Recah Trinidad opens his column today by saying that the reason there was no live broadcast of boxer Drian Francisco’s sensational knockout victory over Duangpetch Kokietgym in Thailand was because there were no broadcasters nationalistic enough to bother with it – as was the case for the recently-concluded Guangzhou Asian Games, which wasn’t broadcast in the country either.

(Really? We’re going to do this again?)

The fact is that we didn’t get to watch Drian Francisco fight live for the same reason we weren’t able to watch Asian Games live – money. The broadcast rights to the Asian Games just cost too much money – the Inquirer, Trinidad’s employer, reported that licensing fees were at a staggering $16 million – and because there was no guarantee that all basketball games for Smart Gilas will be aired, there just wasn’t enough interest in it.

Likewise, it probably did not make much financial sense for Solar Sports to broadcast the Francisco fight live, not just because carrying fights via satellite cost an arm and a leg, but also because it happened on Tuesday afternoon, when there’s no one at home to watch it. Besides, while Francisco is an impressive young fighter, he’s barely a household name, and lord knows if local broadcast networks actually make any money off all these fights on television every week. So instead, Solar has decided to air Francisco’s fight this Sunday.

I don’t know if Recah Trinidad is just misinformed – he says that he had a hard time finding updates on the Internet, when in fact Solar Sports had a blow-by-blow account of the action on Twitter – but I’m less bothered by that than by the insinuation that not following Francisco or the Asian Games, or any Filipino athlete for that matter, somehow makes one less nationalistic.

Because while sports may be a wonderful prism with which to view national identity, it shouldn’t be the only prism. Conrado de Quiros wrote yesterday about national identity vis-à-vis national pride over Manny Pacquiao’s victory, and he hit the nail squarely on the head:

The thing about [drawing pride from Pacquiao] however is that it’s all very transient and ephemeral. I completely buy [the researcher]’s finding that there’s a waning in national pride immediately after a Pacquiao victory and some time later. We saw that during Cory’s time, the euphoria dying almost as fast as it arose and Filipinos denying their Filipino-ness all over again especially while abroad. Doubtless that was due to setbacks the government suffered, among them the return of corruption, the coups, the insurgency, the human rights violations, the crippling power outages, and the no end of natural calamities that befell the country.

But there was a far deeper reason for it, which Malou Doronila, who conducted a study among elementary school kids in the early 1990s, discovered. That was that the default mode of Filipinos was to be ashamed to be Filipino, relieved only by high points like Edsa—and, we may add today, Pacquiao’s victories.

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The point is that the Pacquiao effect, or the Cory effect, or whatever effect certified heroes of this country produce, has to fight (to use a boxing metaphor) against a whole culture stacked up against national pride. And completely unlike Pacquiao’s fights, which have resulted in victories, that fight has resulted in defeat. The problem is not the effect, it is how to sustain the effect. I personally think it can’t be done without giving Filipinos a sense of history or past, which is what makes for rootedness, identity, and pride.