
Cebu, with its magnificent tropical landscape, ought to inspire creativity. Like Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, it should have spawned variations of the elastico. Like Colombia’s Baranquilla, it could have reinvented magic realism as its own.
Instead, it tends to be an underachieving paradise, at least in how the footballer and the artist imagine it.
How that came to be is an enigma larger than our fascination with mass-produced beauty queens, who not only slip on their tail dresses but on common-sense answers as well.
But there are clues.
In his novel “The Plague,” the French writer and goalkeeper Albert Camus describes Oran, a merchant town in Algiers, as a smug place that has turned its back to its beautiful bay.
“Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life, as they call it, ‘doing business.’”
Camus—who uttered the immortal words, “Everything I learned about morality, I owe to football” —could very well have been describing Metro Cebu, where culture is an afterthought with a price tag.
There is no image more apt in illustrating this predicament than an often forgotten structure in the University of the Philippines high school grounds in Lahug.
Called the Cebu Center for Performing Arts, it has, for more than a decade, stood on the brink of being a white elephant.
Worse, rubble and filling materials from the structure’s construction remain indiscriminately dumped on a substantial part of the football field.
Last weekend during a 7-a-side football tournament held in line with UP’s centennial celebrations, eight teams between batches 1993 and 2008 renewed high school rivalries, both real and imagined, on the field.
Many of the players were visual artists, musicians, writers and professionals who have artistic inclinations, thanks to a high school that valued creativity.
As the UP high alumni kicked, tackled and ached on the dilapidated field, the unfinished art center hunched like a mammoth beggar a spitting distance away.
The irony did not escape me.
Metro Cebu isn’t entirely a cultural wasteland, though.
No matter how few, there are pockets of creative activities here and there, just as there are some football fields where the “nomadic” footballer—one who has no home turf—is welcome to play.
Besides, even such seclusion, no matter how silly, can serve as a catalyst for a more vibrant growth in both art and football.
How so?
The Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza offers another clue, this time in explaining the crucial years of fellow countryman and novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s literary education in the big industrial city of Baranquilla, where the artists and writers emerged as “the antibodies of the social organism.”
In the Fragrance of Guava, Mendoza writes: “Paradoxically, perhaps because of this hopeless isolation, artists spring up in Baranquilla with more vitality than in (the capital) Bogota, for all the latter’s arrogant cultural pretensions dating from Colonial times.”
Not unlike the artists— or footballers — in Cebu, perhaps?
(nsvillaflor@gmail.com)
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Terry Razon Copa Filipina 2008 Standings Division 1
| | Click for complete stats
| Team
| W | D | L
| Pts
| | | | | | | Navy
| 6
| 1
| 2
| 19
| | Division 2 | |
|
|
| | Air Force | 6
| 0
| 0 | 18
| | Team | W
| D
| L
| Pts
| | Loyola FC | 5
| 1
| 1
| 16
| | RTU | 3
| 2
| 0
| 11
| | UP | 5
| 0
| 4
| 15
| | Manila All-Japan | 3 | 0
| 1
| 9
| | FEU | 4
| 2
| 3
| 14
| | Nomads FC | 2
| 1
| 0
| 7
| | Kaya FC | 4
| 0
| 1
| 12
| | PUP | 2
| 1
| 1
| 7
| | ADMU | 4
| 0
| 7
| 12
| | Lions FC | 2
| 0
| 1
| 6
| | DLSU | 3
| 1
| 4
| 10
| | Speilt Gern Unten | 2
| 0
| 2
| 6 | | UE | 3
| 1
| 3
| 10
| | Ilonggo FC | 1
| 1
| 3
| 4
| | UST | 3
| 1
| 4
| 10
| | Sunken Garden Utd | 1
| 0
| 2
| 3
| Mama Africa
| 0
| 1
| 6
| 1
| | Loyola FC | 1 | 0
| 4
| 3
| MIT
| 0
| 0
| 8
| 0
| | Xavier Alumni FC | 0
| 1
| 3
| 1
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Updated: October 20, 2008
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