Respect: A reflection on the UAAP

The following is a blog entry written by long-time Shale contentact and friend Carmel Puertollano. Now, I haven’t really followed the recent UAAP men’s basketball games, which led to the Ateneo Blue Eagles sweeping the De La Salle Green Archers and claiming the championship, but obviously things have been (usually) tight post-celebration. In light of the hullabaloo regarding what happened at the Ateneo bonfire – a fact that already earned an official, if not quiet, apology from school bigwigs – she finally writes her thoughts as a DLSU student. But this isn’t one-sided – at least that’s what I think. The entry’s been edited for style requirements, but everything else remains the same.

Three years.

It only took me that long to enjoy the privilege of being bona fide student of De La Salle University Manila. During the orientation or LPEP, as Lasallians commonly know it, basic Lasallian values and principles were taught. We were also taught how to cheer (and not to jeer).

If you can’t buy tickets to the game…

FluidShale 2007.10.04: Not everybody can buy tickets to the DLSU-UE game, so again we resort to another video of those who watched at Z2. This time, though, it’s outside – and a bigger game, it is. Will the Archers topple the Warriors for the first time this season? Malia didn’t immediately think so. However, after the video was shot she hoped her prediction wouldn’t come true – and indeed, it didn’t, by one foul shot. This is how noisy it gets. And, of course, there was the surprise that our very own Carlo Cruz was the telecast’s face of the day. The lines for the second game was very long – it snaked to the Central Plaza and never got shorter – but you can’t expect this crowd in school on Sunday, sadly.

Fair play (or the lack of emotional control)

A disclaimer: I’m not a bitter Lasallian. I’ve not really written about the UAAP games because I’m not really interested in it, until lately when my sister got bitten by the bug. At this point DLSU faces Ateneo for a fifth time after another one point victory for the Eagles – disappointing for us because, for the entirety of the second half, the game was ours.

I wonder what the crowds that assembled at the Central Plaza felt today. The projectors were bad, and the crowd was growing when I passed there a half-hour before the game was slated to start, but surely when we lead by as much as seven points the cheers grew ever so louder. My RELSFOR class was called off because, apparently, some wanted to watch the game and not counted as absent, thus we got the rollover effect (nobody requested for that even if our class hit the game’s time slot perfectly). Everybody’s expectations probably grew big.

But I’d give it to the Blue Eagles for a good fight. This is probably the closest rivalry I’ve witnessed in my conscious viewing, with all games ending with a one-point lead so far. But for those at the green side at the Araneta Coliseum today, it is probably the most disappointing afternoon ever.

Republished: A nation’s passion lives in a rivalry of green vs blue

Surprise, surprise – just in time for what appears to be a fourth La Salle-Ateneo game, this time for the second UAAP men’s basketball finals slot, an article about the fancied rivalry appears in The New York Times! There’s nothing really new here, but here’s what the Americans probably first know about what we are so much into. At least if you’re from either school. Writer Raphael Bartholomew is writing a book about Philippine basketball, probably partly based on his experiences working on that school in Katipunan. Many thanks to Leslie Sy for the tip on this one.

Senators, foreign diplomats, cabinet ministers, a smattering of Forbes’s 40 richest Filipinos, movie stars and enough professional basketball players to play five-on-five. They are the elite of Philippine society, and they all gather at Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City to watch the men’s basketball rivalry between the universities Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle.

La Salle coach Franz Pumaren said, “The janitors in Araneta always say, ‘If there’s an Ateneo-La Salle game, once everybody’s out of the coliseum, it still smells good because of the all the socialites watching.’”

Of rivalries and breaking the unbroken

FluidShale 2007.09.18: Back on the video trail, and this time, it’s about the crowds that never got tickets but are watching the DLSU-Ateneo game nevertheless. I just got dismissed from RELSFOR class and got to look at the crowd, and interview some people as well. Eventually we won by one point, 70-69. There’s more after the jump.