During the wee hours of March 30, I recalled a long-forgotten password from an email address I had used years back. Among the ancient digital mummies previously lost in cyberspace was a 2011 editorial column I had written when I was a member of the FEU Advocate titled “Gambit,” about how this principle of White opening strategy in chess exists in our lives beyond the chessboard.

It’s been 10 years between that column and the making of a Netflix series with a similar concept on a sport reflecting life. Reading that column reminded me of how I had tried to use sports — the principles and strategies behind each — in my columns as a metaphor or analogy for life, in its sum or its parts.

Take, for example, our national government’s risk mitigation efforts — or lack thereof — for this pandemic. In sports, the coaching staff scouts, analyzes opponents, devises game plans and contingencies, and runs specific-situation plays. They prepare so much as though lives are on the line, even when what’s at stake are only bragging rights, school pride, financial athletic support, and, well, job security. The farthest they could go with a semblance of a life-and-death situation is a do-or-die game.

On the contrary, even when human lives and other related matters are at stake, DOH Secretary Francisco Duque and President Duterte have catastrophically failed — or, perhaps, neglected — to prepare, highlighted by a non-existent effort to procure COVID test kits early. If not for the RT-PCR test kits jointly developed by UP Manila-NIH and the Philippine Genome Center (PGC), led by PGC Deputy Executive Director Dr. Raul Destura, COVID detection in the first six months would’ve been rampantly inaccurate and hindered.

Duque and Duterte, though, have shamelessly kept their jobs after the mess they had made, brimming with pride even when a detergent with the same name could remove more problems than they could.

Had this been a UAAP regular season, we would be dead last in the standings, winless, and an athletic clownery due to Duque and Duterte’s gross incompetence and lack of foresight.

There’s also Spokesperson Harry Roque bannering the administration’s pandemic response as “excellent” compared with other countries, and that we’re “winning.” Now, imagine a coach telling supporters that the team has been performing “excellent” and that it is “winning,” but the stats, standings, and scores tell otherwise.

Duterte further claimed that there is no other way to deal with the pandemic except to wait for vaccines. Imagine a coach claiming your team cannot beat — or even compete against —other powerhouse teams unless you have superstars, even when you see other equally small ball clubs go head-to-head with Goliaths. This rings true not just about the pandemic but about other national issues like the Chinese reclamations in the West Philippine Sea.

Had Roque and Duterte been coaches, they would have been fired from their positions and may even be criminally charged for “game-fixing,” as they seem to wilfully give up to China the territorial waters under our jurisdiction, with the latter even (happily) joking about an offer to make the PH a province of China.

There are many examples to refute the defeatist, falsely dichotomized mindset that Duterte has spread like a virus: the Dallas Mavericks’ title win over the Miami Heat and the “Miracle in Hanoi” in 2012; Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s comeback from a 0-2 hole to beat Roger Federer, who then had a 178-win streak in Grand Slam matches when he won the first two sets, in Wimbledon 2012; Gary David and Powerade’s Cinderella run in the PBA Philippine Cup in 2011-2012; Ateneo’s upset of the thrice-to-beat La Salle Lady Spikers in 2014; San Miguel’s “Beeracle” and the Azkals’ stunning win against North Korea during the FIFA World Cup Qualifiers in 2016.

Add to that list Miami of the 2020 NBA season. Miami reached — and won two games in — the finals against the stacked LA Lakers. Miami had two injured starters. Miami had no superstars. Miami was powered mostly by rookies and undrafted, no-name players. Yet, Miami became a championship-caliber team, thanks to the leadership wizardry of Fil-Am head coach Erik Spoelstra.

And that is what good leaders do, right? Leaders make ways where ways are not found.

Limitations in finance can be a chance to show a leader’s brilliance — especially in times of turbulence. LA can pay their superstars a big salary and Miami cannot, but they offered something similarly worthy, whereas the PH kept on incurring debt as a so-called pandemic response, yet the only massive response that is obvious is this admin’s irresponsibility.

Like Spoelstra, there is plenty of leadership brilliance worthy of emulation from nations in the Asia-Pacific region. The pandemic response success of New Zealand (parliamentary), Taiwan (democratic), and Vietnam (communist) showed that the form of government matters less than the kind of leader who governs.

But with our country’s current leaders, sacrifices seem meaningless.

While sacrifice is, both in sports and in life, a part of success, it only is when based on calculation and not on ego inflation. Baseball has squeeze bunts and sacrifice fly (sacfly), basketball has players giving duty fouls to prevent easy field goals, and chess has the Queen’s and King’s Gambits — the sacrificing of a pawn early in exchange for central control.

Duterte must take some pages and principles from sports. Sometimes, you have to deal with an out in baseball either to score or move the runner in scoring position. Instead, the sacfly Duterte makes an excuse for is his sudden, hidden private jet flights to and from Davao.

Duterte wasn’t willing to give a duty foul against China by banning inbound-outbound travels. Instead, he gave the virus the lane with an all-access pass — with a Chinese national being the first recorded PH case and the world’s first COVID death outside China — crashing the boards of our economy and health sectors to near-collapse.

Duterte made a fatal King’s Gambit when he didn’t close national borders earlier. He had boasted instead that he would just slap and spit on the virus. Ironically, it was the Queen’s Gambit, the efforts of Vice President Leni Robredo, which instilled a sense of national leadership with a moral compass that stirred the ship into the right executive direction.

Indeed, sacrifice is part of success, but just as I have written in an ADVO column 10 years ago, “Sacrifice sometimes does not suffice.” Filipinos are not pieces on a chessboard; we are not mere sacrificial pawns in Duterte’s Gambit.

Has he and his cronies forgotten? A pawn has the power to be “promoted” to any piece once it reaches the end of the chessboard. We will reach that end in May 2022, and almost everyone looks forward to promoting a pawn into a Queen to take the head of the King. – Rappler.com

June Ace Esteban, 27, is a former customer service associate and now works for the Krus Na Ligas barangay LGU in Quezon City. He taught journalism in his spare time prior to the pandemic, with a penchant for news, feature, and sports writing.