Part One
By Noel Albano
(I AM giving this space today to Noel Albano, coauthor with Ignacio Dee of the book on the greatest decades of Philippine basketball, Year of Glory, which will be released this summer.)
SAN FRANCISCO, California—The dozen men start arriving by past seven o’clock, eight by bus from the Los Angeles area, a few by car from nearby cities, their destination a modest house in a quiet cul-de-sac in the city of Pittsburg, California.
They repair to the back of the house overlooking a garden in bloom. Pale stars emerge, and a quarter moon hangs low in the horizon for company. It is a purple twilight of a spring day hotter than normal. But like so many times in their earlier lives, so many days and nights dribbling and shooting and rebounding basketball in unplayable conditions, tonight is going to be fun.
They have come for a reunion with the man of the house, Danny Florencio. The hard-court artist—a figure so profoundly etched in the minds of basketball fans in the 1960s—is himself again. He occasionally tells jokes, he constantly worries about the wine and the food, he putters in the kitchen.
His wife of more than 30 years, a retired chemist who had worked in a state hospital for more than three decades, doesn’t mind. She is in the middle of telling affectionately how the interminable days and nights are now spent by the basketball superstar of the decade of the Beatles and rock ’n’ roll.
“He works hard in his garden,” she says, adoringly describing dozens of roses and lilies now in bloom, cared for by the hands of the man who had many times handled a basketball like it was a part of his body.
“Sometimes, unnoticeably, he works there the whole day.”
Decades in retirement, Florencio’s passion for life still burns brightly. There is still so much left in him, like the total dedication, the attention to details, and the joy of creating.
Once, he had mesmerized crowds in local and foreign arenas, in the Olympics, ABC (Asian Basketball Confederation) and Asian Games. Ecstatic fans had showered him with praise, hailed him as a hero of the highest order.
The most memorable championship of his life, the 1967 ABC (now Fiba Asia), was also the most dramatic for the Philippines in the entire 1960s. Nothing came close to it in its sheer drama and joy. Nothing as dramatic as Florencio delivering the team’s last four points in a finale in Seoul where visiting teams, it was once said, lived by the dictum “In Korea nobody wins except the Koreans.”
If only someone had invented as much as a rank in basketball that could be bestowed only upon its highest performers. Florencio would have been a datu or duke. Or a prince among commoners.
In a forthcoming book on Philippine basketball in the Olympics and the Asian Games and ABC, Years of Glory, for which I and Ignacio Dee spent a considerable time the past few years searching the archives, interviewing former players and coaches and writing, I needed to fill in the details of the last one minute in the Philippines-South Korea match for the 1967 ABC crown.
I knew the newspaper accounts by heart. I didn’t know why Florencio had been kept cold on the bench for the entire game—until that moment arrived.
In the book, we wrote: “Fouls ravaged the Filipinos’ ranks. Coach Loyzaga already lost six stalwarts on disqualification and a seventh, (Sonny) Reyes, though in uniform, was still nursing a bad back. Who would be his go-to guy? With the title on the line, and just seconds left to play, he was really down to just one good player—an explosive shooter sitting cold at the farthest end of the bench for the entire game. Loyzaga stood up.”
Now I ask Florencio: Did he walk up to you? What were his instructions?
The moment is fresh in his mind, even with passage of nearly five decades. “Kay Reyes pa nakatingin,” Florencio says. “Katabi ko sya.”
But before Loyzaga could make a move, the assistant coach, Gabby Fajardo, stood up, tapped Florencio and told him amid the bedlam, “Hindi siya [Reyes] puwede. Ikaw na ’yan.” He literally pushed the still-hesitant player onto the court.
“I felt bad,” Florencio recalls.
Around him were shrieking Seoul fans dying to see the Filipinos get clobbered. His mind was blank. So in went Florencio with “no specific instructions” from the bench, and the forward with the leaping, acrobatic shots played “like a demon possessed.”
Without any warm-up, he got the ball and fearlessly struck with a turnaround jumper—a “shot that hit the ring and hesitatingly sank through the basket,” in the AP correspondent’s phrase—stretching the Filipinos’ lead to three points, 81-78. The coliseum literally shook. Time was down to 48 seconds.
On the next play Lee Im-pyo, fouled by Rogelio Melencio, hit his two charities, making it once more a one-point game, 81-80, and the “screaming crowd jumped to their feet.”
Florencio had the ball again. His head was still empty of everything. But instinctively he had gotten into his offensive rhythm. He made a driving play. He blew past a line of defenders, and the last of them, Kim In-kun, crossed his path, fishing for an offensive foul as he came into contact with the Filipino.
“There was a blue blur in his path. Was a foul going to be slapped on Florencio?” asked Ernie Bitong, the columnist. With the stakes so high, he feared a “hometown” call. After all, as the Manila Times sports editor Ricky Llanos was to point out a day later, the Filipinos were “playing on grounds where terror strikes every invading athlete.”
The referees, Gordon Allan Rae and Mario Hopenhaym, mercifully tagged Kim for the foul, and as smoothly as throwing charities in practice, Florencio delivered both gift shots to ice the game, 83-80.
He silenced the rocking thunder in the gallery. On the court, the Philippine bench erupted. In an instant, onrushing teammates mobbed and tossed Florencio in the air. He played less than one minute and made four points. They were the biggest shots in the entire ABC campaign. Loyzaga called him “my secret weapon.”
(To be concluded)
2 comments
Pound for pound, Danny Florencio is the best Filipino basketball player thru generations. He is the prototype of the Filipino player. He was the star of UST during the midsixties.
Loyzaga’s claim of secret weapon was a cop out. It was a desperate move because he didn’t have any other choice. Florencio was meant to be benched. Florencio saved the day not for strategic coaching but due to his own “abilidad”.