Bash Augusto, vice president of traditional sports in Nigeria and also the brain behind the ram competition which recently kicked off at the legacy pitch tagged the Governor’s cup in Lagos State has revealed the drive behind the competition, what traditional sport entails, the high revenue one can coup and the need to embrace African sports.
“Ram sport is part of our package, animal sport under traditional sports. We have Ayoo, Dambe and many others”, Bash exclusively revealed to sports247.
“Since I was little, there have always been ram sports especially during the Muslims festivals and then we knew that it was still going on all over most of the southwest areas, so we now decided that instead of a very big ram fighting a small one, we now brought in rules and regulations of combat of different weight categories. So we have about 16 weight categories that the rams fight under coupled with the newly invented rules and regulations by the federation because we must also look after the welfare of the animlals that they are using that is protecting them so that they won’t be any cruelty to animals.”
“They have rules and regulations that can be presented for the first round if they hit up to 30 and then they stop it and draw a ballot for them either by the toss of a coin or by paper.”
Speaking further to reveal the professionalism in the competition, Bash allayed that during the fight, there are referees and the other referees and the ram monitors. So even when a ram just like we have in boxing gets a hard blow, the referee will immediately stop the fight, examine if the ram can continue or not. If it can continue, they go ahead and if it can’t, they stop the fight immediately.
“Anything that pulls a crowd is a sport and I believe that ram sports pull as much crowd as football that we have in Nigeria presently.”
He continued, “If you check many other countries especially let’s say Indonesia, ram sports is their national sports. They are even more professional than us. They also do most beautiful ram, they have house jumping in different categories and styles. So that is what we use the ram sports to entertain the masses.”
“The masses go to football but they can’t go to the polo club or golfing. So this is the people’s sport in Nigeria at the moment. We are about 7 or 8 states participating. Lagos state, Oyo state, Osun state, kwara state, plateau state, Kaduna and Federal capital territory. We have members all over the place, so my job as I’m here is to make sure that they are following the rules and regulations for sound combat so that is basically my role.”
“Few years back, our national team were playing a friendly at the national bowl and they had no crowd, and the crowd were at the ram at the hockey pitch, they actually came and pleaded that after the ram fight, the people should please come and they were giving it out free of charge. In those days, they were paying #50 at the ram venue at that time.”
“At present the governor’s cup is going here in Lagos State so we have representatives from Oyo state, Ogun State, Kwara State, Osun state. More rams are still coming because we are going to use 5/6 weeks here every Sunday. Sometimes LTV shows rams world on the television for about fifteen to twenty minutes and people still demanding to see it every week sometimes ago. We in Africa don’t promote what is our own, as it is, we don’t have a single African sports in all African games let alone the Olympics.”
“This our traditional sport is under me and I can feel the whole stadium Teslim with Dambe, the African boxing. I don’t know what is going on and what to do. We import almost everything we do and sports inclusive. We don’t promote anything Africa and that really hurts, this is what we do here, we will keep developing the ram sports,” he vowed.
