THE one riveting memory from the Fiba Asia championship in Manila in 2013 was of Jimmy Alapag sinking those late-coming three-point shots that were like daggers stuck into the hearts of the hard-fighting South Koreans.
Fighting with a warrior’s heart (puso), our boys outclassed the South Koreans, a tough resilient quintet we had not beaten in a while. It was a win that sparked an unabashed celebration; finally the nation that had long languished in the freezing fringes of Asian basketball had something to celebrate.
In the gallery of the Mall of Asia arena, as the television cameras rolled, capturing dancing images of giddy fans, there were men, grandfathers now, who stood fighting back tears. They were the young men—the faces of relentless, indestructible youth—during the late 1960’s, a time when Filipinos not only belonged in Asia’s basketball elite, but also sat securely on its throne.
The generation today may be surprised that the ruling power now—Iran—was somewhere still in the desert waste of basketball, and the guile and wiles of Jordan and Lebanon were decades away from their spring bloom. This was a small fraternity that, for years, kept Taiwan, Japan and South Korea in close huddle.
That was before time rolled into the mid-1970s and Iran stirred to life from its slumber, before the tall, relentless Chinese from the mainland emerged from the “Bamboo Curtain,” the forced isolation imposed by Mao Tse-tung’s communist rule.
And before the best Filipino players of the 1970s broke away from the late Gonzalo “Lito” Puyat-led Basketball Association of the Philippines, and with lightning quickness raised a new banner, the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), banishing us into a long exile, in the dark depths of Asia’s amateur basketball.
Magical as our boys’ performance was in the last Fiba Asia, our basketball fortunes fell flat in the 2014 Asian Games. After winning four straight basketball gold medals in the Asiad, in 1951, 1954, 1958 and 1962, our boys slipped to a horrendous sixth place in 1966—historically our rock-bottom finish in the quadrennial tournament. We thought we would not go down a step deeper.
Yet, even this was exceeded by the 2014 Asiad quintet. It plunged into seventh place, and all the hopes of giddy fans, unaccustomed to such drubbing, were crushed.
Now we’re faced with a massive task not only of trying to recover from this ego-deflating setback, but also of trying to get back into the Olympic Games. The last time Filipinos graced Olympic basketball was too long ago—43 years ago to be exact—that most of today’s fans probably don’t even remember that we’ve been to Mount Olympus.
That was in 1972, in Munich, in an Olympics when murder became a new sport—when Arab commandos sneaked into the Games Village and stormed the Israeli delegation quarters, killing at least nine athletes.
Egypt quit the Games after that, giving us a walkover in the consolation round, a win that set up a showdown with Japan for 13th place. Coach Ning Ramos steered our boys past the Japanese, the ABC champion in 1971, so that we finished ahead of them and two entries from Africa.
I have to share my fears that this new Philippine team may be walking into an ambush in Changsa, when it renews our search for an Olympic ticket in the Fiba Asia tournament. This is the elimination series for next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Every Asian contender expectedly will trot out its best team, expectedly well-trained and sharpened into competitive form by months of training. Our Gilas Pilipinas team under the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) still has to be named. Last week the SBP reported the bad news. Training for Gilas under the famed Coach Tab Baldwin starts only on August 1. As of today, following San Miguel Beer’s sweep of Alaska in their best-of-seven PBA title series, we haven’t heard who will be the team candidates. And there is barely two months left before the Changsa series kicks off from September 23 to October 3.
Baldwin reportedly submitted a plan that the SBP chief honcho, Manny V. Pangilinan, has yet to approve. But that’s not the real sticking point. It is that this plan, if finalized, has to pass the muster of the gods of the PBA. Will they allow as many as 26 of its top players to train in the pool, or will the number go down to 16? There’s a cluster of other ifs that we can cite. My fear is not misplaced. In June the Philippines’s domination of the Southeast Asian Games came under threat. Thailand’s scrappy boys came out playing fearlessly. They played Marcus Douthit like he wasn’t a seven-footer, and they made the taller Filipinos sweat it out. Only in the last three minutes, did the Filipinos, represented by a younger Gilas team, pull it out of the fire.
Our neighbors are not lazy, and while we’re more talented, we don’t feel the sense of urgency to focus on the Olympic chase.
After losing badly in 2013, China’s rebound is a foregone conclusion, while Iran, South Korea, Japan historically have competed with players who don’t know the word surrender.
My sense is this Gilas team has entered a period of 11th-hour cramming. There is a limit to what individual talent can do.