When we found out the room we’d be staying in in Dumaguete did not have a television set, I panicked. Where would I watch the World Cup, which was due to start in a week? Because of the hemispheric time difference, matches start at midnight and continue every three hours until eight in the morning. I would have to find an accommodating sports bar to serve as a second home and first bedroom – not a daunting prospect in a football-friendly city like Dumaguete, but the personal logistics are forbidding. Not only would I have to bring unan, banig and kulambo to the establishment, I’d have to drag my wife there. She endures my football fandom with remarkable equanimity, but setting up a bedstead in a sports bar might be a bit much for her.
It turns out I needn’t have worried. The City of Dumaguete, care of its mayor who loves football seemingly even more than I do, had put up a huge screen on Rizal Boulevard, the city’s main drag on its picturesque waterfront, for free public viewings of the World Cup matches. My wife and I discovered this on our first early-morning stroll on the boulevard (a Dumaguete tradition that’s healthy, scenic and fun – try and catch the fantastic sunrise!), and I felt as though I had won the lotto. Or even better, as if the Azkals had qualified for the World Cup finals and been grouped with Kiribati, Greenland and Vatican City (no insult intended to these three fine states, and, hey, at least my football fantasy allowed for their qualification).
So, problem solved, thanks to perhaps the only city in the Philippines that has a World Cup viewing set-up like this, as well as the proper amount of respect for the world’s most beautiful game.
Day 1 of the World Cup. Oddly enough, I watched the first game of the finals not in Dumaguete, but in Siquijor, 45 minutes away by fast boat. We had decided to spoil ourselves by staying a few nights on this island paradise (and in what is by far its best resort, Coco Grove), returning to Dumaguete in time for Brazil versus Croatia, but the lure of continuing great weather proved too strong and we extended until the next day. The monsoon, after all, was fast approaching, and we wanted to enjoy one more day in the resort’s kilometer-long private beach and nature reserve, eating the day’s fresh catch, perfectly grilled.
One time, it was a 400-gram grouper that I swear was still alive (its gills were moving); the staff brought it out because they thought it was too small for two people but it turned out to be plenty of fish for both of us. Football players in Brazil would be lucky to eat as well as us.
The Brazil-Croatia match was thankfully no snoozefest, even though its broadcast began at a sleepy 4 a.m. and was at the complete mercy of Siquijor’s wobbly power supply, which had wavered several times that evening. The tournament’s inaugural match auspiciously featured four goals, including an early unavoidable own goal by Marcelo, the Brazilian left back employed by the club that I follow religiously, Real Madrid. Brazil, and Marcelo, were rescued by two goals from Neymar, the striker from Barcelona, which happen to be Real Madrid’s nemesis and arch-rivals. That’s one of the lovely things about the World Cup, when players from rival clubs discard all the ill feeling from hyper-competitive league play of past seasons in order to play together for their country.
A tiny observation about Neymar, who seems at his best when wearing the yellow and green of his country, and not as much in the blue and red of his club: he needs to be the focus of ball possession, which will not happen in the Barcelona system that moves the ball fluidly and equitably among all players, and where the first option anyway is a fellow named Lionel Messi. But Brazil is clearly and fully Neymar’s team, and will go as far as their talisman is able to take them.
Day 2. Back in Dumaguete, and in Jo’s Chicken Inato for a very early supper en route to a preternaturally early bedtime of 6:30 p.m. because I have a 3 a.m. date with the big screen on Rizal Boulevard to watch Spain play the Netherlands. My wife and I are convinced that Jo’s makes the best tasting chicken barbecue in the whole country, and perhaps the world. We are almost scared to find out what their secret is; we suspect it might be something illegal and have taken to calling their chicken “crack de manok.” (By the way, the basement bakery at Super Lee has a pan de sal variant called “crack de sal,” which the locals line up to get. We unwittingly jumped this line one afternoon, got a good-natured education from the folks there about what they were waiting for, and bought some crack for ourselves. It was denser than regular pan de sal, the texture reminding me of pan de leche, but buttery without being unctuous. Needless to say, the crack was consumed in seconds.)
After Jo’s we sauntered over to Rock’s Café, a new establishment inside the Silliman campus and attached to Byblos, a free library with thousands of volumes, owned and managed by book-lover Bron Teves, who had finally realized his dream of celebrating books, coffee and food together in a single place. He has also created a coffee connoisseur’s delight.
We were shocked to find, for example, cortado, a fairly obscure espresso drink valued by some purists, on the menu. Cortado is made using less steamed milk and foam than humdrum lattes and cappuccinos, thereby according more respect to the coffee. It is rare to find cortado even in cosmopolitan and coffee-chauvinistic New York City, and our friend NYU sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi says it has to be ordered with a lot of confidence, especially when it’s not on the menu. Well, it’s on the menu at Rock’s, beautifully brewed and delicious.
We bumped into environmentalist Leo Mamicpic at Rock’s, and in no time he had organized an instant salon, with Bron and Dumaguete’s legendary resident writer Sawi Aquino soon joining us, followed by Annabelle Lee Adriano, book collector and owner of Antulang Resort (with its own impressive library), late-blooming scuba diver Florentina “Doody” Garcia-Carre, and (briefly) writer-academic Ian Casocot.
If this is sounding like society page fluff, well, excuse me, but these folks are celebrities, and, no, our conversation was less flummery than literary, ranging from Hemingway to Wallace Stevens to Llosa and Marquez, and so enjoyable I almost missed my 6:30 bedtime.
Even though I was up dark and very early I barely made it to the boulevard in time for kick-off because the Silliman gate I was going to exit off was locked. I then remembered that the only gate open at this time of the morning was way down Hibbard Avenue, so I flashed my pocket light at the guard across the street, posted on the older, seaside part of campus, who agreed to unlock the gate but told me to use the farther gate when I returned.
Dumaguete streets at this hour are quite safe so I decided to walk the few blocks down to the boulevard, and who else was there at the screening venue but His Honor himself, the mayor (or I think it was him, he looked very mayoral) in charge of keeping these streets safe. I suspect he was cheering for Spain, in which case both of us ended up being terribly disappointed, because the title holders got drubbed by the Dutch, 1-5.
I’ve been a fan of Spain going back to the days of Raul, Morientes, Helguera, Hierro, and of course San Iker (naming just the prominent nationals from Real Madrid), and have suffered through a Zubizarreta own goal that pretty much doomed Spain in 1998, a controversial penalty loss to South Korea (without Raul who was injured in the previous game) in the 2002 semis, and a knockout loss to Zidane’s France in 2006. All in all, a trail of tears for the Spain fan, but the triumphant 2008 Euros ended the suffering; and for the last World Cup, we were with acclaimed novelist Gina Apostol and Ken Byrne (who played for the Republic of Ireland… in his dreams) on 14th Street in New York City when an impromptu parade broke out celebrating Spain’s victory over the same Netherlands who were now running circles around this 2014 version of Spain.
In truth, the entire Spanish side seems to have lost a step. Pique lumbers; Busquets does not provide cover to the back four anymore; Xabi Alonso, never fast anyway, was often exposed, but even then, it was after he was subbed when everything fell apart. Their paciest player, Sergio Ramos, was easily outsprinted by Arjen Robben for the fourth goal, or was it fifth or sixth? I had lost count.
Some interesting tidbits during the public screening: Rizal Boulevard was not closed to traffic for the screening, and because the projector was on one side of the boulevard and the screen was on the other, every time a truck rumbled past, it would pull the projected image to its side. It was pretty funny, if a bit distracting… They were serving beer (and soft drinks and snacks) at the match so I ordered a Pale Pilsen before halftime. At 3:30 in the morning it was the earliest beer I’ve had in years… I noticed a foreign gentleman behind me who was trying a clean an ugly wound on his knee, which was bleeding a lot; he also had a bump the size of an egg on his forehead, as well as nasty cuts on both elbows and arms. I asked the young man what happened and he replied that he got into a motor bike crash less than 30 minutes ago. I asked him why he wasn’t in a hospital since he was obviously in a bad way and he said he wanted to watch the match. I told the girl he was with to keep an eye on him in case he had suffered a concussion, which usually doesn’t manifest itself until some time after an injury. I should have also told her to make sure he got a tetanus shot. I hope he’s okay.
When I related this to my wife, she gave a sigh between exasperation and relief. “I thought you were crazy to go to the boulevard to watch football at 3 a.m., but it’s sort of good to know that this guy was even crazier than you.”
Day 3. Still heartbroken from the Spain loss, I went to KRI for an early takeout as I wanted to wake up in time for the Italy-England match the next morning. When it comes to dinner, KRI Restaurant has become home base for us here for a number of reasons, chief of which is they’re still the only place in town (that we know of) that serves brown rice.
Even more important, their cuisine is outstanding; we’ve yet to encounter an inferior dish. But tonight, as a special treat because of aforesaid sadness, I ordered our favorite dishes: island grilled tuna with stir-fried kangkong, and grilled pork belly – the yin and yang of healthy eating. (More on KRI later, as it is an incredible gastronomic pleasure dome.)
Despite my being a Spain diehard, I have told everyone who cared to ask that my pre-tournament pick to win the World Cup isn’t really Spain, but France, which has a bunch of amazing young footballers who are starting to play well together: Pogba, Griezmann, Varane, Sakho, Matuidi, Cabella. The injury to Franck Ribery, their best known player, has allowed Olivier Giroud to pair with Karim Benzema (who comprises the terrifying BBC triumvirate of Real Madrid along with Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo) into an unlikely yet dynamic attacking duo. So while the loss of Spain to the Netherlands still stings, I do feel a lot of confidence in my choice of France as the first European team to win a World Cup staged in the western hemisphere. Besides, all is not lost as Spain also dropped their first group match in the last World Cup, but on a more competitive 0-1 score line against Switzerland. Their multi-goal demolition by the Dutch is an awfully bad start.
I never got to watch the Italy-England match on the boulevard, which is just as well, because I was nursing a cold and badly needed my sleep. I did catch the replay on the TV set in our new quarters, which Ian Casocot helped us move into. The Italy win was well-deserved, I thought, and not at all surprising, even though this young England team played well and showed me that they were merely overrated this World Cup, and not vastly overrated as usual.
The biggest surprise to me so far is Costa Rica, which upset heavily favored Uruguay, 3-1. I must admit I am unfamiliar with most of the Costa Rica players, save for the young striker Joel Campbell, the Arsenal player on loan to Olympiacos who scored against Manchester United in the Champions League. This team of nobodies from a small Central American country with no standing army just beat a team of stars (who, to be fair, were without their best player, Luis Suarez) from the country that won the first ever World Cup.
Despite its many huge staging problems, this World Cup is promising to be a terrific one, with former champions getting wiped on the floor and nobodies emerging to become contenders, and I – with little sleep but with a full belly –promise to keep you company through it all. (To be continued)
New York-based poet Fidelito C. Cortes is in Dumaguete as visiting writer for Silliman University’s Department of English and the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center. He has written two books of poetry, including Everyday Things (UST Publishing House, 2010).
