This weekend at the Roger’s Stadium, two teams from every district along with two from the Belize Rural will be vying for top honors in this prestigious tournament. Belize City will be represented by defending champions C.T.C., coached by Greg Moguel along with Hall of Famer Raymond Lashley’s city champions, Acros. The competition promises to be intense and includes a Camalote team which features a now seasoned Keneisha Sutherland and an Independence team which had won three championships in a row before finally being dethroned by C.T.C. last year. This tournament of course, comes at a time just right to give some welcome relief from the overbearing monotony of politics and should serve to at least ease some of the tension. Friday night will feature three games while Saturday and Sunday will feature games all day beginning at nine in the morning. Food and drinks will be on sale.

And while on the subject of sports, the eighteenth Central American and Caribbean Games being hosted in Maracaibo, Venezuela will be wrapping up tomorrow night and while reports have been all of sketchy, word is that our medal count is not what you might call overwhelming. Our male national basketball team on which hinged our highest hopes for a medal, has been able to win but two of their six matches as of Friday morning, when this is being recorded and we can only hope that by the time this commentary airs we’ll have news of a bronze medal. A significant fact of course is that one of their two victories came against a very tough world class team from Puerto Rico, and that in itself is a major accomplishment. Evidently our team, while big on heart, was not able to match up well against the much bigger athletes from countries like Panama and Cuba and one wonders if just maybe the addition of Fred Garcia, arguably the most talented big man from Belize, would not have made a difference.

Garcia according to reports, missed the trip due to what he described as business to take care of, but after speaking to him personally, I was left convinced that it had a lot more to do with money than with business commitments. It seems that as far as the priorities of our athletes are concerned, especially basketballers, money is way up at top of the list while patriotism and love of sport is way down near the bottom. With all the talk of semi-pro being revived, one wonders if maybe our athletes should not first be taught the value of playing for love of sport and love of country before being reintroduced and reduced to playing solely for the love of money.

Now of course, no commentary would be complete around this time without at least a little dab of politics. While it seemed for a while that it might never get here, August 27th is now finally just around the corner and by this time next week we will have known whose experience was the thrill of victory and whose the agony of defeat. Regardless of which party wins of course, life will go on and for our country to weather the tumultuous storms of the future, we will have to place more emphasis on national unity. Let us then all go out next Thursday and cast our ballots and after all the votes are tallied, let us hold those we elect to their promises and let us stay ever diligent in our quest for national unity and true political reform.