Boom or bust in LA

The PBA board’s annual planning meeting starts today in Los Angeles, California. It’s an appropriate setting for the meeting, it’s the home of Hollywood, the world’s movie capital.

Here, the board members can act out their fantasies. They can create make-believe sequences without consequences. They can be heroes – or heels – depending on what they ate for breakfast.

PBA board meetings, usually held abroad, are occasions for reaffirming camaraderie among league members after nine months of grueling competition.

After some trips I happened to join, I realized that the planning session was actually not a planning session. The real plan had already been fashioned earlier—back home, where it was conceptualized, discussed, deliberated, and approved. The meeting merely affirms it.

But unlike past board meetings when team governors brought along family members intent on shopping and being merry, this one is serious, somber, and urgent. With Hollywood as backdrop, this one can still turn into a thriller, a horror-comedy, or a whodunit.

Never has the PBA board gone to a planning session with so many imponderables, chief of which is the term of its commissioner Chito Narvasa.

Narvasa upended the unity of the usually congenial board—whose decisions are normally governed by consensus—when he approved the trade that sent Kia’s number one pick to San Miguel.

That decision sparked a crisis that could have sent the country’s most popular and most successful professional league to ruin. It divided the PBA into two bitter factions, one led by the powerful San Miguel and the other by the equally powerful Talk ‘N Text.

Against this backdrop, the planning session is going to be held. But from where I stand, I believe that unity has already been forged. This LA trip will be one happy gathering for all the biggies concerned.

I am also almost sure that Narvasa will not get a renewal, that his presence in the PBA has become untenable, and that the “lack of confidence” vote by seven members is likely to stick. Because, if you think about it, will the PBA allow itself to be dismembered just because of one person?

But while in LA, the PBA board will really need to write a really good script to avoid a repetition of this crisis. A stricter definition of the role of the commissioner is vital to the plot. Another is the commissioner’s security of tenure. It is this that safeguards the commissioner’s independence; if he knows that his position is secure as long as his decisions are defensible, he is bound to call the shots with more courage.

That to me may be more important than just seeing the sights of Los Angeles.