CHOT REYES has been walking around these past few months in shoes, perhaps, too big for him to fill. They belonged formerly to Tab Baldwin, the immediate past national team coach.
Even if Baldwin had only come tantalizingly close in propelling the Philippines back to Olympic basketball in Rio de Janeiro, and never quite made it on his second chance, he undoubtedly raised the bar in team preparation and discipline.
Our lingering memory of him is of the coach that had taken Gilas Pilipinas to the finals of the last Fiba Asia—and came up one game short of clinching the magical top spot.
Now comes Chot Reyes. He has taken on the task, seemingly reluctantly of rebuilding the Gilas brand. In October last year he stepped into those big shoes, and now passionate Filipino cage fans are wondering if he could ever be as good as the man who had replaced him. It is not easy to forget the ghost from the past that Chot could slay. It is the haunting disaster of Gilas Pilipinas Asian Games campaign in 2014 in Incheon.
Since winning the first basketball gold in the Asian Games in 1950 in New Delhi, its birthing ground, no Philippine quintet had finished lower than sixth place. Chot’s team, inheritor of a proud golden tradition that gave us four Asiad golds from 1950 to 1960, ingloriously slipped to seventh place.
A loud groan of disapproval, even anger, from fans across the archipelago rumbled under his feet. Perhaps this fiery groan had chased Chot out of his coaching job in 2014, my BFF (best friend forever) Martin Bangcaya, based in Washington, who had added his voice to this smoldering subterranean flow, remarked to me.
For all of his attributes as a good team leader, even a great motivator and disciplinarian, Chot’s response appeared as if he had not had the best basketball program for a national team that Filipinos could pray for.
“No. 1 is to get good players who will fit the system. No. 2 is to give them a lot of international exposure and time to train together; and then we get them ready to play actual games.”
That was what he told the press on September 29, 2014, when, with his mission in flames in Incheon, all that mattered for Gilas was to salvage a win in its final game, against lowly Mongolia, to retain a shred of Philippine dignity in the Games.
Was he trying to put down the long-running Gilas Pilipinas training program that had given him luminous success at the Fiba Asia in Manila in 2013? With this program, he had made fans weep for finally giving back our pride in basketball.
In Incheon he had had some of the best local players a national coach could only dream of knitting together into an explosive, extremely competitive and ultra-motivated team. He had the best three-point shooter among the pros, the tall, 6-foot-5 Ranidel de Ocampo. He had the upcoming Jun Mar Fajardo and Japeth Aguilar—two tall players who, together with the naturalized Marcus Douthit, gave this team ceiling and muscle under the boards. He had Gabe Norwood for tough defense, LA Tenorio, Jimmy Alapag and Paul Lee for playmaking and outside firepower.
In short, he had a Philippine Dream Team. One even better than his team in the 2013 Fiba Asia that only failed to clear its last hurdle, a tall Iran, powered by a National Basketball Association veteran, to wind up in second place.
With great expectations, and wearing an armor of the nation’s players, Chot Reyes had gone to Incheon ready to touch basketball heaven. Passionate fans, old and young, have been looking for a savior of our dreams, the quintessence of what basketball means for them through all these empty decades.
Depressingly, he and his men came back earth-bound as ever. We basketball fans remain as rooted on the ground as we have been since 1966, mortal men who could only look up at the starry night sky and dream.
The lingering impression he seemed to have conveyed was of a different man, unsettled and irascible, not being capable of what Ernest Hemingway had perpetuated as “grace under pressure”. What exactly made Chot lose his poise in Incheon, an impression created by his apparent altercation (as seen on television) with Douthit during the team’s all-important game against Qatar? He had kept mum about it.
But about his impressions of the competitive field he was quite vocal. I resurrect some of them here to refresh our memory—and to make us ponder on what to expect from the rebuild of Gilas 5 in the hands of the returning mentor.
Playing Iran, Filipinos showed “how competitive we are against them,” he said.
Playing South Korea, “we played tough even without” Douthit, he added.
“But in the Asian Games, it’s how to play four straight games,” he said. “Being the smallest team in the league as you saw today, we had no legs. We couldn’t make shots anymore that we normally make because it’s just a physical thing.
It’s how we need to keep the players recovered, healthy, well enough.”
In short, they were physically exhausted. But that was what the Gilas is for. With all its hard training and overseas exposure, its geared to give our finest players the physical preparation and mental toughness to last a competition the way the Iranians, Koreans, Chinese and the Arabs could.
Something more serious had gone wrong with that team. It might be wise to revisit the lessons and take them to heart.
Chot Reyes should tell fans honestly what this new Gilas 5 would have to go through to prepare it better, to keep it as competitive as the best in Asia, so as to avoid to same alibis he gave us in 2014.