It’s been a month since my last column, when I bade farewell to Philippine horseracing, my topic du jour for the past eight years, after a significant life change.
Thanks to Manila Standard sports editor Riera Mallari, I still have this space to write about issues related to sports and games.
I am also grateful to opinion editor Adelle Chua who has retained my Pop Goes the World column in this newspaper and gives space for it on Thursdays (opinion) and Saturdays (literary). Please check out my pieces on those days too.
So our journey together isn’t over, dear friends, and this time we will be talking about more things than before.
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I am spending some time in California now, and boy, the folks over here are crazy for football.
Take the good people of the San Francisco Bay Area in particular. The local team is the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders black and white logo can be seen everywhere, on t-shirts and caps and whatnot, especially on Sunday game days, when fans crowd onto the BART (their equivalent of the LRT-MRT) to get to and from the Oakland Alameda Coliseum.
In public places such as shops and restaurants, they’ll have the game on TV. The man who assembled my Ikea bed on a Sunday did a quick and thorough job because, he said, he was raring to get home and watch the game that night with his buddies over beer and snacks.
However, complicated money matters mean that the Raiders are likely to move to Las Vegas, which has offered $750 million to build a new stadium there. Negotiations are ongoing to keep the Raiders in the Bay Area, but some analysts don’t put much hope in a positive outcome.
Filipinos, while enamored of American basketball, pay little attention to other sports popular here, such as football and baseball. Football, in particular, has no following outside the US, where futbal—what Americans call soccer—is the “game of life”.
Speaking of baseball, how about the Chicago Cubs, eh? They’re going on to the World Series against the Cleveland Indians Tuesday night Eastern time, with both teams hungry for the championship. The Indians last won in 1948 and the Cubs in 1908—that’s a record drought.
Even President Obama has caught Cubs fever, tweeting his well wishes to the team, though he’s an avowed White Sox fan.
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Racing fans the world over are looking forward to the Breeders Cup, to be held Nov. 4 and 5 at Santa Anita Park.
Among the likely contenders in the Classic are California Chrome, Frosted, Hoppertunity, Nyquist, and Keen Ice. The Longines Distaff will see Beholder and I’m A Chatterbox among the hopefuls, while 5YO racemare Tepin is in the Mile.
Tepin, says the BC website, “is in the midst of a campaign so fabulous that she is often mentioned in the same breath as the greatest female Thoroughbreds of all time.” She defeated male opponents to win last year’s Breeders’ Cup Mile, won over males in the Woodbine Mile Stakes (Can-G1), and copped the Queen Anne Stakes (Eng-G1). Now that’s a horse to watch!
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