Thursday, May 01, 2008 Yap: Fruit and shake By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
IT was exactly 3 p.m. when they arrived on the beach: a mother and her three boys, bringing with them pails, shovels, brushes, and what looked like Molotov cocktails. Immediately, they got down to work as though everything had been carefully planned back home.
The mother drew a wide square with a stick on the sand, and right off, the two boys shoved their pails on the wet sand and ferried them unto the square. The other boy wrestled the mound into a plateau, on which he carefully poured forth wet sand to form promontories he’d soon shave clean into minuscule minarets.
The sand here in Boracay isn’t as white as I remember it years ago. This seven-kilometer stretch has aged a bit through years of ceaseless partying.
In a little while, the beach nomads had erected a miniature kingdom in time for dusk, and placed the lighted “cocktails” on the sides. Around this time, a throng had almost filled a hat with bills and coins.
Still on the beach, a young wife had shaved a heap of sand into a phallus right on her husband. She wanted details and planted strands from a coconut husk around it, until her husband broke into laughter and consequently the fragile sculpture.
The kids were looking over and shared in the laughter. Boracay hosts a lot of other crazy stuffs.
A “lasting impression” is how my best friend puts it after three days of watching a sport I was ignorant about, or have overlooked in the season when our countrymen are tickled pink at the slightest jab of a boxing icon.
I’m talking about beach volleyball, a sport I so shamelessly thought merely falls along bikini and cleavage. Well, I had Beach Volley 101 with Nestea’s annual event, this year in Boracay Island, where you can’t seem to take a writing assignment too seriously.
But, indeed, a “lasting impression.” It is one sport where the Cebu teams excel.
For years now, the Southwestern University (SWU), University of the Visayas (UV), University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJ-R), the University of Southern Philippines Foundation (USPF) have been taking turns on the champ’s chair.
We have teams that have other provinces for fans. The crowd is particularly taken by UV’s Janette Brillo and USPF’s Jonrey Sasing. The latter, our sportswriter Marian Baring said, has a standing offer to the Philippine team, which he persistently turned down.
Sasing sported a “Superman” henna tattoo, and as he dropped bombs on the enemy’s court one after the other with fierceness and grace at the same time, the announcer couldn’t help but cry out, “Can somebody put that Superman sign on his chest?!”
Those who didn’t quite know him eventually became converts and started yelling “Sassssinggg!” making it sound like a cobra’s hiss.
Brillo was equally brilliant, a terrifying machine that spews fireballs. If not for SWU’s intelligent playing, UV would’ve kept its title this year. But SWU it was that showed depth in the game, nailing the point that indeed beach volley is still a war of wits done on dunes. The kids went home, and may as well spend the rest of the year playing the usual volley on concrete, in dull gyms and covered courts.
I can only hope there will be time the country’s beach volley starts to look into bigger things, say, the Olympics. We go out and sell our beaches; we might as well send our players as their ambassadors.
Rain fell in Bora, and we ended up in Jona’s. Eat your hearts out, but I just had the best fruit shake in the world in a glass as bloated as my tummy.
