THAT laugh. Hearty and a tad high-pitched. It’s still there. As is the sharp wit and keen eye.
Tommy Manotoc may be getting on in years, but the man, in addition to still packing a mean golf game, has a sharp memory.
Over a live Web interview, along with Ariel Vanguardia and Joey Guillermo—from his San Francisco, California, home—we chatted for an hour-and-a-half last Saturday afternoon (9 p.m. Pacific Time) about his getting into coaching, winning Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) titles, golf, and his family.
And there was that familiar fire, the snap in his bones that gets the blood pumping as he took a stroll down memory lane.
I loved how he threw himself in the Crispa-Toyota conversation in those first four years of the PBA by leading the U-Tex Wranglers to a championship in 1978.
As Manotoc said, the superstars all went to those two teams so he had to patiently build a winner. While he had some collegiate stars in Lim Eng Beng, Mike Bilbao and Fitz Gaston, they were young compared to the seasoned veterans of Crispa and Toyota.
Coach Tommy revealed how he built his team around defense and a rigorous conditioning program. While most teams placed a premium on offense (defense to an extent), Manotoc figured that in order to do battle with Crispa and Toyota, he had to make sure his team was fit. This was a time, when players would smoke between breaks and training was scrimmaging. Sure, there were plays, but scientific basketball wasn’t even thought of just yet.
While he noted that Lim Eng Beng was a scoring star, perhaps Gaston and Bogs Adornado embodied what his team was all about. Both Gaston and Adornado were—for lack of a better term—reclamation projects. That was a time when you busted your knee, your career was thought to be over. But U-Tex took them in and they performed with aplomb.
Manotoc showed that he wasn’t a one-trick pony when he inflicted one of the most painful losses to Toyota when his Wranglers came back from two games down and four points behind in Game Five with 16 seconds left to win a second title.
And to add to his legend, he became the second coach—after Ed Ocampo—to win a championship with two different ball clubs when he guided San Miguel Beer to a title in 1982. Ocampo led Royal and Toyota to PBA crowns.
But Manotoc got a leg up on Ocampo when he led Crispa to the league and the club’s second grand slam in 1983.
Coach Tommy defrayed credit for his wins. “It wasn’t all me,” he admitted. “When I was in U-Tex, I had two legitimate NBA [National Basketball Association] veterans in Glenn MacDonald who played for the Boston Celtics and Aaron James who was a part of the starting five of the New Orleans Jazz along with Pete Maravich. There were times, they knew what OI was going to say even before I did it. They had the experience. In Crispa, while the second unit of Yoyoy Villamin and Padim Israel pushed the local stars like Freddie Hubalde, Abet Guidaben and Atoy Co, there was Billy Ray Bates. A lot of it was Bates.”
Manotoc recounted how Bates came to play for Crispa. “I was in Hawaii and I read in the newspaper there was this basketball game for the day and so I went.” The place was rocking because of Bates who was out of the NBA for a variety of offenses.
Coach came away convinced that Bates would be the import they needed and when he returned to Manila, he informed team management, “Get Bates and we will win.”
The rest is history.
And yet, Manotoc’s story doesn’t end there. Golf was his first love and prior to his becoming a PBA coach, he was a two-time golfer of the year. He returned to the game he loves. In fact, before our Web interview, he had just gotten back from a match on the greens with his children.
He recounted of an opportunity to play with Phil Mickelson who was recently in the news for his charity golf game along with Tiger Woods and National Football League stars Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. He got to play with Mickelson, the five-time winner of major golf tournaments alongside a couple of local journalists.
We also intimated that when he returns to the Philippines, maybe he could organize a golf game similar to the Mickelson/Brady-Woods/Manning charity game.
“Anything for the country,” he summed up. “As long as we can help.”