SO the demise of the old sports complex—Rizal Memorial—is sealed.
We don’t know if the wrecking ball would be cold steel gray or painted with the flag’s red, blue and yellow to soften the impact—as the one that wrecked Ebbets Field in Brooklyn had been, complete with red stitches.
Whatever it is, we’d soon be saying good-bye to a revered sports venue, one that rightly can be called the next thing to a Philippine sports shrine.
Nearly 75 years of history and golden tradition would be wiped out.
If Typhoon Ondoy, which had invaded and erased the memories of players that were filed away in scrapbooks, mementoes and memorabilia, when its rampaging floodwaters cut a frenzied trail of destruction through the metropolis in 2009, the steel ball will complete the job of eliminating what remains to remind us of a golden past.
Last Tuesday it was reported in the press that only the opinion of the Justice Department is being awaited on the sale of “old Rizal” that could be worth at least P10 billion.
Its value pertains only to its physical dimensions: 8.4 hectare of real prime estate. You see, the RMSC has been degraded into a mere “property.” To many, the terrible idea is assaulting. Ask old-timers in sports, and they would tell you they rage every day at this proposal.
Rizal Memorial’s value cannot be equated in terms of its per-square-meter price as the dads of City Hall, and the current sports administrators, appear to agree. (It is only the final price that has eluded them!)
No, it is hallowed ground whose tracks, whose grass, whose hard court had been trodden by the immortals of sports. Visit, for instance, the ballpark whose iconic façade has survived the war—and fought off the creeping invasion of grime, soot and decay of an imploding, suffocating city.
Climbing to the grandstand, one could see across the diamond the peeling outer walls beyond the outfield that separates it from the track stadium. It hardly makes the heart flutter anymore. But when I first laid my eyes on it as a sportswriter, I felt that unmatched sensation. On the wall the names of baseball’s greatest names of the last century stare into eternity. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who had blasted out home runs well beyond the fence, for instance.
But that’s too American for local taste, some might argue. Yes, it is. As American as the idea of a stadium rising in what Americans, at the turn of the century, named Wallace Field.
If the design and façade are American, there should be no mistaking that ground is solidly in the Filipinos’ name. It became our own once our great sportsmen started reaping the laurels of sports glory and fame in Asia.
In 1954 the greatest athletes in Asia gathered in its sun-baked field to hear the oratory of Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson, himself a famed footballer of another time, during the opening of the Second Asian Games.
Now, let’s reel back to the present. What is there about this dilapidated, dinky place that some men furiously, vehemently resist the idea of wrecking it?
Are we not often told that the place is past its prime?
In its present state, one argument goes, it is not celebration of our past sports glories. Rather, it is a grim, grimy reminder of everything we have not achieved, and we have not become.
We are no longer a sports power the way we used to be in 1934, the year the last coat of paint was splashed on the newly built façade of the old ballpark and the nearby track and tennis stadium.
It would in a few days host the opening parade and the games of the 1934 Far Eastern Games.
In its heart—a spanking new venue that was unrivalled in Asia—Rizal Memorial Sports Complex glowed with the heart of champions, Filipinos who excelled in track and field, in basketball, in volleyball.
The crowds packed the stands, admiring the heroics of athletes, marveling at the same time at this stadium built some 35 years after the final year of the 333-year imperial rule of Spain entered its death throes, with the flowering of the 1898 Philippine Revolution.
Our athletes were once without peers. They set the standards in the region. Japan and China sent their best runners and jumpers, their best swimmers, their best basketball teams—the best of what they had—to the Philippine invitational events.
Our neighbors competed here not just to win but also to learn from us, because in many sports Filipinos were the standard of excellence. Beating Filipinos was worth more than the medals that came with the effort; they were, in many ways, psychic victories.
So, Rizal Memorial, for all the losses in its sporting field that came later, was first a shrine to the budding greatness of Filipinos. From where I sit now as an amateur historian engaged in chronicling periodic episodes of our sports history, I cannot feel anything but a growing sense of loss.
No one, not even the National Historical Institute, which had earlier put up so much effort to preserve memories of the “phantom” Jabidah Massacre, for which even a historical marker stands in sacred Corregidor, has not raised a whimper when the idea of razing the Rizal Memorial was first broached.
Is there forgetfulness about the past that is the opposite of official historians’ vigilance when opposing political events like the Marcos’s burial?
A place of rich, intertwined with memories of loss and celebration and despair deserves a long second look.