Benny’s solid stand on Duterte sustained

By Al S. Mendoza

  BENNY Gopez was right all along.

“Mayor Duterte will run for President,” Benny had kept telling anyone who cared to listen.  “Mark my word.”

You do not know Benny.

I know him from head to foot.

Relentless and the most persistent person I’ve ever known when pursuing either a dream or a target, Benny is beyond compare.

Unstoppable as a train gone haywire.

Impregnable as Fort Knox.

No surrender like a hero-destined warrior.

The guy who could approximate Benny’s maverick persona is yet to be born.

When, almost, one by one from Duterte’s close-in circle were dispirited on crumbling knees, it was only Benny who kept the fires of hope a-burning.

At one time, weighed-down by uncertainty, the majority of Duterte’s team members, if not all of them, waved high the white flag of surrender. 

Only Benny stood his ground. 

“I am still here as a Mayor Duterte believer,” Benny said.  “I will never toss in the towel for as long as that window of registration has not closed. For me, the march to Malacanang cannot be stopped for as long as Mayor Duterte is breathing.”

Benny has been president of the nation’s governing bodies in golf and volleyball.

Before him, no one else had held multiple national positions in sports.

While president of golf, Benny’s leadership was sterling, to say the least.

He brought the World Team Golf Championship to the Philippines in 1996. 

That will not happen again in 50 years, at the very least, because of rules on rotation hosting via continental basis.

After that, Benny, as volleyball president, staged the FIVB World Women’s Volleyball Championship in Manila in 2000.

It marked the first time that the country had hosted such volleyball event of global proportion.

Beauteous Leila Barros of Brazil would crown herself the darling of the tournament, drawing crowds of unimaginable numbers.

And, in case you have forgotten, Benny Gopez also brought the World Junior Volleyball Championship in Dagupan that same year.

He did it in tandem with then Dagupan City Mayor Al “Buloy” Fernandez, making Dagupan the first non-major capital in the world to host an international volleyball tournament.

He has done many more world wonders for the country on the world stage.

Then, as vice president of the Philippine Olympic Committee, Benny saw himself a whisker away from being president of the country’s Olympic movement.

He quit before his term ended.

“Dirty politics has never left Philippine sports,” Benny had said then.

Now, he’s back.

“I can see in Mayor Duterte as the biggest hope of our country,” Benny said.  “I never wavered.  He is running finally because I knew from the start he would bow to the will of the people.”

I can hear Duterte diehard Gonz Duque, my neighbor from two storeys above me, yelling with all his might:  “Didn’t I tell you, Digong will run?”

 

(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)

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