WE competed in 38 of 40 sports in the just-ended 31st Southeast Asian Games in Hanoi, Vietnam. We finished fourth overall and that’s considered commendable already.
Even if we were more than 147 gold medals behind overall champion Vietnam.
Our haul of 52 gold medals completely paled in comparison to Vietnam’s 205 gold medals.
Doesn’t matter.
That yawning gap is never considered an aberration.
“Remember in 2015 and 2017, we finished sixth,” Philippine Olympic chief Bambol Tolentino said.
But did we not finish first—also in a runaway fashion like Vietnam’s win this year—in 2019 in Manila?
We were the defending champion in Vietnam and we got thoroughly thrashed. Why is that?
On the eve of the Games’ conclusion, we trailed second-running Thailand by an unreachable 36-plus gold medals, and third-running Indonesia by 15-plus gold medals.
We barely clipped Singapore for fourth place, with Malaysia finishing sixth in the 11-nation conclave considered the Olympics of Southeast Asia.
“There were way too many silver medals (69) from subjective sports,” said Tolentino.
One of those silver medals came in men’s basketball, which became the most unwanted, most snubbed and most unappreciated piece of metal for Team Philippines.
By yielding a stunning 85-81 loss to Indonesia, Gilas Pilipinas lost its vise-like grip on our most precious gold for 33 straight years in the biennial meet.
We can lose all of the 38 sports that we had competed in, but not basketball. We win the gold in our national pastime and that will do it. Quite crazily, it essentially takes the form of emerging overall champion by itself.
But all things must pass, obviously as the saying goes, including the good ones.
Ended was our basketball reign since 1989, spanning 13 consecutive championship trophies.
Indonesia came prepared, was armed to the teeth so to speak.
First off, its commander-in-chief for the mission was no less than Rajko Toroman, the Serbian coach who helped devise our own Gilas basketball development program only a while back
In short, Toroman knew every nook and cranny of our game plan. He had the antidote, period.
Toroman got three towering Caucasians naturalized, one of them was 6-foot-10 Marques Bolden. Despite using Bolden sparingly to avoid the enemy’s (Philippines) prying eyes in its first five games, Indonesia still snatched a 5-0 card to match Gilas Pilipinas’ 5-0 mark.
In their battle for the gold, Toroman ordered his men to fire threes at will. Responding with gusto, his soldiers buried 13 of 31 triples as against only three threes from the Philippines’ puny 16 attempts.
Coupled with a suffocating defense that caused Gilas’s offense of dribble-and-drive to sputter consistently, Indonesia’s crew nudged on unerringly almost. And Bolden, playing his longest of 32 minutes, did the most havoc with his 18 points and 10 rebounds.
And if Toroman, indeed, designed that dribble-and-drive assault, need I say more?
The funeral dirge is still playing.
THAT’S IT If it’s any consolation, our lady dribblers successfully defended their basketball title despite a loss in their no-bearing final game against Malaysia. As Senator Bong Go loves to say, “Laban lang tayo lagi—para sa bayan!” Cheers! You win some, you lose some.