“Why would you quit basketball at a time the sports needs your vision?
“You can’t leave your legions of fans, and you can’t leave Gilas Pilipinas out in the cold. You can’t quit the race for an Olympic slot now that the prize is so near.
“The Simon and Garfunkel melody comes to mind, ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ and its haunting refrain:
“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
I reproduce this note from a reader that was sent by e-mail to me just an hour after sportsman Manny V. Pangilinan did the unimaginable: turn his back on Philippine basketball.
The godfather of Gilas Pilipinas, the reason Filipino basketball fans are celebrating the Philippines’s return to elite status in Asian basketball, made the casual announcement on Thursday, which came down as even more shocking than any political speech by misty-eyed politicians dreaming about gaining Malacañang.
He quit as head of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP). “It is for the best that I retire,” he said, telling an unplanned press briefing that it was best to give the SBP to a “young, energetic” leadership.
As if to make sure that no one would miss the true import of his announcement, he made it as clear as daylight: “It signals a change of leadership and membership of the board.” Our fans’ pain was not deadened by his generic statement that, “Our love for basketball has not diminished at all.”
It was earth-shattering news, one that buckled the ground under our feet—and once more raised our collective anxiety to a hyperventilating level over the future of Philippine basketball.
Is this the end of the line as well for Gilas Pilipinas? If so, the guts and glory word—puso—will become just stirring memory to fill the soul a few hours from now.
It may well be that we have seen the last of his pet project to put Philippine basketball back, against the greatest of odds, on the road to new glory?
It may well be that it is good-bye forever to the Olympic Games.
Let’s face it. The reason the Philippines is back in business as a power is not because the Philippine Basketball Association suddenly became magnanimous and lent all its best players—despite the obvious protestation of ball club owners—to the national program that MVP had spearheaded.
To do as much as suggest this is to introduce a fallacy in Philippine basketball history.
The nation owes it all to MVP. He had had the courage to say, “Yes, we can dream about the Olympics again.” He put money where his heart was. He wore his heart on his lapel. He clapped lustily, and urged on his boys, even in the face of a slap, a putdown, or a defeat.
The payback to him wasn’t reflected in the ledgers of his accountants. It was felt by hearts he had filled to overwhelming, by souls he had set on fire, by the dreams of young, aspiring men he had ignited.
Yes, he did it all. He bequeathed a dream to the present, and to the coming generation, of basketball lovers.
He had come so near his Olympic dream, was in fact 40-minutes away from the main prize, last week, but China had other ideas to give him a nightmare. China made sure to outplay Gilas on the court—with the aid of officiating. And it made sure that its fans, firing vitriol from the stands, stung the Filipinos’ every conceivable way to take them emotionally out of sync in a game the Chinese did everything not to lose.
It wasn’t those acts that made MVP quit. He would have been a poor loser if it were so. So focused was he, in fact, on the next step, which he determined to be the Fiba World Cup in 2017, that he had initially ruled out Gilas Pilipinas playing in the next round of Olympic qualifiers next year.
If not then, could it be because of the pro league’s non-cooperation with him? The big club owners of the PBA—even as fans prayed hard for them to close ranks just for the Fiba Asia tournament—had remained deaf, insensitive, even callous, to the popular call.
Fans were waving the flag—but the PBA chose to see the banner of their branded names and products. One man gave them the vision of the Everest to scale; they choose to putter around in their backyard and climb anthills.
We could almost hear the voice of Antonio Luna, the revolutionary general at the end of the century, upbraiding the PBA’s high priests: “We are our own worst enemies!”
So it wasn’t the Chinese that had forced MVP’s hand. It was the highest placed men of the pro league. MVP’s public goals had not sat well with their private considerations. It would be giving the sportsman too much credit to give him the team he wanted. He would be bathed with glitter, crowned with the laurel wreath, a victor who prevailed with the power of his vision rather than the power of his money.
Tragically, the result is far worse than imagined: We’re back to where we were seven years ago—to the arena of the rejected.
No more higher expectations than to see champions in our backyard, the PBA, providing entertainment as before, while the rest of Asia is aflame with the exploits of the dreamers who can climb mountains.
1 comment
Isn’t this guy an alleged plunderer and is on trial? Why the hell is he writing for Business Mirror?