la salle and UST’s teng brothers very gay pic – topless shows a brand character failure

we saw this picture of the teng brothers jeron and jeric posted at  twitter by sportscaster TJ Manotoc (@tjmanotoc) that accompanied an article posted at the  PhilStar website (Philippine Star), Lifestyle section. my initial reaction was – omg, what is the point of that picture? then i tweeted (@wawam) this :

source of pic and the article here : http://www.philstar.com/supreme/2013/10/05/1241418/sibling-rivalry

we thought there are so many things wrong with that picture:

it is a very gay picture of the Teng brothers. we have never seen a much more gay picture of two basketball players in philippine sports. while we have not seen all the  pictures of US basketball players, of those that we have seen on the internet and in sports magazines, this is the first time we have seen a picture of this sort even in feature articles like the one posted at philippine star. and even in sports magazines and in sports pages of philippine newspapers.

what of the picture are we talking about? well two men who are topless, showing lots of manly muscles, hands held  together in an “embrace” that way, with their bodies so close to each other. plus the bottoms not being shown makes you wonder if they were completely naked. although i have to admit, maybe the last point is taking it too far.

basketball players are always shown in their uniforms and if not in uniforms with clothes on, tops and bottoms included. seeing them topless and in this way is unheard of, also unseen. basketball is a sport of skill and mental prowess, it is not about muscles or brawn. in fact the shorts that basketball players now are very long (started by michael jordan) showing very little leg muscles. even the tops that basketball players wear show very little muscles. showing shirtless basketball players is a shock and very much way off.

a follower of ours in twitter, @econcepcion asked “where are the school colors?”. that is a very good point. basketball and most specially college basketball in the philippines and UAAP is all about the team colors – green is for la salle and yellow for UST. we see that all the time during the games. in fact it is the colors that people wear to watch the games that separate and identify the audience as to what school one supports.

shirtless means the teng brothers are not showing the school colors.

the article is published at the “lifestyle” section of the Philippine Star, not at the sports section. so that also makes you wonder what this picture and article is all about. reading the article though is about what happens to the brothers during and after the game, its about sports.

from a communications standpoint, this picture is very much off strategy and off-brand character in several levels. it is a very confused set of communication material where the visuals do not match with the content of the article,  most certainly the sports of basketball and most specially the basketball skills and talents of the teng brothers.

just like in advertising, pictures even in newspaper articles also tell a lot of the story that you read. this topless pic of the teng brothers  is way off and does not contribute to the story being told in the article. there is no way one can actually rationalize or defend that that picture should accompany the article.

we saw a picture from rappler.com that is actually a perfect fit to this Philippine Star article. it is a picture of the teng brothers entangled in court during the first game with each of the teng brothers not allowing the other any room or advantage. we saw that play out on tv during the game and those few seconds on the court were totally intense but  it felt like it almost went on forever as each one fought the other for space and positioning. it was really beautiful basketball skills.

you appreciate the intensity and professionalism of the brothers even though they had their school colors on and not topless.

from what we know, writers and specially editors labor at choosing the pictures that accompany articles. they know that pictures that accompany articles does play an important role n the appreciation of the article. on this philippine star article, nothing of that sort happened.

aside from accompanying the article with a very gay picture of the teng brothers, this picture is way off strategy, way off brand character and does not make sense at all. it’s a WAWAM!