Voices.sg

I watched in awe as Manny “the national fists” Pacquiao brought traffic in the Philippines to a standstill with his uppercuts, punching out American boxing legend Oscar de la Hoya in Round 8 in the welter-weight bout scheduled for 12 rounds.

And I do mean awe. How does someone with a name like Manny Pacquiao make it big in boxing? In Singapore’s colloquial slang, Pacquiao is translated literally as “shoot bird”, popularly taken to mean one who is cock-eyed and regularly misses the target. “A lot of misses” is hardly a sound name for a top boxer.

But you don’t make fun of a guy who has been called the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, even if that term is the most useless piece of information since, well, the last edition of The Straits Times.

Pound-for-pound, a rhinoceros beetle is the strongest creature in the world, capable of supporting up to 850 times its own weight; pound-for-pound, the froghopper spittlebug is the greatest jumper, propelling itself more than 140 times its own height. (The equivalent of me bench-pressing 5 SBS double-decker buses and jumping over the Singapore Flyer with plenty of room to spare.) But no, pound-for-pound is a stupid statistic, as my bug-swatter and I can attest to. But, again, you don’t make fun of a guy who can sweep Oscar de la Hoya aside like he was an insect.

As Pacquiao rained blow after blow on his opponent, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of national pride. Until I remembered I wasn’t Filipino.

Kudos and heartiest congratulations to the Philippines. The archipelago — renowned for its call centres and domestic helpers than sports excellence — has achieved more than Singapore dares to beg Santa Claus for, even with all our money and infrastructural superiority.

And while the Philippines celebrates the victory of Manny Pacquiao, we are left to rue the sorry, cock-eyed state of Singapore sports.

It isn’t for lack of trying: the starting up of the Singapore Sports School, winning the bid to host the Youth Olympics Games 2010, and the first-ever F1 Grand Prix night race at the Marina Bay circuit are a poke in the right direction.

But for the pragmatic state, sports represents a new way of raking in the money. The country earned some $1 billion from sports and related industries last year, local media reported this month.

Yet, Singapore sports is still a bloody mess.

I suspect Minister Mah is still red-faced from his prediction that we would make it to the World Cup in 2010. Again, it’s not like we didn’t try.

Like Manchester City FC, Singapore has deep pockets. And like the English Premier League club, it is learning that money cannot buy you everything. Attempts to raid the international transfer market and “buy” foreign-born talents for its national team have been both farcical and futile.

With close to half the Singapore team bearing unfamiliar names, the Football Association of Singapore has estranged its own supporters. While Kallang roared in the past for local born and bred heroes like Quah Kim Song, Fandi Ahmad, and V Sundramoorthy, there is hardly a whimper around the stadiums as we struggle to pronounce the names of the current crop of footballers donning the national jersey, including John Wilkinson and Daniel Bennett (from England), Shi Jiayi and Qiu Li (China), Mustafic Fahrudin (Serbia), Aleksander Duric (Bosnia), Agu Casmir, Precious Emuejeraye and Itimi Dickson (Nigeria), Egmar Goncalves (Brazil), Mirko Grabovac (Croatia), and Bah Mamadou (Mali). We have an international cast that Arsene Wenger can only envy, and still don’t look like a side capable of making it into the World Cup. The difference now is: with a team we can’t identify with, we don’t even care if we make it.

But foreign imports are not exclusive to Singapore football. Singapore’s Olympic flag-bearer and table-tennis star Li Jiawei is from China (as are the rest of her teammates and coaches), and admitted in a TV interview that she was keen to do well at the Beijing Olympics Games in 2008 “as a Beijinger, and a Chinese national, Beijing is my home ground and I hope to do well”. Did I forget to mention that she was Singapore’s flag bearer?

The only Singaporean of note associated with the table-tennis team is the STTA president and PAP MP Lee Bee Wah, whose ill-timed comments about bringing coaches to task for a dismal performance at the Games sparked threats of an en masse walkout and culminated in her public apology.

Or perhaps Sean Lee, who is still on the run from an angry mob of ruggers waiting to maul him, after absconding with some $500,000 from the Singapore Rugby Union in 2005.

In that light, perhaps it’s not all a bad thing that Singaporeans stopped being involved in our own sports after all.