Winners and losers

CONCIO. Unique gifts and insights.

Our top celebrity winners this week are led by ABS-CBN’s Charo Santos-Concio, who has just been promoted to CEO of the huge media and entertainment corporation. Charo joined the company as consultant in 1987, so she’s marking her silver anniversary in an especially glittering way—ensconced at the very top!

We first knew Charo as a hardworking PA, then producer, in different production companies—and also as a fine TV-film actress (she even has a Best Actress award from the Asian Film Festival).

In general, however, she has put her acting career on hold in favor of her many production and management responsibilities, which have consistently become weightier and more challenging through the years. It could have been a difficult choice, but we’re glad she made it, because her unique gifts and insights as artist, wife and mother have enhanced her work and achievements at ABS-CBN.

Yes, the shows she’s initiated have been popular and financially profitable, but her awareness of media and production people’s responsibilities have added to their cachet and positive influence on viewers.

She may know on which side her loaf of bread is buttered, but she’s also aware of the fact that butter isn’t everything!

In addition, Charo wears her mantle of responsibilities lightly, and hasn’t lost her zest for life. The last time we interviewed her at length, she viscerally brightened the room with her bright, blithe and beaming arrival—and we got the distinct impression that she welcomed each new day with alacrity and happiness, grateful for its many challenges and opportunities to entertain and serve viewers better.

—A winner all the way!

On the losing end of this piece’s instructive dichotomy stands—or slumps—Manny Pacquiao, after his KO loss to Juan Miguel Marquez last Sunday. Manny isn’t used to losing, so it was quite a blow for him and to his ego, which has steadily expanded and inflated through the years, But, we know that he will go on to other triumphs, so we aren’t worried about him.

Insight

What we do fret about is the way that the Filipino nation has taken Manny’s uncharacteristic defeat, like he failed them in some darkly seminal way. It has reminded us of the insight we gained many years ago, when we witnessed the rise and “fall” of another national winner, our cousin, chess champion and Asia’s first grandmaster, Eugene Torre.

When Eugene kept winning one tournament after another at a very young age, he could do no wrong as far as Filipinos were concerned. They lionized and praised him to high heavens!

Then came the day when he met his first defeat in an international chess tournament—and many of his erstwhile fanatics reacted as though he had betrayed them!

That’s when we first realized that we Filipinos love winners—and hate losers, especially in the international arena, where “the whole world” is watching “our” national defeat, because our hero has turned out to be not as invincible as we stubbornly fancy ourselves to be!