Biantan: I am back

LONDON-- After more than six months of hibernation the Big Jack has come back and I hope it is for good.

All my life I have been a sportsman. I was an athlete, a referee, an organizer, a fan, and a sports journalist.

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I grew up in a sports-crazy community of Victorias Milling Company in Victorias, Negros Occidental with my sports- crazy family headed by my sports-nut father, Roberto Erasmo Biantan.

During my childhood years, I grew up with a family rooting for Crispa in the PBA and we knew all the personal lives of the Crispa players and hated everything that was Toyota and our object of our hate mainly was Mr. PBA himself, Robert Jaworski.

That was even without a TV set. We only listened to the legendary battles of Crispa and Toyota from our jurassic pre-war tube radio.

But the sport event which is still very fresh in my mind although it happened more than 30 years already is the unforgettable fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle”.

I was barely eight years old then but I could still remember my father dragging me to watch the Ali-Foreman fight at the house of my uncle where they had a 24-inch black and white TV set.

When Foreman was beating Ali in the early rounds we were shouting our lungs out to finish him off. The family was anti-Ali because we hated his boisterous personality and we loved the humble George.

But when Ali hit Big George with a left hook and followed it up with a right straight in the 8th round, the room felt silent. We were shocked to see George fall and lose by knockout.

We could not believe it. Somebody shouted Mafia!!!. And a great debate followed thereafter. A debate that until leaves a puzzle in my mind. Did George throw the fight?

Well after that fight, the boxing bug caught me up and there was only one person responsible for that--my father.
He would then continue to drag me to my uncle's house every Friday night to watch Joe Cantada's Fight Night boxing program.

My father was a sportsman. He was a bodybuilder. He had the body of Hercules when he was in his 50's. He could climb a coconut tree and take a bunch of coconuts without breaking one fruit.

In his old age my father still loved sports. We would talk endless about basketball, football, baseball and his beloved sport, boxing. He was Manny Pacquiao's No. 1 fan. He never missed a Pacquiao fight until he passed away last year on Nov. 26 after a long year battle with lung cancer.

At age 84, he went back to his creator. He could no longer watch Pacquiao fights Joshua Clottey in March. He could no longer watch the Pac Man beat the hell out of Floyd Mayweather Jr. late this year. My only consolation is that he is now in a better world where suffering is non existent.