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No Obama-look alike out there, but it’s easy to believe in the change they will seek during the national amateur boxing summit slated in hospitable Bacolod later this month.
The conference, which caps the national amateur boxing championship scheduled Jan. 16-23, could be called by any name.
It’s being planned and launched with limited fanfare.
It also doesn’t claim anything big, like scoring a knockout or dropping a win-win bomb.
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Yes, it would be apt to call it a constructive conference, a make-up meeting, or a solution summit.
But no matter what name, the assembly scheduled in Bacolod appears ready to open a bigger, brighter era in Philippine amateur boxing.
Contrary to advance criticism, it doesn’t claim to break new ground.
It will be a summit of amateur boxing stakeholders. Period.
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OK, a summit.
But please don’t make the mistake of lumping it with the aborted summit planned by failed Philippine Olympic Committee bigwigs following the RP debacle in the Beijing Olympics.
Remember how that one, announced while the RP contingent continued to lay one rotten egg after another at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, crashed right on the planning pad?
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For the record, that planned summit crumbled because it was designed mainly to deceive.
You know, to send the message that RP sports was—sob, sob—on the right track.
It was to serve as cover-up for all the failures and mistakes in Philippine sports.
Anyway, knowing tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan, this event he’s sponsoring in Bacolod should be anything but a making-up-for-the-mistakes affair.
It should be an honest-to-goodness love affair with sports, nothing less.
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But beware.
There’s the great danger of disruptions, of win-win signals being jammed in Bacolod.
What, for example, if the belated victory scored by the failed Harry Tañamor in an off-season tournament in Europe gets adopted as a vindication of the past ABAP leadership?
For the record, the winner in the Beijing Olympics light flyweight division, a sharp, talented Chinese spitfire, did not compete in the recent event Tañamor had topped.
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Of course, it would help greatly if the main man behind the resounding flops in the previous Amateur Boxing Association of the Philippines hierarchy could show up.
You know, to make a clean breast of the boo-boos, the crippling incompetence that defined his sordid tenure through at least four Olympics—from Sydney all the way to Beijing.
That, you bet, is asking for the impossible.
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How, for example, could they draw an honest confession from a failed leader who continued to insist he owned the winning formula for Philippine amateur boxing?
Just the same, the stakeholders could take time out to review the program of the previous ABAP leadership.
They should also adopt a resolution to get rid of all these perennial mistakes.
The motto: Never again.
Only then can the Bacolod boxing summit succeed in seeking timely changes and open the road to winning in the Olympics.
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(SPECIAL SHOW: Sisters Act, Priests Re-Act, a concert, will be staged on Saturday, Jan. 10, 7 p.m. at the Lipa Youth and Cultural Center in Lipa City. Performing are some 15 nuns of the Sacred Heart Sisters and the Archdiocesan Congregation of Religious Women founded by Madre Laura Mendoza Morabe in the 1920s. The performing priests include Frs. Joden Tenorio, Jonas Palmares, Rustom Sabularse, Richard Hernandez, Ariel Gonzales and Darwin de Leon. Beneficiaries are the St. Francis de Sales Minor Seminary and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart.)
