OVER the holidays I wrote about the impending demise of the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex (RMSC). It does not have a chance against the onslaught of progress.
It is our misfortune, we are told, to be born in this generation that has little appreciation of history.
A case in point is this: we are losing some of the treasured icons of our history. In the city of Manila, where the sports complex lies in a moribund state, preservation is not in the character of City Hall.
City Hall, under another leader, had ordered years earlier the demolition of another icon, the Jai-Alai Building, an echo of the 1930s just like the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex.
History buffs wept at its ruins. They wept at the loss of an architectural gem. They wept because of a city’s wanton disregard of its history, its memory.
This is a foretaste of the fate that awaits Rizal Complex, our “icon of a sports place.” Tragically, only a few thousands have responded to an online petition calling for its reservation.
Its demise will surely come. It is inevitable. Time marches on.
But I see that a strong challenge awaits and cannot be evaded by the city’s political leaders and the business captains who would one day take over the commercial development of the 10-hectare property.
It is to preserve not just RMSC’s façade but also keep its memory alive, storing in video, in print, in books, and in whatever form that could be accessed by the future generations of Filipinos.
As a history buff, I am going to share with our readers a vignette of the Rizal Memorial Coliseum’s cherished history.
The year was 1960, the month January, 57 years ago this week. Manila was the center of the basketball universe in Asia.
It became the birthing ground of a new Asian cage tournament, christened the ABC (Asian Basketball Confederation), whose modern reincarnation is the Fiba Asia, the name now known to Filipino cage buffs.
The Rizal Memorial Coliseum, up till then the best basketball venue in the region, put on its best as host of Asia’s greatest basketball stars of the generation.
They were the brightest lights on the local hard court—Carlos Loyzaga, Carlos Badion, Bonnie Carbonell, among others, led by their famous coach Arturo “Fifteen Seconds” Rius.
The Koreans sent their best cagers and were vanquished by the Filipinos.
The Japanese, feared for their remarkable progress in the sport,
put up a fight in the first half, but the game was not close.
What happened at the start of the second half the most admired sportswriter of his time, Antonio Siddayao of the old Manila Times, observed:
“Before the Japanese could get their first basket in the second half,” wrote Siddayao, “the booming Badion propelled the Loyzaga-less starters to a 63-36 advantage that virtually decided the contest.”
The Chinese were two years removed from their first-ever victory over the Filipinos in Asia’s caging, at the Third Asian Games in 1958 in Tokyo.
They had spent 1959 trying to scale grand heights and made it to the top 5 in the Fiba World Championship in Chile.
Because they were playing their best basketball in decades, the Chinese had won acclaim and earned respect.
In Manila, fancied as leading title contenders, they came led by their new American coach, a blustery major of the US Marine Corps named Don Spencer.
On his team’s chances, he boasted to the Manila press: “We are not afraid of the Philippines!”
On the eve of the Chinese’s elimination-round showdown with the Filipinos, Spencer somehow tempered his forecast.
It would be a “hard game,” he said. “But I think we can win. The issue simply boils down to a question of strength against shooting, and I think we have the advantage in speed.”
I have read passages from a soon-to-be launched book on basketball, Years of Glory, by two former sportswriters, Noel Albano and Ignacio Dee, and this is what they wrote about that game:
“He [Spencer] was right about the first. The hometown boys had “a rough, blasting” fight in their hands as the ball-hawking playmaker Huang Kuo-yang, still nursing a sprained ankle sustained against the Koreans, sparked the Chinese to a 49-all tie.
Even as the gallery fell into a hush, Rius plucked two rookies and a sophomore from the bench and sent them in to shake up a phlegmatic offensive.
“Not until three scrappy collegians—Bachmann, Bernardo and Carranceja—opened up a 77-65 spread in a spine-tingling stint for their foul-encumbered superiors, was the Philippines assured of the outcome,” Siddayao wrote.
“Filipinos in a mob of 11,000 that overflowed the Rizal Coliseum shared the early agony and then sank into a state of sheer delight” as the locals took the game, 96-83 over a Chinese crew that threw everything in the first 30 minutes and paid dearly for it.
They exhausted themselves in a pressing game to make up for the Filipinos’ “edge in poundage and height,” and were the first to lose steam.
“The greater staying power carried them [Filipinos] past the greatest threat to Philippine cage supremacy, enabling them to blow up the game in the homestretch,” Siddayao wrote.
The two quintets clashed again in the finals several days later. Rius had warned his boys a day earlier not to underestimate their opponents. He was right.
A dazzling Chinese attack opened the first seven minutes of the game, giving them a 19-10 lead that seemed to usher in a reprise of the 1958 Asiad disaster.
“That was perhaps why the Filipinos fought like lions,” Siddayao wrote. They cranked up their game and caught up with their challengers, and what was anticipated to be a classic rematch between a tireless, new power and an old vulnerable champion instead turned into an affirmation of the majestic power of the Filipinos.
The game ended like most of the Filipinos’ wins in this tournament, a 99-78 rout.
Shrieking fans in a crowd of 11,000 watched a spectacle of the hometown boys unleashing a “terrible punishment” upon the team that “had shown so much doubt about the Philippines’s supremacy in the sport.”
Siddayao wrote a lyrical lead the following morning. It echoed all the glory of the fifties and typically anticipated none of the ferment of the coming decade.
“It will be a long, long time before the Filipino cager gets booted out of the Asian throne—if ever,” he wrote. “Or so it seemed last night in one glorious splurge…”
That was some forecast.
The Filipinos swept that ABC tournament. It was a time when they ruled Asia, and an end to their basketball empire was hard to comprehend.
Aren’t we all glad that we have kept some of these memories alive?