BASKETBALL old-timers—guys in their twenties during the 1960s—when to lose a basketball game in the Asian arena was a cause of national shame to Filipinos—spoke of 1964 as perhaps, a year when everything turned against the Philippines.
They likened it to a huge earthquake that had snapped and buckled the Philippine basketball landscape, a massive tectonic shift that had also reshaped and reconfigured the power centers of Asia. That was the year Japan staged the Tokyo Olympics to demonstrate its post-World War II recovery and growing economic muscle.
It was a year in sports when other Asian cage powers flexed their muscle at last, the year when they reduced the Filipinos’ historical edge in the sports to complete insignificance.
It was the year Filipinos had to go through the pre-Olympics qualifying tournament in Yokohama and got the surprise of their lives. The Indonesians, coached by an American, Bob Ackerman, threw a bewildering full-court press at them in the opening minutes, surging to a 17-1 start behind the hotshot Liem Siem Siong (also named Hendrawan in Indonesian) and never losing the lead from the first whistle.
So completely unprepared by the over-confident Filipinos that they would never recover from this whirlwind start by the Indonesians. “We couldn’t even get a pass beyond the centerline,” a young Elias Tolentino, who played center and forward on the team, was to tell two sportswriters many years later.
The 98-86 loss seemed statistically improbable then, one that Ambrosio Padilla, the 1936 Berlin Olympian, would later call, “stranger than fiction.” The Philippine bench, led by a young Tito Eduque, would later lodge a protest with the technical panel citing the “poor and one-sided officiating” of a Korean and a Japanese who worked the game.
In retrospect, the loss was emblematic of an era. It was the wave on the rise, and it would build up with the force of a tsunami—taking on its crest the new Asian powers, South Korea and Japan, to the summit of Asian basketball. No longer were the Filipinos alone, unchallenged and invincible at the top.
In Yokohama in 1964, that wave had just enough force to wipe away the one distinction enjoyed by Filipinos in Olympic basketball—as the best nation in Asia to ever compete against the powers of Europe and Latin America.
What followed the Philippine elimination from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics is something I feel Filipinos of this current generation should know. The sense of humiliation it brought upon Filipinos was indescribable. “That day we felt like the Philippine flag should fly at half-mast,” Nemie Villegas, then a young player with the Letran Knights, was to recall to sportswriters decades later. This episode is worth recounting if only to emphasize the mind-set of Filipino players then and now. Almost everybody during the years, the generation of Villegas had felt compelled by something essential, that pride in the flag, that love of country, to desperately want to serve in the national team at a cost of great personal sacrifice.
In the early 1060s, an ageing Carlos Loyzaga, who is the best Filipino to every play the game, dragged his aching limbs, his swollen knees, and his battered body into battle in the 1963 Asian Basketball Confederation (ABC) in Taipei. It was his final year in the national uniform, and the sight of him playing injured on the court was an adrenalin shot that powered the Philippine team to claw its way back from the edge of the precipice to retain the championship.
He was oblivious to the pain, unmindful of the demands of a body that wanted the comfort of the bench, a reprieve from the searing heat of battle. Call that sacrifice. It was supreme. It was not for personal glory, but for the flag.
Now that the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) Asia Championship, the new name for the discarded ABC, is only over six weeks away from its opening, there is talk that as many as four stars of the pro league, the stalwarts of the national five, would not make the selection. They are in various stages of recovery from injury, we’ve been told.
But we are disturbed by the talk in the news room and on media row among sportswriters who knew what it was in the old days, and what it would take to bring the Philippines back to its glory days. The players’ ball clubs, it appears, are the ones that don’t want them to play in the Asian tournament.
If true, this is not only sad. It is tragic.
We need to inject this new generation of players and club owners with a heavy dose of nationalism. Bring back that sense of pride that glows with the national uniform, and that element of sacrifice that tells the brain it is worth more than the price of gold to play for country.
The Fiba Asia is a tournament that is cyclical, after all. The calendar tells us it comes every two years.
Could not the team interest of pro ball clubs take the back seat once in a while, and set the stage for the formation of a truly national team that represents the very best of Filipino basketball talent, guile and courage?
Could not someone in the pro league, one with stature but most of all one that cares about bringing Philippine basketball back to its glory days, stand up and light the torch for this cause?
Or is nationalism truly dead?