Pariahs

Naturalization of foreign athletes is now the winning sports currency of some countries. The Philippines included, especially in basketball. Quite a number have been Filipinized to strengthen its campaign to reclaim its status among world best. Too ambitious. The country still holds the best basketball record among Asian nations in the Olympics when it finished fifth in Berlin in 1936. That was then and this is now, the country has not qualified to the quadrennial games since Munich in 1972. It even bombed out in its embarrassing title defense in the last Asiad.

It is not the solution. Instead of reinforcing its national team for a sport that does not belong to a short race, the country should instead focus on sports where height and size do not matter. Categorized, if at all. Manny Pacquiao is the damning evidence. In fact, the weight division did not divide him, he beat bigger and taller foes, even knocked out some of them. That convincing. Yet he is every inch a Filipino inside and out who became pound for pound king and went down as one of the greats in all of boxing history. The country’s greatest athlete ever. Hands down.

Why the country naturalizes foreign players to neutralize foreign foes is the height of irony. These applicants want to be Filipinized when millions are dying to leave the country. That alone would have alarmed them, there are no good reasons to stay in a plundered country where corruption is defended and celebrated. But of course, no one else can speak for their intentions.

Why they pursue the Filipino dream in a country of nightmare is baffling. But still, no one can speak for their aspirations. These foreign players may be good, but not good enough to play for their country of origin where the bench is deeper and wider. They need to find a place elsewhere. And that elsewhere is a hospitable country, so welcoming of strangers but meanly critical of their homegrown achievers. Just as it complains against poverty but worships those who impoverish them. Self-contradictory. Or self-inflicted.

Ugly much like naturalization. The word itself is anomalous. Nature is nature. It undergoes is own process, without human intervention. Or humanity can work with it, not against it, if at all. Nature, with all its glory and purity, is irreplaceable. Not even the geniuses of the human race can. Science and medicine may extend life, but it cannot create one. Cloning is not creation, it is duplication. Just as artificial intelligence can never cure natural stupidity.