I once covered the Southeast Asian Games that Cebu hosted in the then newly built Cebu City Sports Center. That was the time when globalization had still to reach its peak and the inclusion of naturalized players wasn’t the vogue. My observation then was that Southeast Asia was indeed a region because it was composed of people with almost similar physical attributes: brown and small in stature.
But policies changed through the years, especially in Asia. Sports federations went through the lengths of harvesting athletes with mixed blood in wherever country they could be found. In Philippine basketball, the term Fil-Am was introduced, for players with mixed Filipino and American ancestry. The practice improved the stature of our basketball players because Fil-Ams were bigger because of their Pinoy blood being mixed with American blood. Americans are naturally bigger partly because of their genes and better nutrition. Fil-Ams also got the benefit of better training in US schools.
Our version of a diaspora also contributed to it. Wherever Filipino communities thrive, the athletic children will then go through the sports discipline. It became just a matter of us choosing them to represent us in disciplines where we are weak. Track and field and swimming, for example, became beneficiaries of the participation of athletes with mixed blood. But in basketball, a controversy erupted when even players with nary a Filipino blood forged papers and narratives to misrepresent themselves as Fil-Foreigners, a term more favored than “Fil-Am.” This led to the deportation of the cheats and the growing hesitance of other players to lie about lineage.
Soon, other countries learned about the advantage of having athletes with mixed blood and, if they don’t have one, naturalizing them. Naturalization is allowed in certain instances. Apparently, Cambodia abused this naturalization thing. It is now represented by a basketball team with many naturalized players. Naturally, the stature and game of their team improved. But for a country like the Philippines to use that as reason for their defeat is pathetic. A better-prepared and better-coached team could have won over a team with haphazardly assembled members.
But Gilas is not better-coached. It has Chot Reyes, who has already had his share of historic losses in his international coaching stint. Other coaches would already have resigned or have been kicked out. But not Chot.
I just hope that the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, businessman Manny Pangilinan especially, will finally move to extricate us from the mess we are in. At least Pangilinan finally used the word “ignominious” to describe our defeat to Cambodia. That’s a recognition that a problem exists. That is, at least, a step in the right direction.
Let not ego be the cause of the fall of the basketball program of the country.