THERE are tournaments designed to bring fame, wealth and glory to the champion.
But the APT Cup has none of those. This is a golf tournament that has no equal in the world. First off, it wants its participants to get drunk even before they could make their last putt. Drinks of all kinds are all over and that’s par for the course.
Top that.
The winner here doesn’t get anything but applause. Oops, wait, a minute. He/she is forced to gulp down a mug of poktanju—a potent mix of beer, Korean sake and Scotch whiskey. As the emcee of the award ceremonies counts from one-to-ten, the drinker/winner up on the stage has to finish the poktanju down the hatch.
Bash that.
If you can call that punishment for a champ who toiled nearly six hours on the course, bring it on. For, you are damn right.
But if you consider the poktanju a champion’s prize worth keeping, remembering, you believe in the beauty of life’s mystic once again.
For it is in the APT Cup that you get to reclaim the beauty of “abnormalness” anew. It’s a refrain that tirelessly guns up the event.
So often that we, as adults, take life so seriously, totally forgetting that to be children again is what ensures the balance of our earthly existence.
What happens so stingingly sadly is that, without our knowing it, as we trod on through life’s journey, we lousily lose touch on the primaries, basics. We allow radiant rainbows to turn black and white, letting it happen with inexplicable indifference. The magical mystery of a “leaf falling” is lost in the staccato of our race to get there first ahead of the rest.
That irks no end our APT (Art P. Tugade), a lawyer for humankind who spouts poetry like no other extemporaneously especially when he is expounding on life’s true meaning.
As APT had put it so succinctly in his much-awaited speech during the award ceremonies on Friday at The Orchard in Dasmarinas, Cavite: “Today is that time for us to be children again.”
He’s been telling us that with as much passion as when he said it first some 20 or so years ago.
Someone won a Nissan Almera as the tournament’s top raffle—and, like the rest of the field, he didn’t even shell out a single centavo to get into the tournament.
Tell me, who can top APT’s child-play?
(alsol47@yahoo.com)