Ray Roquero

Conclusion

‘THIS is the time of year when all sorts of advice is writing about hangovers.”

“THAT’S the future, folks, unless we tame the monster that we have unleashed.”

THERE is a new standard for true grit in college basketball, and he comes by the name Mac Belo.

IT was a title showdown between two great rivals and two storied schools that was 36 years in the making. on Wednesday when they—the top-seed Growling Tigers of University of Santo Tomas (UST) and the second-ranked Tamaraws of Far Eastern University (FEU)—came to blows again, the hard court shook and trembled under their feet, and the ground cracked and buckled.

I HAVE nothing but respect for Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Commissioner Chito Narvasa. There is nothing I would have wished for him but smooth sailing in a league that enjoys popularity with fans on a scale so staggering when viewed from the perspective of four decades.

THE picture says it all, Tab Baldwin in the middle of a sea of tall blue shirts. The veteran coach, a much-admired tactician of the Philippine five, could not have been more blessed. Finally, he has Version 4 of Gilas Pilipinas, unwrapped like an early Christmas package, with a lineup that is upgraded, enhanced, finessed and made younger, taller and more deadly with its outside firepower.

HOW badly do the Ateneo Blue Eagles want this year’s University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) seniors’ basketball title?

FIGHT fans in my neighborhood and in the other towns of Antique where I grew up in, couldn’t believe when they heard the champ on television 10 days ago. One more fight next year, said the legend, the greatest Filipino fighter in the ring.

“TELL us it isn’t so, MVP.

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.

AFTER more than a month of terrible bashing, of being thumbed down as Gilas Pilipinas’s burden rather than spark, Andray Blatche is discovering at last how it feels to be lionized in a country where millions of fans follow Gilas’s exploits in Changsa, China, like true devotees.

THE three-point shot that Andray Blatche launched from the corner with time winding down never made it to the hoop nor touched the net in a meaningful way.

THESE days, terrible rumors have been sweeping the Filipino basketball faithful.

THERE is no rocket science involved; it’s plainly in the numbers.

CALL it a rebirth, renaissance or a rediscovery of its pride and self-respect.

FORGET about Estonia and its pocket tournament. Consider its three huge loses a nightmare. Those seemed like a decade ago.

WOE to the gritty Filipina who out-punched China’s Lou Yu Jie in a boxing match in Macau in June to win the flyweight crown of the Women’s International Boxing Association.

RENAULD “SONNY” BARRIOS, speaking for the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP), returned home from a winless Gilas Pilipinas stint in a pocket tournament in Estonia with a profoundly disturbing admission.

IT was a week in sports that Manila newsrooms in the old days could describe as dramatic.

DR. ANTHONY NICANOR, known as Comm Nic, was an exuberant and sturdy guy who was humble in victory. He never wavered from his conviction, fighting for athletes’ rights even when he ruffled many feathers.

NO one who has seen Calvin Abueva in action, in just one game, will leave the hard court unmoved by the spectacle.

BASKETBALL old-timers—guys in their twenties during the 1960s—when to lose a basketball game in the Asian arena was a cause of national shame to Filipinos—spoke of 1964 as perhaps, a year when everything turned against the Philippines.

SOMEONE very knowledgeable about Philippine basketball has suggested it might be time to dash off the Gilas Pilipinas’s obituary, even before it could shoot its first basket in the Fiba Asia Championship in China.

OUTSIDE their increasingly bitter dispute over rocks, shoals and parcels of islets strewn on the West Philippine Sea that are said to be rich in oil and natural gas deposits, the Philippines and China are engaged in another bitter showdown—and the world is waiting with bated breath which one will be victor or vanquished.

THE hands were quick. A powerful left hand or a right or a combination that he would unleash with rapid accuracy would stun his opponent. Once he got his hands over his foe it was all over.

THE one riveting memory from the Fiba Asia championship in Manila in 2013 was of Jimmy Alapag sinking those late-coming three-point shots that were like daggers stuck into the hearts of the hard-fighting South Koreans.

THE signs were all there, and the ceremony was mean and ruthless.

BRISBANE, Australia—After soaking it in, after a frenzy of celebrations, after the equivalent of a heart-tugging ticker-tape parade, a hero’s homecoming in the heart of Oakland, the Golden State Warriors, the new National Basketball Association (NBA) champions, settled down to the business of deciding whether they could live another day with the same lineup to defend the title next season.

FLORENCIO CAMPOMANES was a scholarly of speech, consummate of skills, and with his silver-gray hair favored by advertisers in their photographs of men of distinction.

WHEN the draw for the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) Asia Championship preliminary round was announced last week, there was a ripple of excitement that ran through the Filipino basketball faithful. The Philippines, in Group B, where Palestine and Kuwait stand as its strongest opponents, is considered to be in an easy bracket.

THEY transformed ordinary men into myths. They spun stories with beer as their collaborator. They enjoyed more editorial liberties to become chronicler, critic and hero-worshipper all at the same time.

ON the day of your birth any topic in sports was right. Even a mimicry of the intramural games on campus, a village sportsfest or a nontitle fight in the ring seemed alright to write about.

AS surely as Stephen Curry regained his shooting touch, Mayor Sandy Javier felt that the National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals would end in six games. Definitely.

THE past four decades in our sports archive is a gallery of glad circumstance and vivid memories, of heroes and heroines with feats carved in stones, and even of losers with their heartaches written on sand.

TWO scores and a decade ago, they were Asia’s laughingstock, written off cavalierly as “the babes in the woods.”

THE harsh truth is that sports has become a great emotional escape, a fantasy experience, like getting infatuated, especially with the games of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

FOR the first time in many years, athletics’ brash and controversial top brass Go Teng Kok, a.k.a.  GTK, would be absent from the track-and-field competitions of the 28th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games formally opening on Friday in the city-state of Singapore.

TIME was when you thought of boxing competitions in the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games you quickly thought of mismatches in favor of our colorful and seasoned simonpures against their unheralded foes in the ring.

MAYBE it’s not immodest for me to say so, but I just don’t think there will be another incredible period of records, drama and personalities than the joyous, golden moment of the 2005 Southeast Asian Games here in Manila.

FROM the gallery of our glad remembrances, the Palarong Pambansa of yesteryears was a period of endless excitement and a wonderful world of clashing colors and emotions by unknown athletes and coaches from many obscure places.

I AM not really an aficionado of the ring, and have not been since Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao dropped Ricky Hatton in the second round like a fallen log at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas six years ago.

BY any Olympic standard, Manny Pacquiao is the Norse deity Thor, the superhero who wields the enchanted hammer and takes care of thunder and lightning, and the protection of mankind.