Sport
There are five major sports in the Philippines. These are basketball, boxing, billiards, football, and volleyball. Despite being a tropical nation, ice skating is a popular sport in the Philippines. Sports such as athletics, weightlifting, aerobics, and martial arts are also popular recreations.
Other sports including baseball, swimming, wrestling, underwater diving, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing, cockfighting, horse racing, motor racing, rugby and jai-alai are also appreciated. With the sport of cockfighting being wildly popular in the Philippines, attracting large crowds who bet on the outcome of fights between the birds, and the sport itself a popular form of fertility worship among almost all Southeast Asians. Such sports activity as the sport of cockfighting, related to ritual forms of worship as practices and rituals of ancient worship intended for the blessings of the supernatural, as "in Indus Valley and other ancient civilizations, mother goddess had been invoked for fertility and prosperity" which included that religious cockfight lay as a prime example of "cultural synthesis of 'little' and 'great' cultures" due to religious syncretisms causing the loss for some of religious significance and hence a sport, while remaining for some as a form of ‘fertility worship’ and still for others as Baal or Baalim.
On July 27, 2009, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed Republic Act No. 9850 into law, declaring Modern Arnis as the Philippine National Martial Art and Sport.
Read more about this topic: Sport In The Philippines
Famous quotes containing the word sport:
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)