Damn, I’m writing this with a terrible stiff neck courtesy of my team mate Gully Go. Last night, we did some partner play doing the thai plum (muay thai clinch). He easily dominated me and my neck is so sore that I have to turn my entire upper budy just to look sideways.
It seems that in every personal blog, at one point, the writer will make a confession to be read by thousands of anonymous reader. I will make no attempt in formulating reasons for this but instead, will join the herd and make my first confession.
As a teenager, I looked up to this actor (who was in the early 90’s the epitome of a hunk, tall, dark, handsome and with ripped muscled and washboard abs) . I idolized him not because of his looks and his talent in acting but because he’s a multi-faceted person. He excelled in almost every sport he dipped his hands into: target shooting, golf, fencing. He even won several gold medals in SEA Games for fencing. In the early 90’s he organized sporting events that bared his name, which started the trend for show biz personalities to organizing and naming tournaments after them. He’s a talented actor who won acting awards and have studies his craft and become a director as well. His entry though in politics is somewhat marred by controversies and him being named as Presidential Advisor on Sports is said to be based on his connections with the President and not because of his capability.
Yup, that person is Richard Gomez. He is my idol when I was in high school until 2nd year college. I look up to him so much that almost all of the shirts that I wore, at that time, are all Bench. Whenever I compete in quiz shows or speak in public ( I was a student leader) I made sure that I am wearing Bench. I even imitated his hair style!
Richard Gomez is now training muay thai in MAP-ultra and he says that he truly enjoy the sport. There’s some sort of an invasion launched by the Philippine fencing team who would troop to our gym and work out some sweat doing muay thai after training in their original sport. He really is a natural athelete and only after doing a few sessions, he has improved his way of punching and kicking. The RP fencing team are even kidding me that I now have a match, in the person of Richard Gomez.
I have good impressions about this guy. Though he’s a known celebrity, he doesn’t put his weight around the gym expecting to be given a special treatment. And have no qualms in using the extremely spartan facilities of the Muay Thai Central Gym. Our first conversation even started with me saying that I’m from PUP and him saying that he’s also from PUP. Though I’ve “outgrown” him, my role model now is Theodore Roosevelt who’s also a multi-faceted person, I will only have respect for Richard Gomez.
Speaking of Theodore Roosevelt, I’m so amazed by his life that I have 3 THICK books about this remarkable man. Time Magazine in 1998 named him as one of the most important persons of the 2oth Century. Below is the first paragraph of that article from Time Magazine:
“They don’t hold White House lunches the way they used to at the beginning of the century. On Jan. 1, 1907, for example, the guest list was as follows: a Nobel prize winner, a physical culturalist, a naval historian, a biographer, an essayist, a paleontologist, a taxidermist, an ornithologist, a field naturalist, a conservationist, a big-game hunter, an editor, a critic, a ranchman, an orator, a country squire, a civil service reformar, a socialite, a patron of the arts, a colonel of the cavalry, a former Governor of New York, the ranking expert on big-game mammals in North America and the President of the United States.
All these men are named Theodore Roosevelt.”
