Filipino cage buffs are looking for a 42-year-old and a 38-year-old—the two men who pulled the trigger on the Kiwis last Friday.
They are looking for them online—on Twitter and Facebook—and in every word of admiration and psalm of praise that came out in reams of prose after the Gilas boys’ character-building triumph in overtime over the Wellington Saints at the Jones Cup.
For now it doesn’t matter if the fans do or don’t find them. Let’s leave the two triggermen to Tab Baldwin, the Gilas Pilipinas coach, and let them wrap up their mission in Taipei and come home wearing a halo. The two, Asi Taulava and Dondon Hontiveros, are ancients in a game where, in an earlier era, they might have been more suited at their age fanning the gallery into a roaring wildfire of cheering.
But on Friday Asi played like he was in his 20s, rebounding, defending, shooting, screening, drawing the defense—in fact, playing what Baldwin was to pay him the ultimate compliment for: intelligent basketball.
And Asi wasn’t coming off a day’s rest in a body-sapping tournament. He had just emerged, less than 24 hours earlier, from the hardest matchup in the tournament. Going up against the 7-foot-2 Persian colossus named Hammed Haddadi, and banging bodies and exchanging elbows with him, Asi hung tough and showed why he deserved a spot in Baldwin’s final 12.
Asi not only scored 12 points, a feat against a swarming defense by the taller, relentless Iranians, but he collared seven boards, an even more stunning record considering how Haddadi and the other Iranian giants dominated the keyhole. Rest day was Friday for Asi so he could have enough strength and power when the Gilas five played US Select-Overtake on Saturday. The Americans toted a poor 3-3 win-loss slate, a full game behind Gilas’ 4-2, but they could not be taken lightly because they have the size and speed, and their oldest man is several years younger than Taulava.
Baldwin admitted he didn’t want to play Asi at all against the Kiwis, who took command in the second quarter and looked like they were going to breeze past the Filipinos. But in the third quarter—after Gilas had been held to seven second-quarter points, and another seven in the first six minutes of the third—Asi injected adrenaline into the Filipinos’ offense.
When none of his teammates could hit, he scored. When few could effectively battle the taller Kiwis under the boards, he threw his body to defend the rim and get the rebounds. His timing and positioning blended with his well-honed instincts. Pumping his chest, he told a Manila reporter, “It’s all inside of here…I can’t let my brothers down.”
He didn’t leave tens of thousands Filipino fans watching at home in the lurch. “That’s a 42-year-old guy, let me remind you, that when I asked to perform, was ready, not only with effort but also to play intelligently,” Baldwin said.
The great guard Ed Ocampo, one of the best to ever suit up for the national five, used to say that when a team had big guys under the board, it gave the shooters confidence. That must have been the way it felt for Jason Castro playing alongside the tireless Asi. Nicknamed “The Blur,” he picked up the pace for Gilas in that quarter when the Filipinos rebounded mightily from 39-55. In the fourth he scored 11 of the Filipinos’ final 13 points, including a dash to the basket to flip in a left-hander that forged overtime with 19.2 ticks to go.
The Filipinos had been scrounging around for precious baskets for three quarters until that explosion. That was a great effort by Castro, who reasserted himself in the face of Terrence Romeo’s almost enchanted emergence as a clutch-shooter and triggerman with inestimable value to the team.
The last act in this game was left in the hands of Hontiveros, however. He had been feeling useless for a week, perhaps mumbling to himself many times what he finally admitted to the reporters on Friday. He had been in Taipei for days, and said “I felt I haven’t done anything in the week I’ve been here.”
The firepower strapped like lightning bolts in those wiry arms of his lighted up, as if from slumber. At the start of extra time, he flicked one trey and it ripped the net; on the next play he did it again, and on the next play he rattled in still another. It was a concentrated act of great shooting. Considering his 38 years, and looking as though he was one jump shot away from falling into exhaustion, that he had a steady hand, and his nerves held firmly like strands of steel, made it even more amazing.
Dondon had turned back the hands of time, Manila’s scribes chorused. It was like a celebration of age over youth.
No such distinction, however, existed in the mind of Baldwin that’s packed with several lifetimes of basketball experience. To hear him describe the game, he had so deconstructed it that there was little left of that starry-eyed magic left—only the herculean effort and spirit of a team that refused to die easily.
“There is no magic in basketball,” Baldwin said. “It was all hard work for us.” It seemed like they had a bad game in the second half. He didn’t see it that way. It was simply that the Filipinos’ shots were not falling.
And then he pointed out the irony that made sense of this magical moment. “The irony is that we hardly missed a shot in the fourth quarter and in overtime. That’s the way the game is.”
For now, Asi and Dondon and Jason had their day. It was one more piece of legend in this Gilas team that continues to amaze fans looking for new heroes.