Basketball’s Glory Years

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from the sports book “Years of Glory,” a history of Philippine basketball, and the National Five’s seven Olympic stints between 1936 and 1972, written by veteran sportswriters Noel Albano and Ignacio Dee. It will be released in June this year.)

(Last of two parts)

He acquired yet another rare skill that would be the envy of an upcoming basketball great, Antonio Genato.

Silva definitely saw Paeng as perhaps not just one of the pieces but the centerpiece of UST’s future campaigns, first for the UAAP title and beyond it, the more prestigious Inter-collegiate championship and the biggest prize of all, the National Seniors. He had a reliable core of players that counted on the steadiness of Ramon Manulat, Genaro Fernandez from Cebu, and Deogracias de la Paz. The FEU Tamaraws were the Goldies’ toughest rivals for UAAP supremacy throughout the forties until the mid-fifties. Though winning more titles since 1937, the Goldies lost in 1950 and were hot on the comeback trail in 1951, the year Hechanova finally reached the dream status as UST team captain. The Goldies appeared headed for another disastrous season; the Tamaraws, surging ahead in the final, moved one quarter away from clinching back-to-back titles. Then Herr, ever tactically astute “but a little ungallant,” changed tack and in the final canto he played possession ball, a “grand though not so popular court strategy.” But it was, the Filipino Athlete wrote, “a perfect and legitimate maneuver.” And the Goldies fought back from a “hopelessly” lost situation to pull off a startling 43-34 victory.

As good as he was on defense, Silva was a cunning offensive tactician. In an age when there was no shot clock, no three-second rule and no backcourt violation, he was in his best elements and was ruthlessly effective with the slow break. One had to go back to May 1954, in the Second Asian Games gold-medal game, to cast an illuminating light on arguably the most controversial game of his coaching career.

What had precipitated, it appeared, was the threat of a loss, imagined or real. The Filipinos were having a hard time cracking the riddle of the Chinese zone and were barely ahead at 34-27, their offensive sputtering, when Silva sued for time. More than twelve minutes remained in the game clock—an eternity in basketball. After action resumed, they played out the famous maneuver the press later memorialized as the “long freeze.” Before the Rizal Coliseum’s emotionally charged gallery, filled to overflowing, the local boys went into an offensive stall when play resumed. This was Silva’s most memorable offensive maneuver, played like a defense in reverse, and later memorialized by the press as the “long freeze.”

Attempting to separate myth from reality, Hechanova offered a different account, utterly credible because he had received Silva’s direct instructions as team captain. “No, no, there was no order to freeze the ball,” Hechanova recalled that moment with intense clarity. “In the last quarter of the game, he was not happy with the way the forwards were playing. So he told me, ‘what you have to do is try to open up the zone because the Chinese defense was very tight. Move (Lauro) Mumar, who was playing guard, to the center and move Caloy (Loyzaga) to the forward line vbecause the forward guys were not shooting well.’ So I instructed Caloy to go to the corner and let Mumar be the center. That was the strategy.”

Not intended at all

That it “was not intended to be a long freeze,” Hechanova was absolutely certain. Silva even took out one of the forwards and sent in the unflappable Ning Ramos to partner with Hechanova at guard. Unfortunately, a Filipino-Chinese player who had suited up for the Chinese side saw the maneuver, Hechanova recalled, and alerted the quintet’s American coach “not to fall for it because Silva was a brilliant tactician. So the Chinese did not open up although they were behind. By the time they did, it was the last three minutes of the game. It turned out that for about six or seven minutes we were just passing the ball around in the outside trying to get them to open up, or trying to find that opening so we could get the ball to the center. That’s how it turned out, and the press started calling it the long freeze.”

A pillar of the 1954 team, the spitfire Antonio Genato, offered a different recollection. He had opposed the tactical change, he said, because, “we were not to shoot since the Chinese were playing zone.” Asked if he was certain Silva gave the order through Hechanova, he replied: “Whoever it was… We were leading, so the idea was to bring them out. So we were in the center court. There was no limit to possession.” And the shortest player on the floor, the epitome of a fearless warrior, told himself, “I could not play like that. It was a passing game, it was freeze the ball.”

At the next opportunity, he did the unthinkable. He defied the coach’s order. “So I took a shot, ‘di pumasok. I knew I would be taken out. I was taken out.”

Campos was watching the action from a seat in the gallery, and was struck by the passive Chinese, who stared at the Filipinos, and even squatted on the floor in their counter-tactic not to give up the shaded area. He said, “So this is what happened. The rest of the (Philippine) team would sit down and only two would be standing up and passing the ball like this (demonstrates) and then the other two would come up and (take over). And the Chinese would sometimes sit and wait. That’s how it ended.”

For all of Silva’s spunk, Genato thought of him as being genuinely wary of China’s shotmaking in the final minutes of the game. Genato cared about winning, but “not to win like that. Kaya naman natin talunin. Why freeze? This question would be asked countless times then and many years afterwards as Silva’s legacy came under intense scrutiny. To the doubters, he must have looked opportunistic, unimaginative or even prosaic. Would Herr’s coaching style have kept up in a time when the rules of the game were changed?

Yet he could not be judged outside the rules prevailing then. One view that did not detract from his fame was that there was something formidably traditional about him. He had often incurred the displeasure of fans and sacrificed the beauty and rhythms of the game but only at the altar of victory. Pressed by the Philippines’ winning tradition in the sport that dated all the way back to 1913, he could justify everything in the name of basketball glory. The liberating elements of the game were a few years away, such as the thirty-second shot clock, the three-second rule, and the widening of the keyhole area—all meant to eliminate the encumbrances of the old rules.

But as Silva’s boys—a bit chastened—tucked away the Asiad gold, such a transition was not imagined in the least. They were unwary about the shock waves and forces they had let loose. Basketball, in fact, was on the brink of the turning of an era, and basketball in the Manila Asiad’s would be the last of its kind in the Games’ history. Silva’s maneuver would link him to this new extraordinary era—a tectonic shift, so to speak, that would occur in 1956 at the FIBA congress on the sidelines of the Melbourne Olympics.

By the mid-fifties the Philippines had been to three Olympic basketball tournaments and known two national coaches, Dionisio Calvo and Fely Fajardo. But now, about to see action in its first world championship, a third coach, Herr Silva, emerged to lead the national team. His reputation was huge and his mission difficult.