Who controls the bank calls the shots

Here’s a scenario. You had agreed with your friends to go on an adventure of a lifetime with all related things prepared. The next thing you know, the trip was scrapped for reasons seriously challenging sanity. Your reaction of course would be a mixture of surprise, irritation and frustration. The expected excitement and fun changed to apathy and gloom.

More or less, this speaks of the SBP’s pull-out from the Asian Games which will be jointly held in the Indonesian cities of Jakarta and Palembang come August 12 to September 2. This greatly frustrated the majority of this basketball-manic republic. It happened just hours after a meeting with the PBA board that agreed on sending the core of the Rain or Shine team to the Asiad. Reportedly, the Board was not informed of the withdrawal as they only knew of it from the internet.

The nation’s governing body for basketball partly said in their statement that the move was done to “improve its systems and to prepare programs that will better ensure respectable performance of our teams internationally of which our countrymen can be truly proud.”

The programs are well-placed and the pro league had been cooperating in the preparations and as far as the Asian region is concerned, we had done well and can really be proud of the results. It is the system that needs to be improved. To “better ensure respectable performance”, probably it’s high time to change the national teamcoach and let him manage full time his patron’s TV station and its affiliates.Two foreigners had handled the Gilas with favorable results and since already obscene amounts of money had been spent already, better spend it on these people.

They were practically raw and inexperienced in overseas competitions but the college team sent to the recently concluded Jones Cup did very well ranged against national and international club teams. They were mentored by a former Gilas coach and except for two main guys, he uses whoever does well on court, walangpaboran. It would be nice to see him back as the national team’s chief tactician. In all fairness, the present Gilas coach had done well but as we all would like to say, move on na.

The patron saint of Philippine basketball said that he doesn’t want to send a token team to the Asiad. My freaking goodness! Are the ten FIBA-suspended players the only players we have? What’s the point in having a national team pool? The statement is an insult to the RoS team and to the rest of the country’s basketball players. I don’t have to name the abundance of players that we have who can replace and in fact even do better than the infamous ten.

Further, the godfather added, “The overriding consideration is, given the suspension meted out by FIBA on the Gilas team, it’s a setback to the Gilas program so we decided we should focus on reviving that program and getting the team back on its feet.”

What’s to revive? Was the program abandoned, shelved? The local basketball community is too wise to swallow this explanation. Is it because the pet coach won’t be calling the shots for the team and it is not the patron’s team who will represent the country? Or did the P13 million penalty imposed by FIBA took a huge bite off the Gilas budget?

I will agree on the actor/sportsman and now mayor who heads the PH delegation to Indonesia when he said that we should first set our sights on Asian success rather than focus on the world stage. Indeed. Once we will be at par with Asian powerhouses Iran and China and As-Pac powers Australia and New Zealand, only then can we confidently say that we are ready for the world. Heart and guts alone can’t win games and with this development, the overused ‘puso’ has become ‘ginabot’, which actually is, ‘lami iparessapuso’ downed with an ice-cold RC Cola.

Some internet basketball “analysts” had commented that sending RoS with an equally hot headed coach from another team would do harm than good because he have at his disposal a wide-bodied enforcer on the team and the prospect of another one with the same body structure. Frankly, I frown on on-court violence but if worse comes to worst, I would prefer these guys to be on my team because they do their fighting face up and mano-a-mano, not the hit-and-run, half-baked tough guys we saw in Bulacan.

PH basketball won four consecutive Asiad golds from 1951 to 1962. That time, medals were decided on the top three teams who had the fewest number of loses and we topped the tournament without a single defeat. The next time we medalled was in 1986 where we took home the bronze. The all-pro Centennial Team surrendered to China during the title match in 1990, settling for the silver. The bronze in 1998 at Bangkok was the last Asian Games basketball medal we had.

All things considered, the reality is who holds the purse has the final say. Yes, he who controls the bank calls the shots. That’s reality even if advance ka mag- isip.