In 1992, when the Milpros Football Club was about to travel to Texas to face the Dallas Rockets in the away leg of their CONCACAF Champion and Sub-Champions series, our club Coordinator, the late Denton Garbutt embarked on an initiative to which he attached great importance, with the full support of our management. Denton visited the Belize Tourist Board and requested a complete set of brochures and other paraphernalia advertising Belize, which were organized into packages for our team members to individually offer to their counterparts before the game in Texas. We saw ourselves as proud ambassadors for Belize.
The situation which unfolded with our national basketball team athletes in Guatemala over the past weekend is regrettable. In the future, we need to have policies in place for all our sports bureaucrats and managers to better appreciate the roles they need to play on the diplomatic front, for our athletes are all ambassadors when they travel abroad to represent our country.
In fairness to our players, of all sports, youths are our future; the rapport they develop with their counterparts abroad is what will help to break down barriers, and eventually dissolve the inherited biases fueling the disputes between nations. Our youth will always want to make friends and to play ball. This is good and to be encouraged. Together, our youth and their Guatemalan friends will eventually solve this ridiculous, unfounded claim to our territory.
However, in the meantime, we need to educate our young people better on their role and responsibility, and be more careful when we send them out that they are not put in positions where their friendly nature makes them vulnerable to devious machinations by older and wiser manipulators on the other side.
Don’t crucify our young men. Sympathize with them. Come home, youths. No need to apologize. When you are ready, and begin to understand, you will want to apologize to yourself. But we are all to blame.
No worry ‘bout not’n, youths; we will take care of business. We are Belize!
Big up BiGYea! Big up the Belize Territorial Volunteers.