WHY did the Games and Amusements Board suspend the Mindanao leg of the Pilipinas VisMin Super Cup if its function is just oversight?
The decision of the GAB to call off the Mindanao leg is a big question mark to Chooks-to-Go president and sports patron Ronald Mascariñas, whose firm is sponsoring the new league.
“The Games and Amusement Board (GAB) is right in acting strongly, and swiftly, against the painfully laughable lack of professionalism on display in the basketball match between the Siquijor Mystics and Lapu Lapu Heroes last April 14, during the Visayas leg of the VisMin Super Cup. However, its decision to suspend the entire Mindanao leg pending ‘further observation of the ongoing games in Visayas,’ as reported by the media, is not just simply going overboard; it is going berserk,” Mascariñas said in a statement yesterday.
“The Mindanao leg, composed of different sets of management teams and players, and different sets of games, has not even started yet. The only way to justify such better-safe-than-sorry preemptive action is to suspect the entire Mindanao leg of serious copycat tendencies, or worse, possible agreement to commit the same April 14 infamy,” he added.
In its website, the GAB’s function is to “regulate(s) and supervises professional sports and allied activities to combat and prevent the existence and proliferation of illegal bookie joints and other forms of organized illegal gambling connected with all play-for-pay sports and amusement games.”
Nowhere does it say that the GAB is empowered to suspend any league.
Mascariñas has threatened to pull out his company’s backing of the pro league marred in a controversy after two teams — Siquijor and ARQ Builders-Lapu Lapu City — figured in a mockery of a match last April 14 that raised suspicions of game-fixing.
Mascariñas wondered if there was conspiracy involved since only the still-to-happen Mindanao leg, and not the Visayas leg, was suspended.
“In law and ordinary logic, the only way to attribute an act of one as an act of all is to prove conspiracy — a meeting of the minds to commit a wrong. GAB did not even bother to offer any ground acceptable to a reasonable mind exercising ordinary judgment as remotely sufficient to justify its action,” Mascariñas said.
“It beggar’s belief that GAB could be acting, in this case, out of an abundance of caution, because the Visayas leg, where the shocking parody of professionalism in basketball was played, was not even suspended at all. It was allowed to go on, ostensibly, under ‘further observation.’”
Mascarinas also questioned GAB’s swift action despite its ongoing probe.
“If wrongful acts committed in a single match in Cebu, and not by any means attributable to all the teams playing in the Visayas leg, did not stop the games there, by what contorted stretch of logic or the imagination did it justify the wholesale suspension of the games in Mindanao? The investigations in Cebu, plain enough for ordinary fans to see, have not even been completed yet.
Despite our own biases, there is time-honored wisdom in the principle that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty,” Mascariñas said.
“By suspending the Mindanao leg, the GAB went all over itself by introducing, in effect, a novel double presumption — that teams there are presumed to be presumed guilty of wrongful tendencies for acts committed elsewhere, and by strangers. It is as if the time-honored presumption of innocence, and the basic elements of due process, and finding probable cause, or basic logic, are mere logical, legal, or ethical niceties it can fully dispense with, anytime.”
