Ticky Tocka

I’ve always suspected that the average football fan is easy prey to manipulation by sports media. Perhaps they are willing prey, much as readers of novels want to know about people they know were never actually born. One way or another, the sports section of even reputable newspapers get to print stories that would not meet the standards of any other section barring the showbiz pages. For instance when young stars leave the small club that made them great to join the likes of Barcelona and Chelsea, they sometimes claim they need to move because the missus likes to shop on Jermaine Street or they have a large family to support. Only sports reporters accept this at face value and abstain from the obvious follow-up question. “Got that José. But the millions you already earn from Osasuna would keep a dozen families obese. And the gazillions of your transfer would be enough to feed the whole of Pamplona”. I do not remember a single footballer being asked these questions and pressed to admit “Yes, I actually enjoy becoming the tenth richest man in the country -- eat your heart out, loser” as he zips away in his yellow Ferrari. Nor do I remember anyone pointing out that if you’re insensitive enough to buy yourself a Ferrari car, at least buy it red, moron.

The bar is set really low and easy in the sports pages. The result is that over time fans are numbed into believing large quantities of equine manure. All the more so in Italy, where general reporting standards are already low and nouveaux riches buy football clubs for the same reasons that their granddads would marry an impoverished marquesa to sit at the table with old money and gain unfair advantage over their rivals. To think of it, the pre-modern character of football is clearer in my native country than elsewhere. For this and other reasons it is not easy for Italians to make sense of Carlo Tavecchio.

Mr Tavecchio is running to replace Mr Abete at the head of Italy’s football federation after the latter’s resignation at the end of the disastrous campaign in Brazil. The football federation is the richest and by far more visible part of our olympic movement. Tavecchio wants to be the guy who signs up the next manager of the national fooball team. Everyone knows what he said during the speech he gave a few days ago to announce he was running for the post. “Here instead we get Opti Pobà, who used to eat bananas and then suddenly becomes a first-team player with Lazio. That’s how it is here. In England, you need to show what you have on your CV and your pedigree.”

So, Tavecchio said African players -- he made up the name of Opti Pobà -- are banana-eating monkeys and was not politely seen to the door. Not only did he finish his speech, but he did not withdraw from the race. Not only is he still running for the post with the undiminished support of most club owners, but we have a serious national debate over his words and beliefs. In this rainy summer, Italians know all about il caso Tavecchio. I mean, honestly. In England, to reprise Tavecchio’s own comparison, the debate would be over in two days and his name forgotten in a week. To think of it, Italy is a pre-modern country. In fact, it’s worse than that.

Tavecchio is 71 years old; hardly the age to lead a sweeping reform of Italy’s football movement to respond to the second group-stage elimination in so many world-cup finals. Of course, old people should not be discriminated against, but his only rival for the post, Demetrio Albertini, turns 43 this month. Who, in your opinion, would be more likely to show the imagination, the drive, and the energy to fight back the very people who have ruined our football and will inevitably resist change? Tavecchio is a perfect representative of Italy’s decrepit ruling classes. Prior to making a carreer in football administration, he’s been in banking and politics -- Christian Democrat, like Mr Abete whom he intends to replace. Crucially, he has been found guilty five (5) times since 1970, mostly for tax-related crimes. How come he’s still a public personality holding positions of power and responsibility and aspiring for more of the same? Because, far from being a hindrance, this is the perfect ‘pedigree’ for Italy’s ruling classes, whose members prefer to deal with people like them. Imagine if Albertini were to push for transparency, a serious reform plan, and real autonomy from politics. Club owners would have to leave their cosy feudal bubble and actually learn how to run a sports organisation and federation in the 21st century. They don’t want to do that because they would not know how. Tavecchio is their best defence, besides vecchio is Italian for ‘old’.

(photo by Gabriel Bouys / Getty Images)

Along with victorious tourist-fans rockin displays of national pride, we shared a long subway ride home from Manhattan back to Queens on the German E train.

Germany fans celebrating Der Goal on the Boulevard in Dumaguete, Philippines

Copa Final

Ensconced in a back booth nook at a Carmine Street Irish pub, we watched the tense match final between Argentina and Germany.

Captain Noel wondered whether the many links between Argentina and my native Italy would extend to the catenaccio their national football team played in the semifinal against the Netherlands. It is a fact, as he pointed out, that Argentina have made it to the final largely on the strength of their defense. It is also a fact that if you can add Messi, di María and a functioning Higuaín to two well-organised lines of defense you have yourself a decent strategy against the Netherlands’ lethal fast-breaks. “I also thought about the rather large population of Italian Argentines and the fact that Messi's paternal ancestors are from Ancona”, Noel wrote. “Is this something that you would like to write about?” Considering that Ancona is my hometown and that I have more relatives in Argentina than in Italy, that was offer I couldn't refuse, right? Wrong. Here is why I must not write the post you’re reading.

The first reason is moral and very easy to explain. I've already broadcast in this blog my fanship for Italy and Belgium. Can I now extol the merits of Argentina and its catenaccio? How many times can I turn this coat? If I could, I would say that Mascherano was my man of the match against the Dutch. However, Sabella convinced the team to play a game that is not representative of fútbol Argentina-style. In my mind at least, they are associated to superior technique, tough play (let us not forget the junta of Ardiles, Kempes and Passarella that helped them win their first title at home), and an artist every generation or two: Di Stefano, Maradona, and now Messi.

Alfredo Di Stefano

The second reason why I must not write this post is ideological. Messi’s grandfather is from the province of Ancona, not from the city proper. He was in fact from Recanati, half an hour’s drive to the south across a rather stunning countryside, if I may say so. Recanati is also the place where Giacomo Leopardi was born. Leopardi is Italy’s second best poet (assuming Dante was Italian, which he probably wasn’t) and he was as excited about his native village as inmates are about their prisons when they’re in for life. But the crux of the matter is that I would more easily claim a personal link to Messi if his paternal grandfather had been -- say -- from Bologna, 200 km away and home to a different people, the Celts, speaking a dialect unrelated to mine. How unrelated? ‘Rubbish’ is spazzatura in standard Italian, mondezza in Ancona and rusco in Bologna. In Ireland, at the opposite end of Celtic Europe, they call it bruscar.

  Would I like to write about a famous guy whose family originally hails from Recanati? Never! Too close for comfort. This is the essence of parochialism. We call it campanilismo, from campanile, the bell tower. We would not even mention the campanile of a neighbouring town when it casts a shadow on our own territory. Below is the belltower of the Chiesa del Santissimo Sacramento in Ancona.

(Getty images)

(photo by Bernie Ledesma)

When I was a kid, the only game that rivaled soccer was sipa. Yup: sipa. All year long, we’d play that game—anytime, anywhere; in a drizzle, under a hot sun, at recess or dusk, on concrete, dirt, grass. Like football, it was portable, merciless, and beautiful (okay, maybe not so beautiful for those of us who crooked our arms seemingly asking god for forgiveness when we played it). And your freestyling skills transferred to both. 

Derived from the Thai sepak takraw, sipa is a street game. Instead of a ball (in the Thai game a small-grapefruit size orb of woven plastic), you have a “sipa.” The sipa is basically a quarter-size lead washer with a paper or cellophane tail. You can buy one at your corner sari-sari store in the Philippines. If you do, you’ll get one that’s made of pastel-colored paper—big, frilly and slow, good for beginners. As you get better, you’ll find yourself gravitating to homemade affairs. At the peak of my sipa career, we played with a smaller lead washer tufted by an amber cellophane candy wrapper. The one used to wrap sweet-salty sampaloc candy was the best: crinkly, light, and unpredictable in flight. 

There were two versions of the game in my neighborhood. One was similar to soccer freestyling: you took turns kicking the sipa up and down (but unlike soccer mostly with the inner side of your foot) then passing it onto another in a circle. The second version was more competitive—cruel even. One kid would be “it”. That kid would serve the sipa to another and that other would then kick the sipa up and down as many times as s/he wants, set up a last kick, then volley the sipa as high and far away as possible. The point is to catch the sipa before it hits the ground, repeat the number of times the kicker freestyled it, then volley it again as high and far away as you could. With your foot. I’ve memories of forcefully arcing my amber sipa into the sunset, any hope of catching the thing made impossible by sheer physics.

Goooaaaaaallll!!! By that point, my friends and I had made it a practice to insert small pieces of cardboard into our shoe to make sure we didn’t bruise our toes with those sadistic volleys. 

I played with friends. I played with classmates. I played with the rough boys from the “squatter” area down the street. A sipa in my pocket, I challenged anyone to a game. And I figured out which sneaker played best (Converse low-cut Chuck Taylor). But like “teks,” marbles, and spiders, sipa faded out of our young lives as magically as it appeared. One day, we discovered it. For days and days thereafter, we couldn’t think of anything else but it. And then one day, we just outgrew it.

During the last World Cup, my kids and I were vacationing in the Philippines and found ourselves watching a sepak takraw game in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, which rekindled my interest in sipa. My kids and I also began reading a book that talked about sipa at that time. So I tried to play it again with them. But it didn’t feel right. And my kids weren’t that interested. They saw through me, I’m sure. Fun as the game seemed to be, they must have felt my overzealousness as more bittersweet reminiscence than motivated sporting. So the sepak takraw I bought for my son’s birthday after that Puerto Princesa game languishes in our shed. And every time I see teenagers playing hacky sack I think … sipa!

Art Rickerby was a renowned photographer from the Bronx who covered the Kennedy administration for Life magazine. He has also been lauded for his sports photography, including color essays on the Yankees, the Olympics and American football.

The World Cup final pits two living Popes against each other. Well, not really, but we rather enjoy thinking about it.

So today we got this email from Ubaldo alerting us to the fact that the World Cup teams of the two living popes will clash on Sunday. Trust an Italian to remind us Filipinos about this connection that should have been obvious to us at Ticky Tocka from the start, if we weren’t such rabid anti-clerical heretics. Anyway, I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to elaborate on that connection (I am probably the least qualified) but I did tell Ubaldo that two nights ago, I just happened to watch a very interesting documentary on PBS’ Frontline on Benedict’s papacy—how he dealt with issues such as child abuse, corruption, and homosexuality, and how different or similar Francis’ approach has been. You can still watch the documentary here (though it may not work in some countries outside the US):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secrets-of-the-vatican/

In brief, the documentary explores how Benedict virtually crumbled in the face of the Vatican’s dysfunction and corruption, asserting conservative doctrine regarding some issues and all but covering up on others. Confronted by the financial scandals involving the Vatican Bank, he refused to indict the head of the bank (“Er bleibt hier!” he was said to have roared at cardinals who demanded that the bank director step down). And on child abuse, he deflected the issue by issuing a statement about homosexuality, calling it “an objective disorder,” and in effect conflating homosexuality with pedophilia, something that alarmed and dismayed a number of gay or gay-friendly priests. (The documentary captured secret videos of an unmistakably Felliniesque underground of influential members of the clergy who apparently organized their own private “dance clubs” and orgies.) Benedict was a theologian, not an administrator; unable to address the issues or control the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy, and faced with the biggest scandal the papacy had ever experienced with what would be known as Vati Leaks, the Pope from Bavaria resigned, citing poor health.

Enter Francis the Argentine. The documentary only briefly dwells on his papacy, citing how different his approach has been compared to his predecessor’s. Not only does Francis project himself as a man of the people, but he has taken steps to clean up the Curia (by ordaining a number of international cardinals who are expected to help the Pope do the sanitizing), make the Vatican Bank more transparent (by freezing nearly 900 questionable accounts), delivering conciliatory remarks to gays, Muslims, and other communities previously ostracized by the church, opening an investigation into child abuse, openly attacking capitalist greed, and severely castigating the Mafia. It’s a wonder no one’s ever poisoned or assassinated him. But on issues that still prove most divisive, notes the documentary, Francis has likewise been quiet, or evasive.

So that’s all I know about the two Popes (thank you, PBS). It’s not Rome vs. Avignon, and I doubt if one of them will be dancing along the via della Conciliazione Sunday night. So I’m not sure how to connect what I’ve just said to the World Cup, except in jest, as pictures Noel has been digging out of Twitter show.

Dos Papas

Perhaps we can say this. Germany = Benedict = academic, traditional, stickler for rules, infallible. Argentina = Francis = unexpected, popular/populist, flexible, anything possible.

Fair enough? What do you think?

(Suggested reading, if you really are seriously interested in the papacy: Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich; Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. Otherwise, see you Sunday. Hell yeah.)

(Eric Gamalinda)

Well, on that Orbi et Urbi note, I suggest we all buy a jersey of the Argentine club San Lorenzo de Almagro, the pope's team. There was also a funny interview of Borges starring that team. It also happened to be the club near the library where Borges once worked, and his library colleagues mainly talked about football, and Borges was absolutely uninterested in football. So his friends told him to just say his team was the one by the library, San Lorenzo de Almagro, whenever his co-workers asked. Turns out, according to Borges, "I noticed that San Lorenzo almost never won." Winning was only secondary, his colleagues at the library said, San Lorenzo were "the most scientific team of all." In what way, was Borges's question. They lost scientifically: "they did not know how to win; they lost methodically," was how Borges explained his library colleagues' description of Borges's accidental team. Hahaha. So Pope and Borges are on same, "scientific" team. Cheers! Vamonos, Argentina!

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/40c3a0c2-f0f4-11e3-8f3d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz376wkRTKz