What happened? What went wrong? What caused the Arwind Santos machine to choke and sputter? Curiously, at an unlikely time when he was just proclaimed the year’s best player of the PBA.
The morning after the awards night, Santos was still in very high spirits. He told the Inquirer he was determined to play his heart out to win the Governors’ Cup for Petron Blaze.
“Para everybody happy.”
Teammate Danny Ildefonso, an MVP awardee like him, told Santos he understood his predicament. Most likely, Ildefonso offered, Santos was distracted by the MVP contest.
Ildefonso congratulated his teammate and told him that with the MVP derby out of the way, he can now focus on the title series.
“Para if we win, everybody happy!” Ildefonso repeated.
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Last Sunday, however, the exact opposite happened. Santos played miserably, producing one of his lowest scoring outputs in the conference. He rode the bench for almost the entire third quarter after he committed a flagrant foul on Joe Devance.
Inside the Petron Blaze dugout after Game 5, which San Mig Coffee won to lead the title series, 3-2, a couple of scribes sought out an inconsolable Santos.
“He was the very last one to leave,” said one scribe. “He must have stayed in the locker room soul searching more than an hour after everyone had left. His eyes were red and swollen. It was obvious that he had been crying.”
Coach Gee Abanilla believes that negative tweets on social media have affected Santos, but the player himself told me that he is not comfortable and effective in the number 3 position he now mans.
“I advised him to discuss this with coach Gee before it’s too late,” one of the scribes said.
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So far, chief trainer Freddie Roach is satisfied with the progress of Manny Pacquiao’s preparation for his Nov. 24 fight with Brandon Rios in Macau. Except for one detail which needs immediate attention.
Pacquiao’s back hurts after a roadwork and he needs a conditioning coach to fix this. Team Pacquiao tried to look for a replacement for Alex Ariza, who was fired by Roach and has since moved to the Rios camp, but they couldn’t find one who is as good as Ariza.
Roach said there is no other recourse but to borrow Gavin McMillan, personal conditioning coach of Chinese boxer Zou Shimming.
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Actress KC Concepcion blushes every time she is teased about 6-foot-9 power forward Chandler Parsons of the Houston Rockets.
“He is just a friend on Twitter,” Concepcion said on national television, after she personally met for the first time and went out to dinner with Parsons, who was in Manila recently for the NBA Global Games.
Lest fans get the wrong impression, KC said there’s nothing romantic about the dinner.
“We were a big group,” she said. “It wasn’t a one-on-one situation. I introduced him to Filipino foods and he liked it.”