Part One
WE bring in each year full of hopes and dreams that often outstrip our imagination in our advancing middle age. Somehow they have a magical way of fulfilling themselves, by what stargazers call destiny—“it is written in the stars.”
The best gift in basketball in nearly five decades came exactly like that—and, perhaps, more. It was by the will of a dozen men—the oldest being 42, nearly twice the age of the youngest. It came almost as an act of flaming defiance. Remember how little support the pro league extended to the Gilas Pilipinas five, and how some Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) ball clubs kept their best men from rendering service to the flag.
It was a team weakened by acts of unforgiveable pettiness by a pro league that wanted no part of its creation—leaving the team like an abandoned child.
Even so, Gilas Pilipinas 3, the nom de guerre of the nationals, made every Filipino basketball fan proud—rare in our lifetime. The day the team barged into the finals of the International Football Association (Fiba) Asia Championship to seek an outright berth in this year’s Rio Olympics—and a rendezvous with history—became the most talked-about event that topped last year’s chronicles in Philippine sports.
Their campaign was an agonizing story of the joys and agony of every game. Fans died a hundred deaths, but lived to treasure the quest long after the slobbering critics of the Gilas program had fallen on the wayside. What the Gilas team did was crystallized the Filipinos’ remarkable courage and spirit for questing, then conquering, then questing, yet again, for something that was thought beyond their reach.
Let me explain myself a bit. After decades of frustrations, Filipino cagers broke at last their terrestrial shackles. They arranged a finals confrontation with the Chinese, those towering and imperial giants that had grown from the lumbering Mu Tze Se of the seventies to the sleek Yao Ming of the early 2000s.
Those millions of fans like me who journeyed with the Gilas five on the road to resurrection after a first-game debacle, knew that no event could rival the finals for sheer drama.
At the end of that extraordinary and ultimately spine-tingling game, rookie sensation Terrence Romeo came up with near-empty hands, old man Asi Taulava’s legs turned rubbery, and both Andray Blatche and Jayson Castro fell into an off-day.
The Filipinos became mortals. Not because they lacked the skills and hustle, but because the physical drain of having to play consecutive games finally tolled on them. How we wish the bench had been deeper and had younger legs for substitutes.
Hard as they tried, Tab Baldwin’s dirty dozen could not find a way to overcome the overwhelming Chinese size and relentless defense, the heckling of the highly partisan crowd, and the officiating that made even the least partisan of fans cringe, the obvious bias of it all assaulting their sense of fairness.
In sum, that was how the Olympic odyssey ended on a muggy night in China. Greatness came to court us, and we flirted with an outright Olympic slot. We came up short by one game, by 40 minutes, or 35, not counting the first five minutes when Gilas wrested a 15-10 lead. The 11-point difference in the final score, 67-78, was immaterial.
But there were triumphs that lifted our spirits. That win over title-holder Iran was a class act; it felt like we’ve already won the title. It was seared in our memory as an epic milestone.
Now, in the latest chapter of our great book we call History, other Filipino athletes scrawled their names with an outpouring of pride and prejudice. But no one, however long his arm, could write his name so bold and so big as the name written by the longer arm of mankind.
Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao is it, the global icon, pride of our race and the greatest fighter of our generation. He is probably the only man who could unite the nation, albeit momentarily, every time he climbed the ring to enthral the world and our wounded and divided people.
He is idolized by millions of Filipinos; and tens of millions more in the global community, even if they never watched him in person pound and knock out his opponents. Since civilized men sanctioned violence in the ring, no one who has ever thrown a mitt won more world titles than Pacquiao—eight by the last count.
Even if he lost to American Floyd Mayweather in history’s most lucrative fight ever, estimated at $500 million, his record will be hard if not impossible to break, let alone equal, in decades.
Inevitably, age has eroded his skills, has, perhaps, extinguished his speed that earned him the monikers “Pacific Storm,” and “Pambansang Kamao.” But at 38, instead of being incarcerated in athletic senility, Pacquiao tries to turn back the hands of time one last time. He will fight again to write Omega to his career, in a risky bout with Timothy Bradley in April this year.
Boxing’s mythmaking machine went into overdrive when it ballyhooed the Pacquaio-Mayweather match as the “Fight of the Century.” The crowd responded, tickets were sold out in minutes, ads soared to record highs, and glittering gambling oasis Las Vegas earned a $1 billion on fight day.
Time stood still. Pacquiao chased the American throughout the 12-round encounter. He could barely hit the sleek, evasive Mayweather, who was throwing punches at him almost at will. It would be revealed after the bout by Pacquiao himself that he had suffered a pre-game shoulder injury—sparking a series of suits from fans who felt short-changed. Mayweather, well, may have used an illegal substance, as press reports claimed months later.