By MARLEN V. RONQUILLO
THERE is an inane national pursuit that 99 percent of Filipinos approve of. Approve of is rather an understated description of the popular support it enjoys. So let us add the enhancer “enthusiastically approve of.”
This is the dream to achieve basketball greatness. Our undying hoop dreams. Never mind if it can’t be achieved in a thousand years. Basta. The worse thing is majority of our people think it can be done – and it is within grasp before this century expires.
The harsh truth is this. The end-times will come and we will remain a bench warmer in regional or global hoops competition.
This grudgingly-written column on basketball—and the urge to state something to deflate this absolutely crazy and impossible dream of our pigmy, brown race to be great at the sport for tall and massively-built homo sapiens—came after Jeremy Lin’s electrifying plays for the New York Knicks and the electricity called Linsanity that it generated from fans of the struggling Knicks. We may have this notion that if Lin, who has Taiwanese parents, can do it, a pure Pinoy can do it as well.
No. Forget it. We can’t do a Lin. He is some sort of a basketball pioneer—but he is a pioneer like no other. While our jocks have to be tutored on basic math and composition skills, Lin hurdled past the grueling admission requirements at Harvard, then trained in economics while shining for his Ivy League team.
You read his life story and you immediately sense that he is bound to do something great in his life. Not our local jocks who would identify Chaucer, the literary great, as a sandwich brand.
Then you read the story of Serge Ibaka, the Congo-born power forward of the Oklahoma City Thunder. He is now a naturalized Spanish citizen.
With Ibaka a Spanish citizen, he is automatically a main cog in the national team. And the configuration of the starting five of the national team would be this: Ibaka and Pau Gasol at forward, Marc Gasol at center. Rudy Fernandez and Ricky Rubio at guard.
Take a second look at the team. This is a respectable starting five for the NBA. As Spain made Ibaka a citizen, he said: “Marc is possibly the most talented center with the best fundamentals in the NBA. It will be a dream to play with him.”
He was not even talking about Pau Gasol, the starting forward of the LA Lakers, the Spanish NBA player with the championship rings. He was talking about Marc, Pau’s brother who is the starting center of the Memphis Grizzlies.
If we have to be honest about things, this is the sad truth. We can’t form this kind of team within this century or the century after this one. Actually, we are a thousand years behind the great basketball powers. And Spain is just one of the many legitimate contenders for basketball greatness.
Then, there are emerging powers, from countries that were unheard of in the basketball map two decades ago.
All these developments, if there is still some elementof sanity left in us, should push us to confine our basketball to inter-baranggay tournaments. Pursuing the impossible and improbable hoop dream is a wasteof time and a waste of sports investments.
Spain’s starting five in world championships is a good peg for a column on basketball. You know why? The glory days of Philippine basketball were during the prime years of a Filipino player from the Basque Region, in Northern Spain—Carlos Loyzaga. After a third finish in the Olympics of a Philippine team led by Caloy, it was downhill from there.
To stop the harvests of shameful and embarrassing finishes, let us stop this crazy dream once and for all and devote our sports funding into areas where we can excel and win. Pouring the sports funding to areas where Filipinos can really develop global talents will be good for the country’s economy. We are now familiar with by how much a big-earning athlete helps a regional economy (the Gensan area) and the national economy as well..
For empiricism, let us cite the example of Manny Pacquiao. He is Bob Arum’s cash cow but it also works both ways. Pacquiao has gotten extremely wealthy from the Arum promotions. And it is not earnings lying idle.
Pacquiao invests the enormous sums he earns in the US boxing circuit and his investments are part of the great economic stimulators in the Socsargen Region. He may not be as big time as the Alcantaras but his investments are spread out and substantial. Plus, there are regular hand-outs to the really poor, which the poor spends and puts into the economic mainstream.
Not only that. There are two sections of the media-based economy (advertising and television) that thrive around Pacquiao. Who knows that after several flops, Pacquiao’s future movies may finally hit big time?
Pacquiao is also a generator of jobs, not at the scaleof a call center maybe, but substantial enough. There are people who get paid handsomely for shilling for him, for getting him coffee, for stringing his guitar—jobs not even related to his primary career, which is boxing.
Nobody can top Pacquiao’s hard currency remittance to the country right now, not even Filipinos who work as quants at Wall Street.
While the Linsanity that has electrified New York hoop fans may be used as an example to pursue this hopeless dream of attaining basketball greatness, the most prudent thing to do is to admit the harsh truth that brown men can’t jump and that we can’t catch up with the skill level of the basketball powers in a thousand years.
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