NBA-Gilas fiasco: Curing an outrage

BUBOY Sebreros wants to find a way to properly assuage the disappointment of three schoolboy friends from Don Bosco-Mandaluyong who learned that the dream tuneup game between Gilas Pilipinas and a select group of NBA stars would not be played—but only when they had already settled on their ringside seats at Smart Araneta Coliseum last Tuesday.

His friends shelled out a cool P23,000 each, Buboy exclaimed while helping out with his father, a top vegetable trader at the Mandaluyong City wet market section.

He mentioned something about an impending refund from the MVP group of companies, whose chieftain, the respected tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan, became the subject of ire by disgruntled fans.

* * *

Buboy, himself an NBA diehard, said it was not merely a question of money.

His friends, and countless others, no doubt, came rushing to the Big Dome to savor live NBA action and allow themselves to be mesmerized by American basketball stars they had also considered as god-like.

In short, they did not come only to watch, but to worship, hoping to collect and gather great memories that could last them a whole lifetime.

Sorry, but everything, instead, ended in overwhelming disgust.

* * *

It was unforgivable, not quite smart.

The best we could do was shrug off the treachery, charge everything to experience.

Of course, it’s also our duty to print the views of other seasoned spectators, who felt outraged.

“It was immoral, unethical,” cried Joseph Dumuk, former chief national sports statistician from Bauang, La Union.

* * *

He said everybody got cheated, including Pangilinan himself.

“I admire Mr. Pangilinan for standing up and taking the blame,” Dumuk said. “I just cannot imagine the magnitude of our countrymen who were dismayed, disappointed. The event was hyperbolically promoted by media—whole back-page ads, oodles of column-inches of hype! Can you imagine marketing a product you didn’t have an exact idea of what it was. The brains and the prime movers behind the delusion should not escape with a simple ‘Do not do it again,’ or a simple slap on the wrist. Nakakahiya.”

* * *

National cycling hero Jesus Garcia Jr. said the experience was truly traumatic in this country, where basketball is treated like religion.

“They really thought they could do anything as long as you have the money. Shameful,” he cried.

Meanwhile, there was a report about three kids, basketball scholars in their own right, who were flown to Manila from areas ravaged by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.”

The kids had the experience of their lifetime, shooting ball, dribbling, and banishing the woes wrought by Yolanda with the help of the NBA visitors during the clinic portion of the program at Smart Araneta Coliseum.

Truly heartwarming, but then, that was also a totally different story.