AFTER more than a month of terrible bashing, of being thumbed down as Gilas Pilipinas’s burden rather than spark, Andray Blatche is discovering at last how it feels to be lionized in a country where millions of fans follow Gilas’s exploits in Changsa, China, like true devotees.
Blatche not only got a well-deserved reprieve from the slings and arrows; he had a chance to show his National Basketball Association (NBA) pedigree at last. Even though he looked only half the slim, sharp-shooting player from Brooklyn Nets that we occasionally watched on NBA television in past years, he made Hamed Haddadi look like a D-leaguer in the International Basketball Federation Asia championship.
In the only game that seemed to matter to some fans, Gilas Pilipinas routed Iran by 14 points, stealing the top qualifying spot in their preliminary group and looking like they could go all the way to the finals to play China in a colossal game that could shatter the region’s power equation.
In my book, Gilas version 3 has already accomplished something that will go into myths of this wondrously basketball-addicted nation of ours.
On my flight to Iloilo I sat next to a guy who was a thoroughly smitten basketball fan, and he blurted out the sentiment I was about to tell him: “It feels like we’ve already won the Fiba Asia crown!”
Really, it is beyond our wildest expectations. A very old national team, in fact the oldest I can remember since I became a regular on the sports beat, kept on pushing, advancing, attacking the basket like it had players with the lungs and legs of twentysomethings.
Gilas, this team that many had written off as a goner in this championship, a patient on a stretcher that needed badly an adrenaline shot, felled the team that the commentators on television repeatedly called the Asian powerhouse. A team unbeaten for so many times it appeared even invincible.
Yet, an Iran team that had routed its previous opponents, on average, by nearly 50 points, couldn’t muster that fiery form against a Gilas team full of hustle and guts beyond its age.
Iran lost its fire when Gilas turned up the pressure; it lost its temper when Gilas started gunning down those baskets; and it lost its will when Haddadi couldn’t get it done, looking like a desperate, frustrated old man against a suddenly unmatchable Blatche.
Blatche was the glue that put it all together in this game. He was dominant in the fourth quarter; when he had the ball, he drew the defense to himself, but he was quick to kick off to teammates waiting on the wings. His size made the Gilas’s defense even more forbidding.
The few times Haddadi beat Blatche inside the box and I counted only three, were because of Mahdi Kamrani’s well-timed and well-placed entry passes. But the rest of the way Haddadi was beaten, his driving lanes shut off as if by a massive wall, forcing him to pass off instead of to shoot.
With Iran’s big man almost reduced into a hulking irrelevance, Nikka Bahrami’s splendid three-point shooting pushed the Iranians to a series of 10-point leads. Yet, as if their internal fires had been turned on by Blatche, or by something more transcendental—that sense of pride in the flag—the Filipinos woke up and went to work.
Jayson Castro showed how speed often could beat height, as time and again he took the ball to the rim, buzzing the underarms of the Iranian behemoths like a stealth fighter jet undetected by any radar on its flight path.
Terrence Romeo made a statement that his terrific Jones Cup performance was something he could accomplish with staggering regularity, even on a bigger stage. He finished behind Castro’s 26 and Blatche’s 18 with his 15, hitting off some great one-on-one plays.
And “The Beast,” a name that did not escape Andy Jao, as he made a running commentary of the game, finally made an eloquent statement that fans erstwhile turned off by his hard-court antics could now appreciate.
Even with his natural inclination to make physical contact, or create one if it is to his advantage, Calvin Abueava made the hustle plays like he’d been doing it on the Asian stage for some time.
His rebounding, his defense, his shooting—and the last play he made, a gutsy fast-break layup off a steal that enraged Haddadi and made him commit his final foul—gave us all the impression that Gilas’s bad boy has cemented his place among the giants of the game.
It was a game Coach Tab Baldwin had obviously prepared for. His pacing of his sparkplugs, Castro and Romeo, could not have been better. And his fourth quarter was so well-executed I felt was like I was ensconced in a front-row seat enjoying a maestro conduct one of his brilliant masterpieces.
This triumph over class, over a crown holder, has won over the hearts of Filipino fans.
A ticket to Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Games beckons ever closer, but even if we don’t make it there, it’s like we’ve already won the championship.
Are the high priests of the Philippine Basketball Association watching?