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 TOKUSHIMA—An
ugly draw and a nasty call have been pointed out as the
culprits in the country’s premature exit in the Fiba
Asia Championships and the subsequent failure to get an
Olympic slot.
Now,
officials here are looking at fixing one thing they know
they have full control over: their basketball program.
Speaking
to the Philippine media for the first time since the
Philippines was unceremoniously booted out from the
zonals Monday, Noli Eala, commissioner of the Philippine
Basketball Association (PBA), offered solutions that
sounded more like open-ended questions, the possibility
of them being answered by the PBA board of governors.
Eala,
who has doggedly pursued continental conquest like no
PBA commissioner did before him, will see that chase
continue further and immediately—further because it’s
likely the plans are to send a team to the London
Olympics, immediately because once he returns to Manila
on Monday he will begin sitting down with the board to
talk about issues that have direct impact on the future
of the pro league and, immensely important, the search
for Olympic glory.
“As far
as I am concerned, there are three things that come to
my mind immediately which I will take back to the PBA
board,” Eala said. “First, is do we continue to support
the national team and therefore competing
internationally? Number two, do we keep together this
team or a pool of players whom we can use for future
competitions? And third, do we adopt Fiba rules so as to
make the adjustment not only of our team, but also of
our coaches, easier and simpler?”
Eala
called the answers—of course, based on whatever the
board decides on later—“summit decisions” that will
trickle down from the governors down to the coaches and
to the players. He acknowledged them as “league-changing
decisions,” similar to the tectonic shift that
reconfigured the PBA from a three-conference,
12-months-a-year league into a two-tournament, Fiba
calendar-conducive season.
“I’ve
never had any problems making very big decisions,” Eala
said. “So we just have to continue to adapt to the
changing times and to the demands of our basketball
community.”
Adaptation—or the difficulty to it—is the word of the
tournament here, with the state of mind of the players,
coaches and officials still heavily ingrained in a
professional-league culture.
And it
didn’t help the
Philippines
to be in the company of three of the most lethal
basketball countries in
Asia (in the group stages) and to be at the wrong end of a myriad
of calls (in a loss that could’ve easily been a win).
“I can’t
articulate the pain and the experience but I think, we
have to be humble enough to accept that there are
obviously inadequacies in the program we’ve set up,”
Eala said, the first time he has gone public with his
feelings.
“Some
[inadequacies] not because of our own fault,
particularly the time frame that we had to plan, but
others, I guess are still within our control. I think
that the PBA has—to quote Patrick Baumann—must stay its
course in terms of its support for the national team.”
“It’s
the only way,” he added, “to put some sense and some
reason for what has happened here in
Tokushima.”
While
finding sense and reason may take a while, esteem, even
just a measure of it, was earned, Eala said.
“Personally, we gained a lot here. We didn’t claim a
victory but we claimed respect. And it’s one of our
objectives we had when we came to Tokushima, and I’m
glad we’re able to achieve that,” he remarked, adding
that people “cannot overreact too much to what has
happened [here]. We have to be realistic, detached, and
we have to be visionaries than reactionaries. We have to
see what’s in store for us, rather than react to what we
experienced here.”
The same
experience is not only keeping Eala’s Olympic side open,
but his PBA side receptive to change as well.
“We’ve
seen up close the development of international
basketball from the PBA’s perspective. And we don’t like
to be the United States,” he admitted. “I personally
don’t want to be like the NBA [National Basketball
Association], where, internationally, they’re being left
behind. That’s not a model that works internationally.
Commercially, it is the best but if you want to compete
internationally, that’s not the model to follow. So,
even that we would have to rethink our philosophy,
balancing, of course, our responsibility to the country
and also our commercial interest.”
“Because
the PBA is a commercial venture, it is a
sport-entertainment venture, it is the biggest
sport-entertainment venture in this country and we
cannot simply disregard that aspect of existence,” Eala
continued. “So that’s what we need to balance. That’s
what we need, to find a delicate balance.” |
