[SPORTS]Saludos!

Efren "Bata" Manalang Reyes. "The Magician"

And they won again!

Efren “Bata” Reyes and his comrade Francisco “Django” Bustamante won again… this time against Indian nationals.

I was watching the Solar Channel with my family and it was really boring — it was sports. But because my parents wanted to watch it, I half-heartedly bared with it.

At first, I never expected I’d get hooked at watching pool. Well, I know Bata and Django because they’re famous and I’ve watched some of their games but I really wasn’t interested.

So speaking, I enjoyed the game. But, as much as I’m happy with the outcome of the game… that wasn’t the reason why I decided to blog about it. The real reason behind it was, after the game ended, they were interviewed by an american (or is it australian? I’m not really good at telling the difference of their accents) reporter. Of course, they were asked in English (Bata and Django) and to my surprise, after the journalist asked his “english” question… Bata answered in Tagalog.

Yes! you’ve read my post right! Bata answered in Tagalog, the mother language of the Filipinos (I don’t even know why I’m writing this blog in English when it definitely should be written in Tagalog.)

I was impressed. I kept looking at the american journalist’s face to check his reaction — and my guess was right, he doesn’t look like someone who understood the language — OUR language.

When Django Bustamante was asked, however, he struggled to answer in English — he shouldn’t have.

There are lots of blogs that came out recently. A post for example vilifying our language and treating English as his mother language and the other one encourages people to learn our language more and tells us how fortunate we are to have Tagalog as our mother language. Those are all just words… here is a man (Bata) in front of International Television, is speaking our language! What a great man! Now that’s what I’m looking for!

Our professor in our subject “Rizal’s life” (our national hero) told us to use the English language in her class. That made me wonder, “Isn’t Rizal one of the biggest advocates of the Tagalog language? So why are we going to go against his belief while learning his life?” Seriously, sometimes I worry if what I’m learning at school is the truth.

Well, I can go on and on about this topic but unfortunately, I have to end this blog post because I have to go to work tomorrow early. But before I go to bed… my final words to Mr. Reyes is, “Saludo ako sayo Ginoong Reyes!”

P.S.

Bata didn’t just use our language to answer a question once… He did it TWICE!