My RP Team Recollections: Our Quest to the Return of the (Asian Hoops) King It was a win for the country when I first saw a basketball game between the Philippines and an opponent. It was in 1982 and the Philippines was playing China in that year’s Asian Youth Basketball championship match which was held in Manila. Not yet a basketball aficionado, I merely chanced upon that game as I was doing what a couple of decades later would be called channel surfing on our 12-inch Nivico television. That black and white set was a gift from my paternal grandparents who gave it to us to keep my brothers and I from missing our father who had just left to work in Saudi Arabia. It came with a 500-peso (or it it 50 pesos?) subsidy for a 10-foot long antenna that had to be first installed on our roof before we could use our tv. I don’t remember now how I ended up watching that game since I had to always battle my younger brother, Philip, and my mother’s youngest sister, Tita Annie, on who would have the right to decide what program that should remain stuck on the screen. But I remember Alfie Almario sinking several long shots (I didn’t know yet what a three-point shot is) during that match that secured the victory for the Philippines. Yet, it was not Alfie Almario’s long toms that got my attention but rather the speed that the point guard of that team named Hector Calma was able to make his shots. It was those couple of fastbreak lay-ups that Calma made that night that gave me my first ever basketball hero (At that time, I was so in love with running after my brother and I watched on that same Nivico Lydia de Vega winning the gold in the Manila Southeast Asian Games held the previous year.). If I remember it right, I chanced upon the box score for that game years later and it seems those two layups were the only points Calma made that night. Yet, I think I was right in choosing him to be my first hoops hero as he eventually became one of the PBA’s 25 greatest players. I also remember reading somewhere Ron Jacobs, who coached Calma many times in the national team, saying the latter could have played in the NBA if he was a six-footer instead of being just 5’8”. He even said that despite that relatively short height, Calma could nearly dunk the ball. A few months later, I again chanced upon another Philippine game. I can’t recall anymore if it was against Japan but the occasion was the Asian Games in New Delhi. The Philippines was trailing in that game when I chanced upon it and I remembering feeling good despite this since I heard the commentator saying we had less fouls than our opponents. For my then innocent and ignorant to the ways of competitive basketball 10-year old mind, that was better since we were, at least, ahead of our opponents in the field of morality. It was only many years later, while browsing through old sports magazines in the Ateneo College library that I learned that a giant of a Japanese player ran amuck after his Pinoy protagonist named Botchok Lauchengco, if I remember it right, brought him sprawling down on the hardcourt. Only Botchok Lauchengco’s speed in running out of the court that saved him from the Japanese giant’s wrath. It was also during that time, right after I learned that the Philippines only finished fourth in that tournament that I started wondering why we were not the Asian basketball champions. It was only later that I learned that it was the doing of the PBA, the basketball that most Filipinos, even at that time, knew or cared about, even by my kababatas, classmates, and other children of my age. That’s what made me different to, I believe, most people of that time. If my friends had Toyota and Crispa, and Ramon Fernandez, Robert Jaworski, Francis Arnaiz, Bogs Adornado, Arnie Tuadles and the other PBA stars as their favorites, I had the RP team (the name I often catch myself using to call the Gilas Pilipinas team up to now, especially when I want to recall those sweet bygone era) and Calma as my favourite and idol. And when I started playing serious basketball in the summer of 1986 co other boys in our place in Kap. Pepe, in Cabanatuan, who eventually became my lifelong friends, I wore a white shirt under my basketball sando. It was what I saw some of the national players, especially Ronnie Magsanoc, who followed Calma as my favourite, doing especially when they played abroad. (Come to think of it, I never learned the exact reason why they did this. Could it have been caused by the cold weather in those foreign lands?) I eventually learned to like the PBA and to have my favourite PBA teams and players especially when I went to study and live in the seminary when I got into second year high school. Influenced by the priests and fellow seminarians of Ma. Assumpta, I followed the PBA as much as was afforded by the nightly one-hour television viewing time (until the television set itself eventually broke down) that we were allowed to have or by transistor radios the more intrepid of us were able to smuggle inside our barracks-like dormitory. It was through these means that I got to follow the exploits of the 1986 Tanduay team composed of Fernandez, Padim Israel, who I learned after I entered Ateneo as a former King Eagle, Freddie Hubalde, and our kababayan from far off Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija, JV Yango, especially against Jaworski’s Ginebra in that year’s All Filipino Conference. These Tanduay players eventually joined my favourites’ list but Calma, and, eventually, Samboy Lim, Allan Caidic, Elmer Reyes, Yves Dignadice, and the other members of the RP team were the ones on top of that list. As for the National Team, I don’t remember getting to see another of its games until the 1986 Asian Games. At that time, cable television had not yet been introduced to the Filipinos’ consciousness by EDSA and it seems even James Bond and Mcgyver had not yet learned to use the internet. Still, I tried to follow the exploits of the RP Team even if it was just through the newspapers, which for a long time my family could only afford to have on Sundays but which was fortunately available in several titles in the seminary. It was through the papers that I learned of the debacle the country suffered in the 1983 Asian Basketball Championships, or the ABC, what Fiba Asia was once called. I don’t remember knowing, before the stories about that competition came out, that the Philippines had started to recruit foreigners to don the country’s colors in basketball competitions. But it forfeited all its victories during that tournament because the foreign players were still ineligible to play for us. I also remember reading how proud one of the Filipino players felt despite the fiasco since the country never suffered a single loss inside the court during that tournament. A few years later, a friend told me one of those ineligible players was Pearson, an African-American. But I think my classmate had made a mistake as I saw Pearson played for Great Taste or Alaska in several All Filipino Conferences in the PBA. It was also through the papers that I read of the country’s victories in several prestigious tournaments abroad after the debacle of 1983. It was through these stories that I learned of how the Philippines defeated a strong US team in the Jones Cup (though it was only years later that I would learn several of these US players eventually made it to the NBA.), how it came close to defeating a Brazilian team led by the legendary Oscar Schimdt, up to now the leading scorer in Olympic basketball, and how opponents were all praise for Samboy Lim and Caidic, who with Chip Engelland, the 3rd candidate for naturalization, buried most of the 10 3-pointers, a number that was still quite unheard of at that time when the rainbow territory was not yet a decade old, that gave us our first ever Jones Cup crown. There were occasions when I was able to catch this same team on television. But, this was only when it played in the PBA as guests. These occasions included the team’s victory in the 3rd Conference of the 1985 season when it swept Manila Beer for the crown, the first time a shutout was recorded and the first, and so far, only time, an amateur team won a crown in that league’s history. It was again just in the papers that I was able to follow the team’s victorious quest for the Asian basketball crown in the 1985 ABC. The quest included a close shave against a South Korean team that didn’t even have a naturalized player compared to us who had Moore and Smith. (Engelland didn’t play in that tournament perhaps because only two naturalized players could be fielded in or perhaps because he wasn’t able to finish the naturalization process in time for the tournament.) Ron Jacobs worried predictions of how difficult that game against South Korea would be, even before that game was played, would be a portent of dire things to come for Philippine basketball. Yet, it was 1985 and not 1986, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2011. And perhaps, not 2013? (To be continued…)
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 11:50:00 +0000
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