AUGUST is the cruelest month for Philippine basketball.
It was the month when we learned we will have a Gilas Pilipinas team minus the pro league’s stellar performers, and the month MVP, Manny V. Pangilinan, surrounded by a celestial cast, flew to Tokyo to bring home the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) World Cup in 2019 and came home empty-handed.
A country with a world-size passion for the game, and that had gone this far in its quest to host this championship, didn’t deserve to lose. It was almost Shakespearean in its tragedy. The more it became so by the analogy that Chot Reyes, the losing coach of the Asian Games national five last year, employed to portray how so nearly we have topped behemoth China for the right to host the tournament.
“It was like losing a game in double-overtime,” Reyes said. It felt like he almost choked on his words, like he did one night some two years ago when his Gilas thrilled Filipinos by their scrappy stand against Iran in the Fiba Asia finals.
The time it took the Fiba board to reach a decision—and it was reported to have been “delayed twice”—was interpreted to mean that the board apparently had “agonized over its final decision.”
I entertain no illusions about this defeat. The temptation to see defeat beyond what it really was is overwhelming. But MVP has to be praised for bringing us all to the edge of world basketball heaven.
He has done all that he possibly could. His was the white-hot passion that the Fil-Am actor from Hollywood Lou Diamond Phillips, who made the emotional presentation to the Fiba board, spoke of as “authentic,” one that cannot be seen anywhere else.
I agonize with countless Filipino fans that must now learn that in facing off with China, we not only are courting unmanageable risks but almost total, almost perpetual failure. China is China. It will have its way. It beat the flaming Philippine passion for the game with what really counts in hosting the world championship—world-class venues, world-class transportation, world-class infrastructure, and a population of over 1 billion people, its fixed market.
China has eight venues that are soaring monuments to its sporting might. Outside Beijing, which has hosted the Olympians of the world, it boasts of seven other cities with facilities that make Manila look ancient, even decrepit. Next to the Smart Araneta Coliseum, which is a relic from the Sixties, we boast of only two modern arenas, the Mall of Asia in Pasay and the 55,000-seat Philippine Arena in Bulacan. The one we offered in Cebu remains in the realm of dreams.
The sheer scale of China’s advantages not only beggars the imagination, but also reveals to us the supersonic speed with which it has built up its economic force since Deng Shiao-ping, once denounced as a “capitalist roader” in the final years of Mao, pointed the way to its present free-market-oriented economy.
Just as it has gobbled up chunks of island-territories, built airstrips and reclaimed land in the West Philippine Sea, proclaiming them as their own, China bagged the 2019 Fiba World Cup, I suspect, with as much ease minus the stealth. We rode on the eloquence of Lou Diamond, we trotted out the magic of our living icon, Manny Pacquiao, believing rather wishfully that their glowing presence could mask what was physically lacking in our preparation.
But when China sent in Yao Ming, the symbol of its basketball power, the ambassador of its good intentions, we realized that it was “game over.”
The Chinese preparation started years ago, pushing out relentlessly into new horizons and fresh opportunities. In basketball, with the size of is population, they enjoy an immense talent base gleaming with diamonds in the rough—the Yao Mings of a new generation who will be spotted, recruited, housed, fed and trained by the state.
My sense amid MPV’s galling setback in Tokyo is that the Philippines has miles to go before it could reasonably entertain the romance of slaying the Chinese behemoths in the mainland, both on and off the hard court.
The last pure national five to beat China achieved this feat in 1974, in the opening round of the Asian Games in Teheran. At the Aryamerh Basketball Hall of the Shah’s capital, the Filipinos—still brimming with the confidence of the old champion, and with the pro league a distant impulse—won over their traditional mainland rivals in their first face-off in four decades. It came without assist from the referees, and without the celestials of US basketball we now call naturalized Filipinos.
That seemed like a lifetime ago.
The cast assembled by MVP for the Philippine bid was one that transcended basketball. It is a mirror to our national life, especially our struggles and our capacity to dream big. Amid the wrenching social and economic inequities in our society for which there is only bad, opportunistic politics to blame, we’re glad to have an MVP in sports.
He has helped us to retain our capacity to be amused by sports—basketball in particular—and to keep on dreaming about wrapping our arms around an Asian title in our lifetime.