“You
don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.” Bobby
Knight
By Alex P. Vidal
TEAM Gilas Pilipinas has nothing to be ashamed
of.
In the first place, nobody expected them to
literally grab the Spanish bulls by the horns, slay them, and bring home the
bacon.
We love basketball, but basketball can’t
reciprocate that emotional attachment.
Our heights are not meant for the sport.
We can win a world crown in boxing where height
is not really a major factor, but never in the sport of Michael Jordan.
To be qualified in the 2014 FIBA World Cup was
already a victory for the team that wrapped up the bronze medal in the recent
2014 Asia FIBA Cup in China.
Our basketball players were like a group of boys
sent to do a man’s job in Seville, Spain but made their highly-rated
counterparts look like fools, as admitted by Argentina coach Julio Lamas,
whose team was nearly steamrolled by the determined Filipinos before escaping
with a gut-wrenching, 85-81 win.
Despite losing exciting matches against
highly-touted teams, our boys didn’t lose the battle. They were ousted in the
medal column but weren’t defeated.
They can go home with heads unbowed and deserve
a red carpet welcome.
AGAIN
But when can we ever see again a Philippine
basketball team competing in the World Cup where all its cagers are pure
Filipinos?
While we are happy for team Gilas Pilipinas, we
really didn’t expect the 2014 FIBA Asia Cup third placer to score major upsets
against the superpowers of world basketball in the 2014 FIBA World Cup in
Seville, Spain.
Thus the hair-line defeats to Argentina, Croatia
and Puerto Rico were not really bad. At least we beat Senegal.
The stage was different, of course, when the
all-Filipino RP basketball team competed in the 1954 FIBA World Cup in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil and won the bronze medal.
In the 1954 FIBA World Cup (known at that time
as the 2nd World Basketball Championship), the RP team did not
have an Andray Blatche, center-forward of the Brooklyn Nets, recruited abroad to
reinforce the Gilas Pilipinas.
We sent to Rio our best home-grown basketball
players and we did not have to scout for naturalized reinforcements from the
United States and Europe.
PROUD
And we were so proud to see the brown cagers
demolish Formosa (48-38), Israel (90-56), Canada (83-76), and Uruguay (67-63)
through the heroics of Carlos “The Big Difference” M. Loyzaga.
We lost only to the eventual champion United
States (43-56) and second placer Brazil (41-57) but it was our greatest moment
in world basketball championship.
Loyzaga, who turned 84 last August 29, is widely
regarded as the greatest Pinoy cager of his era, being the most dominant
basketball star from the 1950s to the early 1960s.
A two-time Olympian (1952, 1956), Loyzaga helped
the country become one of the best in the world at the time, winning four
consecutive Asian Games gold medals (1951, 1954, 1958, 1962) and two
consecutive FIBA Asia Championships (1960, 1963).
The country’s third place was the best finish by
an Asian country and the Philippines have remained the only Asian medalist in
the tournament until today.
PRESTIGE
To add prestige to our 1954 FIBA World Cup
campaign, Loyzaga wound up as one of the tournament’s leading scorers with
average of 16.4 points-per-game.
The Filipino player was named in the
tournament's All-Star selection.
Nowadays it’s hard to duplicate Loyzaga’s
achievements. We can produce a lot of promising cage stars from colleges and
universities all over the country inspired by the performance of Gilas
Pilipinas. But we can’t probably produce another Loyzaga in the next 50 years.
Truly, what happened in Rio did not happen in
Seville. With basketball in other European, North and Central America improving
by leaps and bounds, it will probably never happen again.
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