Alapag’s final goodbye

Jimmy Alapag celebrates. Photo by Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net

SEOUL—Jimmy Alapag, the 2011 PBA Most Valuable Player and Gilas Pilipinas hero, has hung up his sneakers—for good this time—just a season after making a comeback with Meralco and helping the Bolts to their best finish.

The 5-foot-8 point guard, who was MVP with the former Talk ‘N Text squad (now TNT KaTropa), will also retire as the league’s all-time leader in three-point shots made with 1,250.

“I won’t be coming back in the next season,” Alapag said in a video interview. “It’s been an amazing 13 years, but after leaving everything on the floor, it’s time to walk away for good.”

Alapag, one of the keys in Gilas Pilipinas’ dramatic win over perennial Philippine nemesis South Korea in the 2012 Fiba Asia Championship in Manila, made 73 of those triples in the recent season, where Meralco finished second in the Governors’ Cup behind Ginebra.

Meanwhile, in the ongoing PBA Board meetings here, Robert Non stepped down as chair for the second time in four years, more proud of accomplishing a solid program for the Gilas Pilipinas than almost equaling the all-time gate receipts in the league.

The 41st season raked in millions in the Governors’ Cup that brought the year’s total to more than P210 million.

The figures were a little below the P240 million the league enjoyed in 2013, the first of the two seasons that Non was chair.

But in the past season, Non was particularly pleased that the league was able to come up with a solid program for the National team as the country tries to make the final roster in the 2019 World Cup in China.

“Yes, that’s more important for me,” Non told the Inquirer Thursday over breakfast at posh The Plaza Hotel in this South Korean capital where the entire PBA brain thrust is billeted. “That’s a bigger achievement because it’s for the country.”

The PBA devised a scheme that will effectively have all 12 teams sending two players each to a pool of players from where the final lineups of qualifying tournaments will come from.

GlobalPort team owner and 1-Pacman party-list representative Mikee Romero took over from Non.