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RAI Bollozos Sanchez | Historyahe! | Philippine Basketball: Learning experience but forgetting history?
Mindanaotoday.com | Philippine Basketball: Learning experience but forgetting history?
RAI Bollozos Sanchez | Historyahe!
GILAS Pilipinas were threading decently under the tutelage of Coach Tab Baldwin.
Under his leadership, the GILAS fans’ confidence in Philippine basketball came alive, and their passion for supporting our national team became hopeful. Philippine basketball is back on track!
Not until the harrowing defeat against the Indonesians during the Hanoi 2021 SEAGames and another disappointing loss against the Japanese during the 2022 FIBA Asia Cup.
The backlash of the collapse has left Filipino fans in despair, and a call for a coaching revamp trended on social media.
Those two losses gave a sense of pessimism to most Filipino basketball fans.
The Filipinos’ rendezvous with basketball is synonymous with the American colonization of the archipelago.
Integrating into the public school system, the Filipinos’ first taste of organized basketball was when the Americans introduced the interschool athletics meet during the early 1900s.
Nevertheless, the first organized all-men Philippine team happened during the 1913 Far Eastern Championship Games when Manila hosted the event.
We, then an American colony, were the champion from 1913, 1915, 1917, and 1919; 1923, 1925, 1927, 1930, and 1934.
Philippine basketball dominance continued after the Second World War.
The Philippine basketball team was the perennial champions at the First Asian Games in 1951 in New Delhi, India.
They repeated their dominance in 1954, 1958, and 1962. The best performance of Philippine basketball was a bronze medal finish during the 1954 edition of the FIBA World Cup.
While holding a Southeast Asian basketball record with 18 gold medals at hand and countless victories in the Southeast Asian regional tournaments.
Therefore, if you noticed, the history of Philippine basketball has more victories than her defeats.
You see, the Filipinos’ love and pride for basketball have roots in her past.
In fact, whenever the Philippines loses against a team that is easy to beat, the Filipinos become a sore loser, and countless Philippine basketball history becomes an effortless word of mouth.
Most Filipino basketball fans become basketball historians! To date, our loss against Indonesia and Japan hurts every basketball fan to the core.
Why? Politics, perhaps.
To this date, many fans accuse politics in Philippine national basketball caused the demise of both the SEAGames and the dismal finish in the 2022 FIBA Asia Cup.
Still, the audacity of the coach and the management (perhaps) to declare “it is still a learning experience” seems they had forgotten where the root of Filipino basketball pride comes from – the Filipino dominance of basketball and its history speaks a lot of it.
Therefore, it is not a learning experience if the top management of the national team would learn from the fans whose love of the sport arises from the history of Philippine basketball.
The fans would want to see “strategies and viable plays” not only about “playing the sport from the heart.”
In short, “utak at hindi puro puso!”
Since then, whenever someone piggybacks ride with success and takes reign with the GILAS, the whole nation suffers from aches in pain.
The loss against Indonesia and Japan explicitly shows the type of politics Philippine basketball has.
I started to pour my faith in our Philippine basketball team when we held the Argentinians to only four points during the 2014 FIBA World Cup and our two victories against Korea during the 2021 FIBA Asia Cup because of the crisp execution of play and team chemistry.
Nonetheless, recently, with the type of politics our Philippine national team at bay, I realized that our victory against the Koreans during the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship was just a miracle. (MT)
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