‘Paoay, not Hawaii:’ 5 anniversaries to remember in 2016
WATCH: The Beatles during ill-fated Philippine visit.
2016 is poised to be an exciting year.
We’ve got back-to-back presidential elections that could signal major changes in the Philippines and the United States. The world’s best athletes will meet at another Olympics in South America.
But before we get started with what promises to be an eventful year, time to look back and take note of important and quirky anniversaries to remember in 2016:
Here are 5 of them:
- ‘She hates you, yeah, yeah, yeah:’ When Imelda sicced goons on the Beatles (50th Anniversary)
Beatlemania took a dangerous turn in Manila in 1966 when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr found themselves being chased, not by screaming fans, but by Imelda Marcos’ goons.
The reason: They politely declined an invitation to perform at a private party in Malacanang for the Marcos’ rich friends.
Imelda wanted to show off with the world’s most popular rock n’ roll band, but the Beatles refused to play along.
“As soon as we got there, it was bad news,” George Harrison said in a video clip from a documentary on the Beatles. “It was a very negative vibe.”
Ringo Starr also said, “We had fantasies that we were going to be put in jail because it was a dictatorship there in those days, not a democracy. You lose your rights in a dictatorship, no matter who you are.”
The Beatles weren’t exactly known for being outspoken opponents of dictatorships at the height of their popularity, but in refusing to party with the Marcoses in 1966, they eventually realized that they did the right thing.
“The nice thing about it is that in the end when we found out that it was Marcos and what he’d been doing to his people and it was Imelda and what she’d been doing and the ripoff that the whole thing apparently, allegedly was we were kind of glad to have done it,” Paul McCartney said in the documentary. “We must have been the only people who’d ever dared to snub Marcos.”
- ‘I said Paoay, not Hawaii’ or when an angry nation chased the Marcoses out of the country (30th Anniversary)
In two months, the nation will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1986 popular revolt that ended the Marcos regime.
There are still heated debates on the direction the country took after Filipinos kicked out one of the world’s most corrupt and brutal dictator out of the country.
Well, this week, let’s focus on another direction — the one the Marcoses had wanted to take the night an angry nation chased them out of Malacanang, but ended up not taking.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan was known to have ordered U.S. forces based in the Philippines to rescue his friend and ally at the height of the uprising.
According to a popular joke, Reagan personally called Marcos to ask, “So where do you want to go, buddy?”
And Marcos said, “I want to go to Paoay, Ronnie.”
‘Oh, sure thing Ferdie,’ Reagan said, before giving the order, ‘Okay, he said he wants to go to Hawaii.’
The conversation never took place. But the gist of the joke turned out to be true: The Marcoses did want to fly to the north, not to the east, across the Pacific, to the island state where the tyrant later spent years in exile and died.
Irwin Ver, who was head of Marcos’ security detail, confirmed that there was a plan for the Americans to take them to Paoay. But during an overnight stop at Clark Air Base, the plan was changed.
“We were expecting to land in Paoay,” he told me in a 2006 interview. “And now you know the joke,” he chuckled. “Instead, we landed in Hawaii. It [the joke] was true. To us it was not a joke.”
- Philippine Basketball’s Impressive Olympic Debut (80th Anniversary)
The Philippines last appeared in Olympic basketball competition in 1972. The national team has struggled to make it to the Olympics since then, though there’s still a chance they could make it to Rio de Janeiro later this year.
Hopefully, Gilas will make it. For one thing, it would be a good way to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the country’s debut performance in Olympic basketball, when we could have, should have won a medal.
An Olympic medal in basketball for the Philippines?
Yep. This was in 1936 when basketball, which was still a relatively new and unknown sport, was introduced in the Olympics. This was also during the “golden age in Philippine hoops, at least in terms of international competition,” journalist Rafe Bartholomew writes in “Pacific Rims,” a delightful and insightful account of the history of Philippine basketball.
The Philippines was a basketball powerhouse in Asia and, to some degree, even the world, in the first half of the last century. And the Philippine national team’s performance in Berlin was proof of this.
The Filipinos beat every team during they faced in the tournament, except the U.S., the eventual champion. But odd tournament rules and a “scheduling quirk” deprived the Filipinos of a medal, Bartholomew writes. He notes that the “near-miss in 1936 as the country’s best shot to earn a medal in the sport that Filipinos love most.”
- ‘I’m sure I was hitting him’ Mansueto Velasco’s silver medal (20th Anniversary)
Of course, we’ve had more recent Olympic disappointments.
The last time the Philippines won a Summer Olympics medal was in 1996 when Mansueto ‘Onyok’ Velasco took silver in the light flyweight division.
Velasco lost the gold medal bout to Daniel Petrov Bojilov of Bulgaria in a fight that quickly became controversial.
Journalist Bill Velasco said partly because of the computerized technology used in the competition, the Filipino lost because “his punches were being scored for his opponent, Bojilov.”
New York Times columnist Dave Anderson wrote that the Bulgarian may have won, but Velasco “deserved more points.”
Then again, boxing at the Olympics has long been known to be a stinky affair.
“Even in the Olympics, if not especially in the Olympics, boxing always seems to need a deodorant,” Anderson wrote.
- Mount Pinatubo (25th Anniversary)
Twenty-five years ago, day turned to night in a huge area of Central Luzon as the region was engulfed by a gigantic cloud of volcanic ash.
The Mount Pinatubo eruption, the second biggest of the 20th century, took place 25 years ago this year. The disaster killed hundreds, displaced millions and caused serious damage to communities and the landscape.
The devastation was captured in photographer Albert Garcia’s now famous shot of a Ford Fierra fleeing a gargantuan cloud of ash. The photo was included in Time Magazine’s “Greatest Images of the 20th Century” and National Geographic Magazine’s list of the “Best 100 Pictures of the 20th Century.”
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