# How Sabong Came Online
### *A Pioneer's History*
**by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade*
## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand
Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat.
But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son.
Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from.
**Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside.
And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit.
So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.**
By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet.
The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son.
**He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about.
I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own.
What kind of father says no to that?
So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird.
Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken.
I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.*
And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.**
Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**.
But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was.
I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed.
She invited me to her farm.
---
Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby.
That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day.
There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is.
That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit here setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told.
A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have.
So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand.
Let me take you there.
---
*[Chapter 1 of 13 · Voice: Eric, first person · Next: Chapter 2 — "The Man Who Wired the Nation."]*
# H# How Sabong Came Online ### *A Pioneer's History* **by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade* --- ## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat. But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son. Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from. **Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside. And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit. So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.** By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet. The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son. **He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about. I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own. What kind of father says no to that? So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird. Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken. I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.* And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.** Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**. But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was. I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed. She invited me to her farm. --- Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby. That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day. There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is. That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit h# How Sabong Came Online ### *A Pioneer's History* **by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade* --- ## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat. But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son. Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from. **Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside. And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit. So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.** By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet. The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son. **He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about. I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own. What kind of father says no to that? So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird. Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken. I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.* And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.** Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**. But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was. I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed. She invited me to her farm. --- Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby. That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day. There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is. That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit here setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told. A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have. So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand. Let me take you there. --- *[Chapter 1 of 13 · Voice: Eric, first person · Next: Chapter 2 — "The Man Who Wired the Nation."]*
ere setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told. A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have. So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand. Let me take you there. --- *[Chapter 1 of 13 · Voice: Eric, first person · Next: Chapter 2 — "The Man Who Wired the Nation."]*
ow Sabong Came Online
### # How Sabong Came Online### *A # How Sabong Came Online*A Pioneer's History* **by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade* --- ## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat. But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son. Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from. **Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside. And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit. So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.** By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet. The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son. **He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about. I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own. What kind of father says no to that? So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird. Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken. I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.* And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.** Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**. But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was. I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed. She invited me to her farm. --- Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby. That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day. There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is. That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit here setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told. A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have. So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand. Let me take you there.### *A Pioneer's History* **by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade* --- ## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat. But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son. Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from. **Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside. And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit. So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.** By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet. The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son. **He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about. I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own. What kind of father says no to that? So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird. Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken. I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.* And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.** Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**. But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was. I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed. She invited me to her farm. --- Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby. That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day. There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is. That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit here setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told. A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have. So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand. Let me take you there.Pioneer's History* **by Ricardo R. "Eric" Canonizado** — *Spurblade* --- ## Chapter 1 — A Father's Errand Every big story in my life, it turns out, began as something small. This one began with a little boy, a toy rooster, and a defeat. But let me be honest with you from the very first page, because this book is nothing if it is not honest: I did not begin as a sabungero. That may surprise the people who know me now, who know me as *Spurblade*, who know the forums and the websites and the years I gave to this sport. But it is the truth. The love of the fightingcock did not come to me at birth, the way it comes to so many Filipino men, passed down quietly like a surname. It came to me later, and it came through my son. Let me take you back further, so you understand the soil it grew from. **Animals were always ordinary in our house.** My father, Emilio Canonizado, was a banker — a loan examiner at the Development Bank of the Philippines. His work was to study loan applications, and part of that work was to go out on weekends and inspect the farms of the people asking to borrow. He was a city man, a banker's man; we were not farmers and never pretended to be. But those weekend inspections became our family time. He would bring his sons along — we were six children, three boys and three girls — and while he walked the fields and looked over the livestock, he would let us swim, let us play, let us be boys in the countryside. And sometimes, in the way of the provinces, the farmers he visited would thank him with a gift — a chicken, some livestock, a token of gratitude carried home. That is how the first chickens of my life arrived. Not as fighters. Not as champions. As gifts, ordinary as a basket of fruit. So animals were never strange to me. But if you had asked me, as a grown man, what creature I loved most, I would not have said the rooster at all. **I would have said the racing pigeon.** By then I had built WaveNet — my internet company, which I put up in 1997 — and being an internet man meant I could chase any interest as far as my curiosity would take me. And my interest, in those days, was pigeons. The homing pigeon, the racer, the bird that finds its way home across impossible distances. That was my passion. Not sabong. Not yet. The turn — the real beginning of everything in this book — came through my son. **He was about two years old.** We were visiting his grandmother, my mother, and his cousins out in the province, where the men do what provincial men have always done for leisure on a weekend: they set two roosters against each other in the yard and gather around to watch. My little boy — Odaz, though back then he was just my baby — saw those two roosters fight. And he came alive. He shouted, he pointed, he called everyone to come and see, the way only a small child can, as if he had discovered something the whole world needed to know about. I ran to him. I will admit it — I was a worried father, and I did not like him so close to two fighting birds. I went to pull him back, and instead he threw his arms around me. Then, still lit up with excitement, he asked me — the way a child asks for a toy — if he could have a chicken of his own. What kind of father says no to that? So I bought him a little rooster. A small thing, a pet. And for a while that was the end of it — just a boy and his bird. Until one ordinary day I came home from the office, and my son was upset. His rooster, he told me, had been beaten — *tremendously* beaten — by the neighbor's rooster. I went to look, half expecting some fearsome bird next door. But the rooster that had humbled my son's pet was nothing special at all. Just a plain, ordinary neighborhood chicken. I want you to understand what that did to me, because it is the hinge the whole story turns on. It was a small thing. A backyard scuffle between two birds. But it stung me — not for myself, for *him*. My boy had asked me for one thing, and the one thing I gave him had lost to an ordinary rooster. And something in me, the same something that would later drive everything I did in this sport, decided: *my son will not have an ordinary bird. My son will have the best fowl the Philippines can offer.* And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. **I went to the internet to find it.** Remember — I was not an ordinary man searching. I was an internet pioneer, sitting at the on-ramp of Philippine connectivity, with the whole young web at my fingertips at a time when most of the country had never seen it. I searched for the greatest fighting bloodline in the Philippines. And the name that rose up out of that search was one I would chase for years to come: the **Zamboanga White**. But here is the thing I did not expect. When I went looking for the Zamboanga White, I did not find a quiet catalog of birds. I walked straight into a *war* — a heated online debate raging between American breeders and Filipino gamefowl enthusiasts over the true origins of that very bloodline. Who bred it first. Where it truly came from. Whose it really was. I did not know it then, but that argument would change my life. Because my voice in that debate — a father just trying to learn — is what caught the attention of a woman named **Princess Naldo**, a breeder who held the very line I was chasing. And she did something that opened every door that followed. She invited me to her farm. --- Hold that image, because everything grows from it: not a lifelong sabungero, but a pigeon-racing internet man; not a grand plan, but a two-year-old's toy rooster beaten by an ordinary bird; not a cockpit, but a search bar. I entered this ancient sport the way no one before me had — *through the internet*, before I had ever set foot in a real derby. That is not a small detail. It is the whole thesis of this book in miniature. The man who would one day help bring all of sabong online had himself come into sabong *online* first. The medium and the message, tangled together from the very first day. There is one more thing I should tell you now, so you understand why this book exists and why it is written the way it is. That two-year-old boy — the one whose beaten rooster sent me searching — grew up. His name is Odaz. And as I sit here setting these memories down, I am typing them on *his* laptop. The very machine this history is being written on belongs to the child the whole journey began for. I went hunting a champion for him when he could barely walk. Decades later, it is through him, and through his machine, that the story is finally told. A man does not often get to see his beginnings and his endings touch like that. I am grateful that I have. So this is where we start: a banker's son who loved pigeons, a little boy who loved a rooster, and an ordinary defeat that would not let me rest. Everything else — the farm in Muntinlupa, the man named Lando, the forums, the Cyberfriends, the fallings-out, and the backyard breeders who became icons — all of it grew from this one small, ordinary, loving errand. Let me take you there.
