In the Philippines, the 6,000 year-old sport of cockfighting has been transformed into a fully-legal, billion dollar industry. Known locally as sabong, it takes place in 2,500 dedicated stadiums across the country.
It is the brutal and bloody "sport" of two gamecocks pitted against each other, predicated on one killing the other. Literally, a fight to the finish. To the unaccustomed, a gruesome and disgusting sight. But to the passionately addicted, testosterone-fueled and adrenaline-raging sabong aficionados, it is a fierce, bloody, and slashingly entertaining fight-to-the-death that repeats itself 20 to 30 times in a single day of cockfighting.
It has been called a "national sport" – a designation that easily draws divisive argument. But, it is a "national pastime" – a sphere of activity where class lines blur, a game enjoyed with equal fervor by both the rich and the masa. Parity, however, is more imagined than real. The moneyed aficionados are usually involved with expensive brood cocks of pedigree lineage bred for "fastest kill" and trained for big money derby events, with a variety of breed-names as descriptive as: lemon, radio, white kelso, Madigan Grey, McClean, roundhead, claret, or sweater. In contrast, much of the rural-provincial folk are involved with training and conditioning their low-pedigreedmestizo cocks, usually for hack fights. For the rich, it is the "sport of kings" – of nerve and verve, macho and ego, and the tens-of-thousands of pesos or even millions won or lost with a shrug. And for the masa, a sport of dreamers, pitting their lowly-rural-bred against a burgis cock, betting their meager wages and rainy-day savings, high on a belief that on any day, with the luck of a parry-dodge-and-slash. . . and a prayer. . . his game cock can win.
Brutal, bloody, and entertaining—all that, but it's also a betting sport. Betting is a sine qua non of sabong. In fact, without betting sabong will be transformed into an unrecognizable namby-pamby sport. Betting discharges the adrenaline and stokes the din and theater of the kristos. With the Cockfighting Law of 1974, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, stamped his imprimatur on sabong with Presidential Decree No. 499, essentially designating it as a "vehicle for the preservation and perpetuation of native Filipino heritage and thereby enhance our national identity." The cock-a-hoop endorsement provided legal status to kristos and the culture of cockfight betting.
Very recently.. Atong Ang has break all records for betting 26 million pesos roughly $500 thousand dollars for a single cock fight..
Thousands of peso seems big when you bet it in a cockfight. But what if millions were bet? Not just a million, but 26 million pesos?
For sure you will call all the gods to help your game fowl win in a fight.
Luckily the great Atong Ang won..
Its considered a sport in the Philippines or is it considered as an obssesion?
What are your thoughts?