Sorry, but despite all the drumbeating, the Philippines is back at that spot in the quadrennial Asian Games when all other national competitors could again afford to slip and lose—except for the basketball team.
Initial results from various battlegrounds in Incheon, South Korea, site of the 17th edition of Asia’s version of the Olympics, don’t bear promise of the Philippine contingent meeting the seven-gold medal harvest bragged about by the delegation head.
However, after five empty decades, hope is again being pinned on the national basketball team to score big and save the Philippine delegation from total ridicule.
* * *
Records show that the Philippines, after ruling the Asian Games basketball wars starting in India in 1951, Manila in 1954, Tokyo 1958 and Indonesia 1962, lost hold of the precious Asiad basketball gold in 1966.
In the 1966 Asian Games in Bangkok, discus thrower Josephine dela Viña and boxer Rodolfo Arpon brought home a gold medal each.
Unfortunately, the popular national basketball team, minus the great Carlos Loyzaga who had proudly pillared the Philippine squad in all four previous Asiads, did not make the trip to the Thai capital, together with most of his contemporaries.
* * *
Instead, a team built around varsity standouts, and coached by Fely Fajardo, was shipped out to defend the Asian Games basketball crown.
The experiment ended in disaster. In a crucial must-win game, the young Filipino cagers were eliminated after they suffered cold feet in the killing windup, with no one willing to take charge, while the inexperienced national players frantically passed the ball around like a hot potato (as reported by Philippines Herald sports editor Eddie Lachica from courtside).
There were desperate tries to regain Asian Games basketball supremacy, like in the succeeding 1970 Asiad, also in Bangkok, when the Philippine team, now powered by a more mature group that included Robert Jaworski, Danny Florencio and Adriano Papa, tripped arch rival South Korea, only to nosedive against Chinese Taipei the next day.
* * *
The closest the Philippines could come to regaining the Asian Games basketball crown was in 1990, when it won the silver medal behind host China. But considering how the mighty Chinese squad had dumped the Philippines by 65 points in the elimination, the Asiad crown did appear more unreachable than ever.
Yes, there was a time when it was commonly believed that all other members of the national contingent could afford to lose, except for the Philippine basketball team—“Matalo na lahat huwag lang ang basketball.”
As fate would have it, we now have the celebrated Gilas Pilipinas team to carry the fight for flag and country in the Incheon Games. With its scintillating (a term harshly rejected by Filipino boxing expert Hermie Rivera all the way from California) performance in the 2014 Fiba World Cup, national attention is wholly focused on the Philippine basketball team.
Gilas Pilipinas is in an unenviable spot where losing is not an option.
* * *
PURE(FOOFS) PERFIDY: Jayferson Alfonso, a sandlot league standout in Barangay Vergara, Mandaluyong City, went to buy groceries at the Purefoods-Kalentong mart the other week. He parked his motorcycle in what looked like a secure guarded area. It did not take 10 minutes for him to lose his bike. When he asked for assistance from Purefoods security, he was shown a CCTV file of vehicular thefts inside the area by the guard who said they were helpless and could not do anyting about it. The poor fellow could not help but feel tricked.