Humblebola

Hi Karl,

It’s another UAAP week in one of the tightest races we’ve had since forever. From the looks of it, some separation is starting to form. UP has taken the solo lead due to some inspired play by Ateneo in taking down the NU Bulldogs, but not before that same NU Bulldogs put on a walloping against the Adamson Soaring Falcons, who again fell to the FEU Tamaraws in an absolute grind of a game.

Kieffer Alas and Jared Bahay really carried Ateneo in their win against NU. As expected, no matter how late they started their preparation under Coach Louie, the talent of those two guards will just power them through to several wins, and more this season.

Win and lose streaks are starting to form, FEU finally breaking out of their lose streak, Ateneo forming a 2-game win streak while Adamson has lost back-to-back for the first time this season.

In the wake of the two Adamson losses, meme-pages have latched onto an idea that gave me pause — that the Soaring Falcons is the embodiment of being mid.

Mid in this context is being used as an insult, or at least a taunt against a program that hasn’t seen a men’s basketball championship since Marcos Sr. was president. The meme-makers jeer at the team for not making it to the top, but never quite falling to the bottom. The epitome of mediocrity they claim.

I get that these pages are supposed to be humorous and satire, and satire’s goal is supposed to provoke thought through humor, so let’s think for a moment. Think of what exactly the message is here.

The Adamson Soaring Falcons finished the first round with a 4-3 record, placing it on the top half of a tightly contested race. For 7 games it managed to go toe to toe with so-called title contenders, winning most of the games. A team that doesn’t have a player that made the mythical 5, or even an MVP contender, or a statistical leader from the previous season, went and competed against teams that did (except NU, Adamson just couldn’t contend with NU).

This season, only UE has been winless, a program with a tradition of producing legendary players like James Yap, Paul Artadi, Paul Lee, which has had its best players taken from them season after season. This is probably the state the meme-pages expect Adamson to be in as well, wallowing in the cellar, like UP was before getting its biggest crowdfunding project in the mid 2010’s. But it’s not.

Working behind the scenes with this program, Adamson doesn’t really have a “winning tradition” in men’s basketball. The last basketball championship it’s won in the UAAP was for boys in Season 86. It has the longest championship drought, and hasn’t even seen a Finals appearance in the Final Four era. Instead, the tradition for Adamson’s men’s basketball program is trying and hope. Hope that things will get better.

Going into the game against FEU, the Soaring Falcons were already short-handed. AJ Fransman was seen wearing a splint on his arm, Joshua Barcelona and Hunter Cruz Dumont seem to be dealing with injuries too. But Adamson’s play didn’t feel like they were missing. For the first quarter they made the game a slogfest, playing the slow defensive grind they want every game to be, against a team that players capable of scoring at will.

It was a team that was clearly out-matched in terms of talent, then outmatched in terms of available players, fighting for every advantage they could, making as many right decisions as they could on the court to claw and scrap for points that just come so easy to others. Then Precious Jonah got injured.

Despite losing yet another player to injury, the Soaring Falcons continued to play on, adjusting based on who they had available. They threw zones at FEU, denied Konateh the ball in the post as best they could, ganged up for every rebound, and even closed a 17-point deficit to 6 on the back of Matt Erolon’s no-conscience back-to-back-to-back threes.

For the last 2-minutes of the game the Soaring Falcons went without a big, with Earl Medina probably the tallest among them (it was hard to determine cause they all had similar heights). It was a conscious decision to give up height, rebounding and everything in between to give them a chance to contest every FEU shot possible. And yet it almost worked. There was a steal and a bucket that made the fans believe that this undermanned, undersized lineup could somehow pull off a comeback and win. But it was for naught as an offensive rebound led to a Pasaol corner three to put the game away.

And that’s the story of the Soaring Falcons, the story of us, the ordinary Filipino, isn’t it?

We wake up everyday in a country that can hardly support us, to do a job that we’ve prepared our entire lives for, trying our best to string together one good decision after another, only to find so many obstacles in front of us, many of which we have no control over, many of which are beyond our ability to overcome, and more often than not we get a fraction of the results for multitudes of the effort we put in, yet we continue to work, we continue to hope that tomorrow will be better, not knowing if that better ever comes.

We continue to hope because although the top always seems out of reach, allowing ourselves to sink to the bottom is just not an option. So that’s where many of us are, mid. We are mid because we choose to continue living despite the challenges. We are mid because we refuse to sink to the bottom, but can’t quite make it to the top.

It’s true, the Soaring Falcons don’t have a championship from this decade (or the decades before). It’s true that makes them mid. But I wonder if that’s somehow worse than giving up. If maximizing every advantage humanly possible is somehow worse than laying on the floor and just allowing multiple 0-14 seasons to happen.

Is the messaging saying that it’s better to have just cleared the bench when Jonah got injured, rather than continue to fight on with every play in their book? Are these meme-pages saying that it’s better to just give up?

Because that’s what the people in power who benefit from our misery want, isn’t it? For us to just give up. To stop trying. To stop making attempts to reach the top that they so arrogantly guard. So they shame us for trying. That’s the message being sent, that it’s a shame to try and to try doing it your own way.

I don’t think any UAAP team lacks trying. Championship or not, every team goes into the season thinking this could be their year, and not all of them can be right. At the end of the season, only 1 would have succeeded and everyone else would be either mid or bottom.

If the Soaring Falcons are mid, then they’re mid, but it only means, just like us, they’re still trying to get to the top, one good decision at a time, one play at a time. Gracious when things don’t go their way, magnanimous when it finally does.

Rivalry weekend is coming. Sure to be another exciting game.

See you at the games.

Yours,

Toby.