Meralco coach Normal Black. INQUIRER PHOTO/TRISTAN TAMAYO
Everything, Mt. Everest conqueror Edmund Hillary once said, comes down to motivation. If people want to achieve something, he added, they would work hard for it.
Meralco coach Norman Black has his own Everest to scale.
Black is one of the coaches of note in the PBA today, one of an elite few who have won the slippery Grand Slam. Black has also won 11 PBA crowns and once led Ateneo to five straight collegiate titles. But since leaving the Blue Eagles, Black has won just one title, with TNT in the 2012-13 season, and has lost two Governors’ Cup Finals series to another decorated coach, Tim Cone, and the Barangay Ginebra Kings.
But Black is not about scaling mountains alone.
“It’s not about me, it’s about the team,” Black said when asked if his coaching dry spell would be added motivation for the title war against the Kings, which kicks off with Game 1 on Tuesday at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
“I’m motivated for my team, not me personally,” he said.
Cone also doesn’t have to look far to find motivation bigger than his own. He just has to stare at courtside. At the several rows behind courtside. At the bleachers. At practically anybody even outside the arena.
“Everywhere you go in the street, you know that there’s a Ginebra fan coming up,” Cone said. “They know that we know they want us to win.”
“I think in terms of edge that we have, I think it’s always the Ginebra crowd. They push us to great heights all the time,” Cone added. “[The fans] keep us playing at a high level. [It’s something] you could take two ways: Take it that you’re against lots of pressure or take it and say somehow, it will really help you to become better.”The Kings are leaning on their fans to push them on.
The Bolts? In a budding rivalry where they’ve been beaten twice already, in painful fashion at that, motivation should not be hard to find.