THESE days, terrible rumors have been sweeping the Filipino basketball faithful.
They were mostly about the readiness of Andray Blatche, the former Brooklyn Nets to whom the Congress of the Philippines granted Filipino citizenship so he could wear the national colors in the only tournament that matters to fans: the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) Asia qualifying tournament for next year’s Olympic Games.
It was well and good. Blatche’s credentials looked as impeccable as his personality was warm and pleasant. He is a genuine National Basketball Association (NBA) material; he has an effective outside shot, as well as moves to the basket that exhibit his great footwork and purpose in motion.
But that was the Blatche we came to admire two years back, a sleek, sharp-hitting gunslinger who came out to fight with “Puso,” probably the first word he learned by heart as a newly minted Filipino.
He is not the same Blatche we’ve witnessed in recent weeks. When he rejoined the Gilas Pilipinas in a tune-up series in Estonia, the kindest phrase that he got from sports fans was, “he will slim down and get better.”
He came back from Tannin an overweight weapon, barely in shape, but promising to do better in Taipei, their next stop. Anxious fans took it to mean he would lose the flab around the middle and make those legs and his lungs last at least 25 minutes of each game still feeling like steel.
But a death in the family plunged him in mourning and pried him away from training, away from the Jones Cup where his absence hardly seemed to matter. Robbed of focus, jetting out to a new time zone, dealing with an emotional pain, and unable to fulfill his Gilas commitment just yet, he lingered in the US mainland awhile.
When he flew back to Asia eight days later, he was in worse shape. The first sportswriters who spotted him swore he was looking more bloated than before. In the barber’s stand where I have my hair regularly trimmed, one customer obviously piqued by the news summed up the apprehensions of most fans about him.
“We got someone big to help us—not to break our hearts,” he said.
“If he is not the same guy we got,” my barber said, “why didn’t Gilas get the next best thing to him?”
“Like who?” I asked.
“Moala Tautuaa!”
Unfortunately, that’s water under the bridge after Coach Tab Baldwin finalized his 12-man lineup and sent it to organizers minus Mo and the Los Angeles Lakers promising star Jordan Clarkson.
Being a coach who has worked with players from the malleable to the stubborn ones, Baldwin knew the dose of medicine he would give Blatche. Tab has prescribed him a diet of soup and salad for a week.
Blatche, he swears, took it all in stride and has the right attitude. Tab even revealed that the diet was not an imposition on Blatche. “He did it voluntarily. That’s tough and he did.”
In Gilas Pilipinas’s last game in the recent MVP Cup, which was the team’s final tune-up series, Blatche saw action for 20 minutes. Although, throughout the three-game series he had been huffing and puffing, he finally played a tremendous game.
The Gilas warriors trashed the Taiwanese, 90-77, and the game was hardly over when Baldwin reassuringly told the press, “He [Blatche] shot the ball better tonight. He took better shots.”
That could hardly amount to even half of what Blatche could actually do. His 12 boards and 18 points in a game where no major prize was at stake would hardly matter in the real tournament where elbows would fly and every move, misstep, brilliant play would count.
Blatche isn’t in shape yet, far from it, and Baldwin—for all that he has done to motivate his prized player—still has to see him go from baseline to baseline. “He’s working on it,” he said, which makes us all anxious because the Fiba Asia is just a few days away from kickoff in Changsa, in China’s Hunan province.
Away from the glare of the public and the prying eyes of the media, the Gilas quintet wound up this week its training behind closed doors in Cebu City. The boys prepared for Iran and its 7-foot-2 giant Hamed Haddadi, and for China and its seven-footer Wang Zheli. To earn a ticket to Rio de Janeiro next year, Gilas will have to through one of them at the least, or both depending on the roll of the dice.
As usual lacking height, Baldwin has the game plan buttressed on speed, emphasizing this with a description that caught some by surprise. “This is the fastest team I’ve ever coached,” he said.
In practice, he divided the team into groups of three, and made each group do the drill that ran like this: One player was rebounding, another passing and the other “making the most layups in a span of one minute.
Terrence Romeo and Gabe Norwood each made eight layups to go on top, but Matt Ganuelas-Rosser beat everyone by making a nine. Blatche came through but was a heap of dead battery on the sidelines afterwards.
What took the players there is something that no amount of daily training would bestow upon the warrior. It’s their passion for the game. It’s the passion that makes the sacrifice in this team worthy, and renders age immaterial and the word “star” inoperative.
“We’re all way past that,” said Dondon Hontiveros, still battling with his 38-year-old legs.
When my barber was done, and I dipped into my pocket for his tip, I suddenly realized that he survives the daily grind of work with a passion not unlike those of the Gilas warriors.