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NCAA in Manila circa 1949 |
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by Vic Ortiz
Oh that thrill called the NCAA!
It’s tough remembering, even when it was fun. Try and remember details that happened in 1949! You’ll be lucky to recall yesterday.
It’s like uncorking an old, old wine bottle. The decrepit cork comes off in crumbs from that bottleneck, and you have it on the floor, on the opener, and, no matter how hard you try, in the wine, the very thing you’ve made painstaking, no - herculean effort to avoid. You are terribly annoyed for days, and as the irritation persists, you’ve forgotten why!
I can recall the excitement of maybe making it, though. I had tried out in third year, but I was too short. By 4th year, however, 5’8” was good enough, and I was ready. As Johnny Chuidian eliminated candidates, I felt increasingly confident he would keep me. Every instruction, I followed to the letter. I didn’t want to give him any excuse to stop my becoming a part of the team. And, boy, did I practice. Practice, practice, practice. Making the team, finally, was the thrill of my life, of my 17-year life! It beat winning the gold medal ( which I never got ) I won in ( the 2nd year ) annual elocution contest! But that’s another story.
Johnny was good at teaching fundamentals. He would drill us mercilessly: dribbling, passing, foul shooting, field shooting. The medicine bag was his favorite weapon against slackers. He would throw it at you when you weren’t looking. Johnny knew he was in trouble that year; he had lost most of his team to graduation. He would have trouble next year, too. He had to pick from fourth year guys like me.
I remember the first time we got to work out at the Rizal Memorial coliseum court. So used to our gym, the coliseum made ours look twice as small, and the goals twice as high. It took some getting used to. Worse was when we played the first official game in that humongous venue. The crowd and their yelling would intimidate anyone, specially a rookie like me .
Johnny was not a great coach, now, mind you. He was heavy handed, in not-so-good a kind of a way. Obvious from the very start, his go-to man was Kalawang Cacho. Heck, Kalawang’s play was at a level way beyond the rest of the team’s. So, anything Kalawang wanted, Kalawang got. Everybody else better toe the line….or else. Johnny wouldn’t let you play your game.
You either played exactly how he told you or he’d pull you out of the game. You had no room for variation in case things didn’t work as he planned. I felt like a robot. If you tried something new or took a shot at the basket when open…and missed…you were out of there!
We won a measly three games that year. But I learned a lot about basketball, and life, and coaches.
Did you know we were not allowed to keep our uniforms? Not that they were kept so the next team could used them! them, I can’t remember anymore why that happened, but it seems someone
reported that the team (some of them, me sadly not included ) had gone carousing beyond curfew, and everybody was penalized for it. You know that old rule: if you can’t find out who, punish everybody - that’ll teach them! Does that sound like the Ar’neo you all remember?
Finally, the saddest thing for me was that, as we (or just I) stumbled through fourth year, I was told that, If I graduated, I would make the senior (college) team! The angels rejoiced, manna was falling, fish was reproducing by the basket! I was close to heaven. But, back down here on earth, my mom told me they could no longer afford my studies at the Ateneo.
The last great thrill that year was the inauguration of the stadium in Loyola Heights, the new Ateneo campus. The senior team would play the NCAA champion Mapua team, and the juniors would play the Ateneo de Davao high school team. We avoided a double defeat that night; we beat that Davao team, in spite of Carbonell!
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