WHEN all the passion stoked by this tournament shall have died down and the recrimination filed away, when the better memories shall have been cleansed of the bitter intramural that had deprived this Gilas Pilipinas 3 of some of the best and brightest players of the pro league, this campaign shall not stand as a monument to failure.
Rather, it is seared in the memory as an epic milestone.
Yes, it’s quite right to continue dreaming about getting to the Olympics, again. We still have one chance, very slim, to qualify in July next year. It is quite right to bask in our resurrected glory: we’re truly back among the basketball elite in Asia.
Despite our collective pain, it is quite right to agree with Coach Tab Baldwin, he, who had to cram and put this team together like patchwork, six weeks before the tournament’s opening in Changsa.
“This group deserves the respect of the country,” Baldwin said. “They may not have won the gold, but they are winners as people.” He articulated best how this Gilas team should be treated when it flies home.
Remember their names, shout them out, and lift them into the pantheon of our cage heroes: Andray Blatche and Jayson Castro, who had wondrously carried this team through its ups and downs; Ranidel de Ocampo and Marc Pingris, who both showed that will and courage could overcome the ravages of advancing age; Gabe Norwood, still our best defender; Dondon Hontiveros, who could play good defense and still shoot his threes; Sonny Thoss, still deadly in the perimeter; Terrence Romeo and Calvin Abueva, both rookies who showed snatches of brilliance and a lot of promise; and JC Intal, Matt Ganuelas and old man Asi Taulava, who gave quality minutes as role players.
Banish “impossible” from the vocabulary of Gilas Pilipinas. For the second straight edition of International Basketball Federation (Fiba) Asia, we grabbed the silver medal, accomplishing along the way some stirring wins that strengthened more than killed our hopes. That magical win over Iran, for instance, which effectively propelled us to the finals, and sent the defending titlists off on the road to perdition. Add those two scrambling victories over Japan that demonstrated in no uncertain terms our competitiveness and courage under pressure.
The loss in Changsa is a bitter but necessary detour. It brings to light once more the hard lessons we have to commit to heart. The problem with us is that we’ve encountered those lessons many times before, yet, we persist in ignoring them and ultimately defeating ourselves.
The entire tournament was a laboratory to which Baldwin had brought a team that had been seared by the fire of critics, and abandoned by the pro league’s top talents. The Changsa series brought out the best in our cagers. We marveled at the strength they had shown and which we must sustain—that steely determination, that unbending courage, that supreme individual skill that Filipinos have.
Yet, in our guts the flaws of our basketball program regurgitated like acid that begs to be treated surgically. I refer to the short-sightedness and selfishness of our ballclub owners in the pro league, and the lack of a long-term vision, strategy if you will, that would send our best players, nothing less, to this top-level tournament.
Now that it’s been painfully made clear to us by China that height, combined with speed, would be next to impossible to defeat in a top-level tournament like Fiba Asia, the question confronting us is this: What’s next for Philippine basketball?
Heroic and courageous but outhustled, outrebounded and outhit all night in the gold medal game, the Filipinos were bent low, and then broken, by the whirlwind Chinese offense and an unforgiving defense that limited Gilas Pilipinas to its lowest output in the series. Except for the first five minutes of the game, when they opened a 15-10 lead and made the hard task seem quite possible, Baldwin’s charges were hard put getting into their offensive groove.
“We never got into an offensive flow,” Baldwin said. “But we played good defense in the second half, we just didn’t shoot well.”
The Filipinos could not find a way to overcome the overwhelming Chinese size and their relentless defense, the heckling of the crowd, and of worst of all, the terribly one-sided officiating that made even the least partisan of our fans cringe, assaulted by the obvious unfairness of it all.
In sum, that was how the Olympic odyssey ended on a muggy Saturday night. We came up short by one game, by 40 minutes, or 35, not counting the first five minutes. The 11-point difference in the final score was immaterial.
As the final ticks dwindled, it was the pro league’s deplorable posture of noncooperation that loomed large over the aching failure. When the mission of grabbing that outright ticket to next year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics fired up every Filipino fan, the pro league’s high priests cared little. There was outcry from basketball fans, not just critics, at their posture. It was high tragedy in the sport we dearly love.
The last we heard about the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), in Changsa, was a pronouncement from the PBA Board Chairman Robert Non, the San Miguel Beer board representative. The “glory days of basketball in the Philippines are here again,” he told Filipino sports writers.
It sounded a little strange. Would his words have been the same if, let us assume, Gilas 3 had been knocked out in the quarterfinal round?
Would he even have cared to book a flight to Changsa?
Strangely, the man whose vision continues to inspire, the MVP—Manuel V. Pangilinan—has been silent, raging, perhaps, in his heart at the factors that had deprived this team of the ultimate prize.
The only thing that matters now is what MVP will say post-mortem. Will he continue with his Gilas program?