Jocks and nerds.

Athletes are heroes in high schools, and when they enter university, they become magnets for pro-league recruiters, and when they become pro, they become rich and famous.

In the Philippines, they also become politicians.

Philip Cezar, no. 18, played for Crispa.

Look at basketball star Freddie Webb who became a senator.  Also basketball heroes Atoy Co, a councilor and Philip Cezar, a vice Mayor. And the biggest name in boxing, Manny Pacquiao, a congressman. Webb and Cezar were my favorite PBA players, by the way.

Jocks as they are called, athletes and sportsmen are adulated and worshipped like actors.  In the collapsed communist bloc of yesteryear, athletes were considered "state assets," given extra ordinary perks by the politburo or the Party to bring home medals from world and Olympic events.

On the other side are the nerds, who,in junior high are peppered with insults and paper planes (remember George McFly in Back to the Future?).  In college, they become "term paper machine" for some jocks or worse, computer hacks for those extraordinary cheerleaders, and when they enter the workforce, they are tagged as low in EQ (emotional quotient) or eat alone in office snack bars with only the handheld or tablet as snack mate. 

People who people jocks become celebrities, too.  They become source for autographs, for free tickets for the game, for free photographs.  Those people who people jocks are usually nerds too who gloat over their found-position, as alalay, or minion.

Now that school has just started for some 21.49 million Filipino students, there would be jocks and nerds floating again around campuses.  But the more pathetic figures are those people who people around jocks, sometimes becoming a fly in the ointment, or spoilers of fun, or acting as if they were greater than the idol. In one Tagalog saying, becoming "ang langaw ay mas mataas pa sa kalabaw."