Mendoza: SMB not losing appetite to win

IN 2018, San Miguel Beer captured an unprecedented fourth straight Philippine Cup crown, which was formerly known as the All-Filipino trophy.

That could only mean that the Beermen are the best among all 12 teams every time the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) staged its importless conference four successive years.

That honor used to belong to Crispa, whose glorious stint in the league from 1975 to 1984 saw manager Danny Floro’s celebrated squad reign twice as Grand Slam champion.

Crispa’s first Slam was in 1976 under the lamented great, Virgilio “Baby” Dalupan, the PBA’s foremost “Maestro” with a cache of titles that was broken only a while back by Tim Cone.

So prolific is Cone (a record 21 PBA titles to Dalupan’s 15) that he is even now the only two-time Grand Slam champion coach. He won his first Slam coaching Alaska in 1996, followed by his second Triple Crown while piloting SMC’s San Mig Coffee in 2014.

The only other two Grand Slam coaches are Tommy Manotoc (Crispa 1983) and Norman Black (San Miguel Beer 1989).

Manotoc has retired but not Black, who has left San Miguel Beer and is coaching Meralco. Meralco is one of three PBA teams owned by MVP (Manny V. Pangilinan), the other two being NLEX and TNT-KaTropa.

Like MVP, RSA (Ramon S. Ang) also owns three PBA teams: San Miguel Beer, Barangay Ginebra and Magnolia.

But while MVP’s three teams wound up winless in season 2018, not so with RSA’s squads: they swept all three conferences last year for a Grand Slam feat of a different variety as SMB won the Philippine Cup, Barangay Ginebra the Commissioner’s Cup and Magnolia the Governors’ Cup.

It marked another milestone in the dynastic lore of San Miguel Corp., the only one left among nine PBA founding teams in 1975 still playing in the first ever play-for-pay league in Asia.

And, seemingly, San Miguel isn’t about to rest on its laurels as it had yet acquired another 1-2 punch in playmaker Terrence Romeo and budding bench strategist Jimmy Alapag.

Indeed, champions never seem to have the time to rest at all.

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