The Role Player's Realm

Balut FTW

2010-05-13T11:56:00.002+08:00

Really awesome that TrueHoop's Henry Abbott stood true to his bet and ate that dee-lish Filipino special. Welcome to my world, Henry. And I hope you eating balut will indeed lift the curse of the Blazers.

Injustice and Basketball

2010-03-31T11:15:00.007+08:00

Yesterday's post was all kinds of vague, and I apologize for my zero readership out there if you were left wanting. I'm going to try to clarify stuff by integrating some basketball talk into it. Hopefully, it will make me feel better, too.

***

I should be working right now, but I'm not. I don't care if I get paid for doing nothing. I've done these several times, but there are worse people that would put my laziness to shame. I had a horrible morning last night. I wanted to cry and go home, sleep to get that day over with. It was partly my fault but I didn't regret doing it.

Since she was a close friend, I asked the HR employee handling payroll how my performance appraisal at work turned out. At this time, I was about 50-50 into believing that my promotion was going to push through. I was recommended last year, but it didn't happen because the big boss said it was the crisis and most of the promotions were deferred to save money, yada yada yada. Now, I'm a very patient and understanding guy and I didn't take this in too negatively. Don't get me wrong, I was definitely disappointed. But I knew some people had to make sacrifices, and I felt that the following year, I was getting that promotion for sure.

But then she told me, hey, you got an increase of __%. It was obviously lower than the increase I would get IF I had the promotion, and even though I thought I already set myself up for disappointment, it still jolted me.

I thought I'd give a little background. My ex-boss, who just recently left for another job a few months ago, did not even care to evaluate us before he left. He left it to the one next in line, someone who absolutely does not know the quality of my work and what I've done for this company. It's a freaking travesty.

So in the end, this is what happened. Another year of not getting a little appreciation. Another year of getting older and being left farther and farther behind by my peers. Another year of getting blindsided. Another year of not getting any respect. Another year of being led to believe that something good's going to happen and then getting smacked in the face with a subtle "eff you". There's no such thing as justice in this world. Yes, I said it. The world thrives on being unfair.

This morning, people from Pounding the Rock linked to an article by Dan Shaughnessy undermining the greatness of Tim Duncan. Kelly Dwyer and Joe Posnanski already showed masterfully how wrong that dude is, but still, I can't help but resonate to how some people treat my favorite basketball player ever (Yes, I went there... I dropped Michael Jordan like a hot potato).

Like every PtR'er, I worship Manu, too, but now that I think about it, I find more and more reasons why I love Tim Duncan the most. To make a long story short, I'm just a sucker for him being the epitome of a quiet superstar - he does everything on both ends on the floor, carries his team almost every night, wins, but doesn't celebrate in your face or disrespect the other team. Heck, Shaugnessy even calls Tim out on his extreme modesty as possibly one of the reasons why he's not a Top 10 player. Duncan is that humble. I can't help but applaud the man for that. And I can't help but almost cry for him, too, if people continuously use words like "boring" and "small-market player" to underrate where he ranks in the pantheon of not only the greatest NBA players, but athletes in general.

I, too, feel like a part of me is being disrespected whenever that happens. I may be exaggerating at this point, but I believe that Tim Duncan stands for a lot of what I want to be as a person. Sure, his max salary might say, hey, this guy's already being given what he's due. But it's not that simple. While I can go on and on and just repeat what the Duncan defenders are always saying, I won't. Because you know what? Tim Duncan doesn't give a shit at what you, me or other people say or think about him. Aside from basketball skills, I think that's Duncan's quality that I admire the most.

I work for the research arm of my company and we're probably the most unrecognized group in the building, despite doing a lot of things that help this institution make money or get the recognition it sorely lacks. Our room is even situated at the farthest end of the corridor, away from people's eyes and beside a prayer room that very few people go into. Not even a lot of people know the names or faces who work in this department. But if other employees don't know what to do with something, they dump it on research. Yeah, we'll handle that for you, even if you know you can handle it on your own but you're just too "busy" to do other more important things like having three-hour lunch breaks or complaining about the slow internet connection.

Come evaluation time, everyone's yapping about how they helped the company earn this much or that much or how their project was a success or how they had to deal with this or that problem. And here we are, in the sidelines, with still a lot of people not knowing what we actually do. It's a real shame. Like Tim Duncan, I know the feeling of being under-appreciated by the so-called experts. But unlike Tim Duncan, I deal with it rather poorly. Or at least I've reached a point where I couldn't take it anymore - I couldn't just sit here and allow myself to be slighted, disrespected, abused, used like a tool and treated like cheap labor.

I'm probably one of the most patient guys you'll ever meet but sadly, I'm still not at the level of Duncan's humility, steadfastness and indifference to those who choose to ignore what's really important. Yes, I will say that I'm freaking 5 or 10 times better than the people here who earn much more than I do. I knew these things for a few years and I chose to keep my Duncan face on, quietly going about my business, knowing my time will come. But really, do nice guys finish last? Or, as LatinD once commented on a post here, do nice guys finish... at all? I don't know.

I'm a person who believes and stands firm on the idea of values, so if the values I believe in are being compromised, I can't just let allow people to continuously step on them. Sure, I can forgive a few slights here and there. But now that they've shown how low they are willing to go to disrespect me, I think I've finally hit boiling point.

Despite sinking into new levels of sadness and disappointment, reading these recent stuff about Tim has somewhat given me hope to hold onto. Will the meek really inherit the earth? Again, do nice guys really finish, at all? Does social justice and life eventually balance out the world's imbalances? I'm not too sure, but looking at how Tim has lived his life, yeah... maybe they will happen at some point. I don't know exactly when, but like how The Big Fundamental lives, I will try to stop caring about how other people use me or think of me. I will start focusing on how to further improve myself, and it will probably begin with getting out of this damned company.

There Is No Justice In This World

2010-03-30T13:21:00.001+08:00

That's it. I'm done. I'm outta here.

Tiger Woods Can Suck It

2010-02-01T14:10:00.004+08:00

This man should be talked about more. A once-in-a-lifetime athlete, if you will. And oh yeah, he's a really good guy, too. Also, I don't like Andy Murray but after last night's match, I genuinely felt sorry for the kid. Best of luck to him in ending that British drought.

Yet Another Tennis Post

2010-01-29T16:04:00.007+08:00

And oh yeah, pure talent helps, too.

So yeah, I haven't been posting much, and if I ever did, they're hardly about basketball. Maybe I'll get back to that when the playoffs roll around. But for now, since it's the Australian Open, here's your obligatory tennis entry.

I love reading about the things that make superstar athletes successful - from Michael Jordan's uber competitiveness to Manny Pacquiao's insane training regimen and ability to tune out distractions, I find myself trying to measure up to their exceptional qualities and examine if I can take something from them, apply them to my life and see if they make a difference. Unfortunately though, I usually stop at the "application" part. I guess that explains the harsh reality that a few people really have "it" while the others remain right around the average.

Reading some lines from a Roger Federer interview, you kind of get the message on why the mental part of his game is so good. Here are some choice quotes, see if you get the same idea I'm getting:

I never look at the stat sheet... You know, some people are fanatics about it. How many aces and double-faults did I hit? How many points won, or first serves? I couldn’t care less about all those stats... Same with winners and errors did you hit. I don’t care if I was in the positives or the negatives. What matters is how you play your opponent, and the wind and the tactics and everything. There are so many more important things, you know.

Here's another. This one's on Federer saying he reads newspapers to keep up with what was happening in tennis, but was also quick to say that he is by no means an analyst, and sometimes prefers listening to television commentary.

It’s not really to study opponents. I watch it more as a fan... I didn’t watch last night’s (Andy Murray v Rafael Nadal) match saying, ‘Hm, that’s interesting how they’re playing’. I couldn’t care less. I just like to see a good tennis match and see how they battle it out, and see the intensity of both players, and watching how important it is for both of them to come through.
So I see it more that way than, ‘What’s he doing exactly when I play him next time?’ That would be way too stressful, watching every single tennis match just thinking of my own game, how it would match up.

A couple of things I can take away from trying to read between Roger's lines is first, he's supremely confident about his skills. He doesn't worry too much if this or that guy's going to beat him or how he can beat his opponent. He knows he has the tools and just has to execute the game plan.

Speaking of game plans, sure, he always has a plan coming into every match, but prefers to come up with it in the appropriate time. The admirable thing about Federer is that he's really good at knowing when to do things. Most of the time, regular people like you and me tend to worry about so many things at different points of the day, that in the end, we end up not knowing where to start or finish.

I really liked how Fed says that he watches "as a fan" and not some overly obsessed freak calculating and analyzing everything. That kind of relaxation helps his mental state a lot, especially during the big moments. It helps that you can tune out a previous error or mistake made and just move on and concentrate on the next point. That kind of ability to quickly shift mindsets is almost like a gift. And maybe that's why pundits really see him as some sort of tennis "genius."

So here's hoping for Number 16. Add to that the potentially absolute joy of seeing Andy Murray get his ass kicked yet again.

Awesomeness Going On At PtR

2010-01-29T09:40:00.002+08:00

LatinD is in San Antonio and he's having a grand time. His posts over at Pounding the Rock are great reads (always puts a smile on my face and some giggles here and there), so even if you're not a Spurs fan, head on over there and check it out or miss out on discovering the true meaning of life.

Thoughts on the Pacquiao-Mayweather fallout.

2010-01-10T09:18:00.002+08:00

(HT: Y! Sports)

Totally Unrelated to Basketball

2009-12-16T16:29:00.004+08:00

No, please. You're too good for him.

Over at PtR, Hipuks' posts (inspired by /b/ at 4chan) made me stumble on the short cartoon strip above. It's almost a near-perfect description of the current state of my relationship with the girl of my dreams. Ahh, damn it all.

I also realize I haven't written anything for awhile. I will once I get my sentimental bearings together, but there's no timetable yet.

Fight Night Looms Again

2009-11-09T14:39:00.005+08:00

So it's all over the interwebs (especially on the local front) that Manny Pacquiao's fame has reached unimaginable heights by appearing on Time Magazine's cover (Asian edition). I mean, wow. Just wow. Manny's great, and after "doubting" him for two straight fights, I've learned my lesson and am confident about him emerging victorious after the Cotto fight. Still, that's why sports is sometimes so unpredictable -- any match/fight/game can go either way, especially in boxing, where one lucky punch can turn things around.

In the meantime, here's a New York Times article on the Pacman and his trainer Freddie Roach's relationship. A good read.

Now I'll just have to find a copy of that Time issue. Hopefully it isn't sold out yet.

Get Pumped

2009-10-27T14:00:00.004+08:00

The new NBA season kicks off tomorrow morning here in the Philippines and I am fucking pumped as hell. It's going to be one hell of a season, and you know where I'll be most of the time: at Pounding the Rock, cheering on the San Antonio Spurs with Spurs fans from different parts of the world.

For now, I hope you get excited, too, with these two photos of a passionate Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. Go Spurs Go!

Somebody Fix The Goddam Problem

2009-10-22T17:20:00.003+08:00

Here are some links after the fallout of the Wynne Arboleda fan mauling incident:

Who gave the green light? - a spot-on article by Tommy Manotoc on the root of the said evil.

Rick Olivares PBA haterade - Rick is in a very bad mood. Watch out.

My thoughts? Glad you didn't ask.

Personally, I agree with the suspension for the entire season, but for a lifetime? That's too harsh -- it totally closes the door on reconciliation and a chance to make good on his mistake. Nobody's too small to not get the opportunity to earn forgiveness. I sound like a priest. But seriously, let's try to act and think like real human beings here.

The PBA is once again slipping. I think it hit rock bottom a few years ago then was on its way to recovery when several college stars went pro, but now, as a fan my interest continues to wane. And I'm a basketball fan of any sort of basketball game at that. I try to watch as much ballin' as I could, and you can rarely see my television set tuned in to a different channel other than Basketball TV. Now, if it's not Ginebra or SMART Gilas or some of the other players I like to see playing (Gabe Norwood, for example, and the Ateneo boys), the PBA officially turns me off.

Yeng Guiao is an asshat. He epitomizes a ton of what is wrong with the local pro league. A lot of the bigwigs act like they know everything and refuse to be told how to run certain things. It's kinda similar to the company I work in. Everyone's so damn resistant to change and the accompanying risks that it carries. The coach and other PBA officials and coaches need to eat a good dose of humble pie. There are a lot of good suggestions out there on how to improve the league. You pro basketball suits should just learn how to swallow your pride and sacrifice your egos, and then we fans can decide if it's worth our while to patronize your little business venture.

Good things will eventually, no, check that -- HOPEFULLY, come out of these incidents. Not only the Malice at the Palace: Philippine version, but also Japeth-gate. But like many politicians and the voting public, most of the time, we fucking never learn. We need to do something about that, people. As one Korean student studying english here in Manila wrote: "Filipinos need to love their country." Is it really as simple as that? Maybe.

Outside Insider

2009-10-15T16:19:00.003+08:00

Last season, my daily routine in the morning consisted of checking (in no particular order... I like to mix things up a bit) Yahoo! Sports, Pounding the Rock, personal email accounts (3 in Gmail, 1 in Yahoo), ESPN and Fox Sports. Sometimes, if I remember it, I also check Sports Illustrated (especially the Tennis section and articles from L. Jon Wertheim).

Over time, I began bypassing Fox Sports, as I only read articles there by Charley Rosen and Jason Whitlock. For a few months now, I've also stricken off ESPN in that privileged list. That all began when they started tagging "Insider" to articles they used to release for free. Now, you'd be lucky to find an article written by John Hollinger or Chris Sheridan without having to fork over hard-earned money.

Personally, I like reading ESPN for the entertainment value (Bill Simmons is an idiot but he's someone most people want to be -- a blogger with relatively free rein to discuss stupid things, relate it to sports in a sometimes hilarious way, get paid and receive a lot of privileges), analysis and rumors. I used to actually regard the site as THE source for everything sports, but the recent corporatism it has been subjected to has forced me to look for other alternatives. I visited the site a few minutes ago because I was looking for some San Antonio Spurs news, and it just hit me that I haven't been to ESPN for quite some time now. The experience also resulted into something like being pissed at how the website is being run nowadays.

When the big wigs at ESPN began incorporating this Insider-wide change, I remember reading one of Hollinger's chats where to my delight,someone finally had the balls to question what the hell was happening to ESPN, restricting access to almost all of its content (thank goodness TrueHoop hasn't followed suit). John just said that's what the bosses told them.

I'm pretty sure readership has gone down with all this exclusive content revolution. It won't take a super sleuth to deduce that. And I'm also quite sure that the ESPN bosses told their writers something like, "Okay, fewer people might be able to read what you write, but this is also for your own good. People HAVE to give credit for all your amazing work by PAYING for what you write." Heck, they might've gotten Hollinger's approval by saying that this movement will pay for all his supercomputer bills.

I realize I'm threading a fine line here (which is constantly walked by those who work in the corporate world) between making a profit and giving the product (or content) that people want. I want to take part in the exclusive access that these ESPN writers have by reading what they write, but realistically, I feel it's not a fair proposition for me to pay for it. I mean, don't they get enough revenues for page hits and web ads? Guess not, and I'm just a complete cheapskate who wants to take advantage. Kind of like the saying, "You stick your hand out, and they grab the whole arm." And so the debate continues on and on.

Two NBA seasons ago, a friend shared with me his Insider account. I think I really made good use of it as I almost read every article with an "in" beside its title. Thinking about it some more, what the access just did really was to take up a little more of my time compared to when I didn't have that Insider pass. Nowadays, I don't even need to visit ESPN. The TWSS posts over at PtR is more than enough to fill two, three days, sometimes even a week, of internet reading. Sometimes, I even feel hoopshype.com is more connected to the rumor mills than the big sports websites.

Who needs Insider and other subscription-based sports websites? Maybe those who can't sleep at night when they see a "juicy" article that they can't read for free. Sports junkies who have enough cash to burn (like my friend, who earns a great deal of money). As for the third world-er that I am, no, thank you. I think the internet already does a good job taking care of penniless bums like me. If you ask me about NBA League Pass though, that's an entirely different issue, which I'll reserve for future discussion.

Championship Blues

2009-10-13T11:19:00.008+08:00

Burnin' the sun with just a wave of your hand

The champagne bottles have been popped, the trophy has been raised up high and the cheers are slowly fading. The bonfire has been lit and after a few hours of brightening up the sky, fades into the sunrise. My alma mater is once again on top of the college basketball mountain, yet I am left completely underwhelmed by everything that has happened in the past couple of weeks or so.

I'm thinking this mainly stems from the fact of not being able to witness the actual title-clinching game live. For the past two championships, I've been physically present inside the Araneta Coliseum, exchanging high-fives with everyone and anyone in sight, shouting so hard until my lungs explode, and jumping up and down to our (my friends and I) favorite party music/cheer, "Go Ateneo!" I miss the feeling. Or rather, I missed that feeling. And I seem to regret not being there even more because this time and since a loooong time, the second "back" of the back-to-back titles were at stake.

Number two is the Game 2 beatdown. That was the last live game I watched, and it wasn't a pretty good experience being on the short end of a blowout. I can't even remember the last time my college team was run out of the court like that. To top it all off, I missed the post-game mass at school because my friends wanted to eat first, and I frickin' didn't have a car (which is still being repaired, as I speak). After one game, I suddenly transformed into someone I didn't wanted to become - the "fan" who's just there for the team in times of triumph, but abandons ship when the losing begins. Maybe that's a bit too harsh considering I've always been there before only up until that Game 2. But that's what I honestly felt while I was downing a bowl of rice in that Japanese restaurant we were cooped up in.

Then there was the storm that literally and figuratively threw off everything. I mean, seriously, who can celebrate to the fullest when you see that there are still people who are devastated and continue to suffer? Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anyone if they want to have a good time. Just saying that at least on my end, I guess when you become one of the victims it's easier to relate about the plight of other people, and it just becomes harder to find reasons to celebrate. Kudos, though, to all the people who helped and continue to help in the relief operations. Those fucking politicians who constantly rob this country can go to hell. Don't you even fucking dare say that your best interests are for the Filipino people.

I put a photo of Jessica Mendoza above because I think she, too, kind of contributed to this iffy feeling I'm having. Nothing of it is her fault, to make that part clear. But why am I including her in this?

A friend and I were talking about it after the bonfire, and we both agreed that she didn't seem right that night. She looked like she was suffering from a bad hangover. After all, she joined the basketball team the night before in what seemed to be an all-night booze-filled championship celebration.

Also, we agreed that she looked a little bit like a slut with her short shorts, while her female counterpart, Lia Cruz, was more conservative, wearing jeans and a jacket. Of course, when we first saw Je our hormones went crazy, and even went to overdrive after they showed a video of her getting doused by water and champagne. That was awesome, I first thought. But then the night wore on, and all I could remember was her saying to one of her male co-hosts, "Tsaka na, pag nakainom na" (Roughly translated: "Later, when I've had enough to drink"), which hinted of another night with the drunken beauty, Jessica Mendoza. I went home with that thought in mind, not knowing if I should be elated about the discovery that she's a bit of a wild child, or depressed because the smokescreens on her goody-too-cute image just disappeared.

Hell, I don't even know this girl, and suddenly why am I so affected? Maybe after two months, the post-break up effects with my ex-girlfriend of more than 2 years haven't quite subsided yet. Or maybe it's the secret romantic freak in me, whose image of the ideal girl kinda shattered into little shards of glass after a night of partying. Reading this little entry makes me feel pathetic all of a sudden.

I was with some friends last night, and one of them, a female, offered me some unsolicited "advice" about post break up syndromes. Her words of wisdom? "Break ups give you some sort of unspoken right (or license) to go out there and act like total shit. Do anything you want. ANYTHING." Maybe one of these days, I'll try that out. Maybe pick up a girl at a bookstore or a concert (definitely not at a bar). Do something that's crazy and yet something that I wanted to do for so long. Or maybe, I'll get in touch with Jessica and tell her what's on my mind, and then ask her if she has daddy issues.

Most likely though, the do-gooder, scared-to-take-risks persona in me will prevail and every idea I just wrote will turn into ashes. Happens all the time. And after everything I wrote just now, I'm convinced about something. Winning won't make the problems go away. Maybe I should tell every sports franchise about that.

To end, here's a song for Je. Because you know, even after everything, I'd still date her in a heartbeat.

Winning is Everything Thursday

2009-10-08T09:29:00.005+08:00

It's Thursday. A twinbill of do-or-die games are scheduled later at the Araneta Coliseum, with both games involving teams that I deeply give a shit about. Here are some of my Ondoy-like muddy thoughts about them:

Ateneo Blue Eaglets vs. De La Salle-Zobel Junior Archers
Unlike their seniors counterparts, I believe the Eaglets are the less-talented team, but that doesn't automatically make the Archers the one with the deeper set of players. If Boris Aldeguer runs his starters to the ground again, we might have a chance. Or maybe not. I didn't have the luxury to watch Game 2, because for one, the frickin' Balls channel showed it so late. I got home at around 9:30 pm and the women's finals was still on, and it was still just the 2nd quarter. Another reason is that plainly, I don't like watching games when my team loses.

Kiefer Ravena, you are the man. Or kid. Unfortunately, the fate of this team lies in your surreal, beautiful talents. I think Mark Jackson always says this line like a broken record: "Big-time players make big-time plays." The atrocious 6 (or was it 8?) points in Game 2 wouldn't do. Ael Banal is good but probably a notch or two lower than Kiefer's genius. Where Kief goes, this team follows. Heck, he even makes Ice Reyes and Chuckie Dumrique look good.

Kiefer, I know you still have one more year of high school to go and you can just probably mail it in this year, and then take the championship next year. But the greats of the game do not act like that. Whenever there's an opportunity to win, they go out there, grab the opponent by the neck, slam them to the ground and take the gold home. Show us what you're made of.

And to the rest of the team: show these La Sallian dogs what the heart of an Eaglet (or an Ateneo High School-er) is made of.

Ateneo Blue Eagles vs. University of the East Red Warriors
The similarities to the 2006 fiasco (or robbery, whichever term you may want to call it) aren't really there, but there's one now that I just noticed, although this one concerns only myself. In 2006, that fateful deciding game was also held on a Thursday. I was in the office that time, unable to take a leave because a lot of stuff was keeping me busy. This year, it's the same thing. Three years ago, I watched in horror, through a little TV screen with a fuzzy signal in our public relations office, how UST took away what was deemed to be rightfully belonging to Ateneo.

However, that gritty and resilient Tigers team taught me that championships aren't really given as birthrights. I might be feeling the same "this is ours, we own this" type of vibe this season, but memories of that 2006 ghost bring me back to reality. I hope the Blue Eagles especially realize this, too. If not, it's Norman Black's job to make them to.

At breakfast this morning, my dad told me he thinks UE will win it. The reason? They look like they're the hungrier team. I give him a slight nod because I wanted to avoid further debate. I uttered a few curses in my head, and told myself that Ateneo will win this. Still, I wonder whether the Eagles' hunger will be enough to match that of their opponent's. True enough, sometimes the team that wants it the most wins it.

Win or lose (yeah of course, it's the school I choose!), I think I won't be able to go to the post-game mass. The daily commute is already difficult enough without a car, and the weather as of late has been horrible. I badly want to attend, especially if we lose. For me, being with the team during times of hardship gives a consoling feeling. Bandwagoning fans usually dilute that winning feeling by making the whole thing look like a sideshow. So for those who'll be able to make it, cheer the team on for me, and make sure to cheer with gusto, because simply speaking, there is no tomorrow. I also would've wanted my photo taken with uber-cutie Jessica Mendoza and my main man, the graduating Nonoy Baclao. But for now, I will just have to support the team in spirit.

Enough of the armchair analyses, beaches. It's fucking winning time. ONE BIG FIGHT!

Posting Like Mad

2009-10-05T17:47:00.004+08:00

I'm back with an internet connection. Well, I was back as early as Thursday but the recent typhoon just really threw my entire life off the tracks, so I had to busy myself putting it back on the right path. I'm ready to post again.

No, wait, check that. I expect to post like mad in the next few days. I'm frustrated and openly concerned about the ass-whooping that the Blue Eagles received from UE. What they did to us cannot be ignored. For the first time this season, after 13 games, I'm really saying that it's time to get serious and finish the job. No reenactment of that 2006 championship fumble, please. Or else I will be the most depressed man in the world. (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) I want to fucking go Back-To-Black. I'll post a more sober view of the deciding Game 3 in a later post. Pramis.

I've finished the write-up for my personal account of the NBA Asia Challenge, but I couldn't successfully upload some of the videos on youtube because of sucky internet. Once I get those done, even the devil won't be able to stop me crapping on the interwebs with that post.

The typhoon ruined my supposed UAAP finals preview, so bye-bye with that. But I'll be replacing that one with posts from the Smart Gilas National Team vs. Powerade Pilipinas National Team exhibition game, and later in the day, some thoughts on the Blue Eaglets vs. Junior Archers finals series.

Now, I think I've laid out a neat blogging schedule for myself but for two days now, internet at home isn't cooperating. I need my ISP's help and of course, some semblance of blogging responsibility to be able to finish what I set out to do. Anyway, as we Filipinos like to say "Bahala na si Batman."

Let me leave you with some cute girl photos from Game 2 of the UAAP finals, because I like them and love looking at them. I love women, and I'm sure you do, too, so stop hating. And if you think that I'm just on the lookout for chicks and not all about basketball, then you can suck it.

Let's just say that I know this girl and that she's waaaaay hotter in person. Just flat-out hawt.

She's the one who took the photo of the other hot girl above. Dayum. Hot girls just flock together, don't they?

Last but absolutely not least, the cuteness herself, Jessica Mendoza (Ateneo's courtside reporter). Why oh why did we not attend the same batch in college?

Just Another Quick-Hitting Ateneo Blue Eagles Post

2009-09-21T20:02:00.005+08:00

My man Japeth feeling the awesomeness
(Sorry for the thumbnail-like size, darn these photographers, they don't allow people to download the original photos. Sheesh.)

Okay, a week ago I just wrote about one of the greatest games I have ever watched. Yesterday's Final Four match with UST will also go down that list. Another incredible experience, and I feel very lucky and fortunate that Ateneo has been such a superb team these last two years. Some things of interest that make the match qualify for best game ever honors:

Eric Salamat's "steal fiesta" - I've already said he's a joy to watch when he's on, and yesterday he put on a defensive showcase. In the 2nd quarter, there was one stretch where he generated like 4 or 5 straight steals, which is just plain crazy shit. Nobody's allowed to ballhawk that well. I love me some Man of Steal.

Jai Reyes - Nonoy for President (a great site written by hilarious Ateneans, my kind of bloggers) mentions how Jai has proved them wrong about him not being successful in the big college leagues because of his height. Jainamite's floor leadership is at par with the best point guards in the league, and his shooting form and touch is just perfecto mundo.

Stroke of a genius.

Nonoy Baclao - A healthy Nonoy is a beast. Two more games remaining in Noy's college career and already I am feeling that I'll miss him and his defense the most.

Pido Jarencio's coaching - Or lack of. He just didn't have any sort of discernible strategy out there. Well, he's always effective in getting Rabeh Al-Hussaini in foul trouble (helped in part by Rabeh's childish bumbling) but other than that he's wasting the talent of his kids by playing that professional-style one-on-one basketball. Teach the kids some team play, coach. Either way, we're always going to enjoy Coach Norman whipping Coach Pido's ass, if ever Pido still sticks around for next season.

Kirk Long's jets - Seriously, he has this videogame-like turbo button where he just literally flies past everybody down court. It's shocking to see in person.

Dylan Ababou - He's a great talent and I'm both sad and glad that he already played his last game. The Smart Gilas team will need him. Thanks for all the tremendous battles, 'Bou, and good luck in your career.

Being in Fabilioh.com - Haha, this is rather obnoxious, but our pictures in this game are much, much better than our photos when we were sb*ititting courtside. You can find it here, here, here and here (we're always a little hidden at the back, so don't mistake us for the old geezers) plus this one, the best shot we got:

Where am I in this? I'm not freely giving out my true identity, just yet.

As me and my buddies always love to say: WE'RE GOING TO THE FINALS!!! See you there Sunday. Or earlier if I find it in my lazy ass self to write that preview I was planning to.

JMDP Roolz America

2009-09-15T08:42:00.002+08:00

Another non-American emerging? Yes way, tennis has really gone internacionale.

Wow. So another elite challenger to the throne has emerged. I promised before not to sourgrape this time because the person I'm rooting for lost, so congratulations to Juan Martin del Potro for winning the US Open and ending Roger Federer's five straight US Open titles. JMDP had an unbelievable run in this tournament, and is a likeable guy compared to say, one brash Andy Murray who couldn't even make it to the quarterfinals.

Anyway, I have some stuff coming up for this dead-water nook of the webspace. First, I'll be writing my hack, useless preview of the Ateneo Blue Eagles for the finals (yes, I am assuming we will get in despite still having to play the University of Santo Tomas Tigers... blame Pido Jarencio for that one), which I always have fun doing. Fuck the armchair analysts, you'll get all the analysis and whatever shiznit you'll need here.

Also, I figured to have regular features on "non-superstars" or yeah, as the title of this blog suggests, roleplayers, just so I can save face on my shameless out-of-topic sports postings. I'm still deciding on who to feature though. I already have a local athlete in mind, and another one who's from the NBA. Anyway, these all depend on my free time and more importantly, motivation. They need to make a juice or whatever stuff that pumps these motivation levels in your blood.

Since it's the US Open...

2009-09-14T10:40:00.003+08:00

Check out this crazy, crazy shot here. Roger says it's the most amazing shot of his career.

Here's a great read on tennis' best rivalry at the moment, and provides a nice bit of information on how elite an athlete Roger Federer is:

"Roger's a sneaky-hard worker," Cahill said earlier this week. "He gets to the tournament and in practice all he's doing is trying to groove his shots, slap the ball around and hit some different spins. Little do they know, this guy's been grinding away on the back courts somewhere else."

I really like the idea of competition which brings out the best in athletes, how it motivates them to elevate their games. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are unbelievable champions, and the rivalry has been kind of put on hold now because of Rafa's injury and just in, his recent loss to Juan Martin del Potro.

The Argentine is really good and could be trouble. Still, go Roger.

The Greatest Game Ever?

2009-09-07T17:51:00.004+08:00

Couldn't have had a better alma mater.

Could this possibly be the greatest game ever?

That was what my friends and I were talking about during the 3rd quarter of a college game blowout. Our alma mater, the Ateneo de Manila University Blue Eagles, were crushing the life out of the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons. The Blue Eagles were out for vengeance against one of the bottom feeders of the league, who happened to inflict Ateneo's only loss in the tournament a month ago. And boy, has revenge never been anymore ruthless.

It all started with a 14-0 blast to start the game, and some may actually agree with you if you told them that telling run was also the ballgame. The lead further ballooned to 18 points and UP, much respect to their spirit and heart, managed to narrow the gap by 10 points midway in the second.

That proved to be their last gap, as Eric "Eazy-E" Salamat, one of my favorite players to ever don the Blue & White, made lay-up after slashing, crazy yoyo-ing layup, and threw in some three-pointers in what would be a career game of 23 points. I don't know the exact figures, but he threw out a pretty complete game out there with a few rebounds and absolute defensive gems by way of his favorite stat - the steal. "The Man of Steal," as what most Ateneans call him, and it's just a beauty to see his defense unveiling - unbelievably quick hands swiping at the ball with just enough speed to catch an opponent's dribble, and the right amount of skill to get the ball into perfect position to be stolen. Awesomeness. And then Eric flies off into the sunset, leading a one-man break that usually ends in 2 points and-one. I've always marveled at his skill to finish around the rim, and that was in full effect yesterday. What a joy to watch.

Then there was the three-point barrage. I think the team hit about 13 three-point baskets, which just padded on the lead and destroyed UP's collective will. I play basketball and most of the time, when the opponent keeps on hitting those treys, it just breaks your spirit. Jai Reyes maybe had his best game of the season, knocking down 6 huge three-pointers. He just hit from everywhere, and matched UP's shooter, Martin Reyes, 3-point shot for 3-point shot. But Jai only started the party - Eman "The Pocket Rocket" Monfort drilled two, Salamat I think drained two or three more and Ryan Buenafe added another trey at the buzzer as the third quarter ended to officially put the proverbial dagger into the coffin.

Another aspect of one of the best games I've ever watched happened off the court - dancing members of the Blue Babble Battalion, dudes who lead the school in cheering for the team. We have our traditional female cheerleaders, but the Blue Babble guys are the ones leading the gallery on what cheers to shout - literally a cheer leader. Cheer-space-leader, to be sure. There were a few lull moments during the game when the arena just played dance music and there were these two guys, who are mostly known for their dancing and partying routine during games, dancing their asses off and just entertaining the crowd. It was incredibly comedic and enjoyable. My dad I think really had a blast just watching those guys, as they added a nice element to the game.

Yessir, it was one of those awesome days.

But can you call it "the greatest game ever" if someone nearly died? The father of one of UP's veteran guards, Arvin Braganza, suffered from a stroke in the third quarter that temporarily halted the game as Braganza rushed over to the stands to check on his dad. Man, that was a rather horrifying moment. We were seated just a few seats above the guy and the possibility of someone dying during a game is something you never want to see and happen. Arvin's dad seemed okay after a few minutes and was carried off on a stretcher. He recovered from the stroke but after a few hours, suffered another one which led to his passing away. R.I.P., Mr. Agapito Braganza.

Rick Olivares also reported today that it was supposed to be Arvin's wedding tomorrow. That's just really tough on him. The father wanted Arvin to continue the wedding regardless of what happened, so it'll still push through as planned.

Despite all the ruckus, there was something positive that happened on the court when Arvin's dad was getting checked on. Both teams huddled and prayed for the man's safety, and then applauded when Mr. Braganza was able to recover . That was a special moment in sports, if I ever saw one.

Even though it seemed like one, I'd still won't consider that game as the greatest game I've ever watched. That distinction still belongs to Game 3 of the 2002 UAAP Finals. First, it was Ateneo against our archrivals, the De La Salle Green Archers. It's hard to recall everything that happened, but I am sure that during that game, the place was rocking and each space of the arena was literally filled. There wasn't really enough wiggle room anywhere. Best of all, we won that game which eventually ended a long title drought for the school. Epok Quimpo's dagger three just literally blew the roof off of the Ateneo gallery. I was high-fiving anyone in sight, be it my friends or whoever stranger it was, and my buddies and I were jumping and shouting and hugging.

Top of my head, the greatest sports memory that I have. It'll be a tough one to beat, for sure. So... what's the greatest game you've ever watched?

I Think I Like Steve

2009-09-06T19:49:00.003+08:00

Luckyyyy.

Not in a homosexual way, of course, but just the fact that Steve Nass an overall good guy and a tremendous ambassador to the game of basketball. It was in the news a few weeks ago that he played pick-up basketball in China, but an article from ESPN actually tells us a little bit of the story on what really happened when Nash took the famed Dong Dan Park in Beijing. Man, did those kids have the time of their basketball lives, getting to play ball with an NBA MVP.

Ric Bucher already talks about the building bridges and breaking barriers stuff in the article, but the thing that I really like about what Nash is summed up in this line, which also happens to be the very first sentence of the entire writeup: "Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash is a hoops junkie first and a two-time NBA MVP second." It's a beautiful quality that has been overrun by capitalism in basketball, with the sport generating so much money that those business types and suits can actually be blamed for some of the players losing their true love for the game. That true love is often expressed in a very primal and old-school way through pick-up games, either in your backyard or the basketball court just down the street. Guys having fun, playing freely and without a care in the world. This is how they learn to love the game, and in Nash's case, this is what reminds him of why he is where he is in the first place.

I know that the business side of the league forbids players from just playing whenever and wherever they like, and it's very reasonable since injuries and other accidents may occur that can jeopardize not only a franchise's chances of success, but it's revenue stream. Still, there's nothing that can compare to the experience of just playing basketball for basketball's sake. If you can't appreciate what Nash did then you're a prick who pretends to love basketball.

Now, if only a current NBA superstar will come here to my country and do the same thing...

So Much Happening In So Little Time

2009-08-19T08:09:00.003+08:00

So it's been ages since I last updated. Sue me. Anyway, there have been a lot of stuff going on in the past few days that I'm shamelessly using as excuses to not write. Here are some that I can remember:

1) Just got back from a 3-week trip to the United States. More of sightseeing in the West Coast and meeting relatives. Had the trip of my life, so far. Hopefully future visits will yield the same, if not better, results. I will probably try to post some entries of my trip here or a FanShot at Pounding The Rock.

2) I am only taking up one subject for my Masters degree, and it's killing me. Midterms are in 3 days and I fucking haven't done anything. Read a bit while on vacation, but whatever I read didn't really stick to my brain. I am screwed.

3) I'm looking for very important receipts that I seem to have misplaced. Okay, LOST. One is the claim stub to repair my printer. It's been in the shop for over a month now. The other are receipts for an outing that my organization hosted. These are very, very important. I cannot stress further how fucked up I will be if I can't find them.

4) An email I sent to a quite popular Filipino sports blogger got posted in his website. Cool. It's about baseball though, and my idiocy in that sport. But hey, I'm learning. Check the post here.

5) I broke up with my girlfriend of almost 3 years. Yup, just a few days before I left for my trip. Things happen, I know. It's not cool to be me right now, but like every thing else, it shall come to pass. Hopefully.

I should write more often then. Yeah, I think I'm gonna do just that. But I have to study first. Or at least try to.

It's R-J, Beeyotch.

2009-06-24T11:41:00.004+08:00

Well, there goes the first big move of the offseason. And uncharacteristically, it is headlined by the media-loathed San Antonio Spurs, which of course, happens to be the team that I love (yes, that's pure, unadulterated love). Around this time last year, I posted something about hoping that the Spurs acquire Corey Maggette, and we all know what happened to that one. Now, this happens. It's awesome from a basketball standpoint, but from a business perspective, I don't know. I'll leave the discussion up to the experts, I guess (and no, it's not ESPN but the geniuses over at PtR, thank you).

At the least, it puts the Spurs back into contention. Thank the FSM, and Pop and RC, too after a poor finish last season. Hopefully, Tim and Manu will be back full strength, Tony won't injure himself playing for the French national team, and we'll get a decent big man to go along with TD. For now, here are some Richard-Fucking-Jefferson photos:

Don't worry RJ, Timmeh and Co. won't be doing this to you no more.

Vicious dunks are what he brings. I wonder if Pop will like that.

RJ laughing at Bruce. "Now you'll know how it feels like to be on a crappy team! Hahaha!!!" (On a side note, Bruce, please come back to San Antonio.)

Whoa mama! Apparently, he's a stud muffin too. Now this could really be the biggest trade of the year.

Looking Dapper, Mr. Federer

2009-06-23T08:15:00.005+08:00

Some photos of Roger Federer's getup at Wimbledon 2009. And also a photo of Maria Sharapova's. This is in NO way turning into a strictly tennis or a fashion blog. On the former, the closeness of the French Open and Wimbledon just make it look like that, I guess.

Ze King haz arrived.

When was the last time someone wore pants to a tennis lawn? That's right, NEVER. (at least in my own tennis history book)

Checking out the new roof in his new digs. Is that a permanently popped collar?

Warm-up hitting in his royal vest and again, pants. It's like prom night at The All-England Club!

Finally, stripped down to much more appropriate playing gear.

I don't know what they call these in fashion speak, but it looks like the tennis equivalent of a strait jacket.

Update: Peter Bodo of tennis.com bashes Federer's fashion sense.

The Maturation Of A Fan

2009-06-18T23:28:00.006+08:00

Just not the deranged, obsessed type, please.

Over at Pounding the Rock, one of the members there, BlaseE, made a comment on a Lakers photo I used that he thought scared people off PtR, which is a San Antonio Spurs blog. Honestly, I didn't find any offense on the comment whatsoever, but it got me reflecting on what made me post the picture in the first place.

First and foremost, I am sure that it wasn't an impulsive decision on my part but rather, I had the thinking that it's also a way of showing respect to the team who won it all (despite the risk of being sacrilegous). Sportsmanship and all that stuff, I guess. Another thing is that maybe I don't hate the Lakers that much, or at least not as much as I loathe KG and the Boston Celtics. It could be because I like Phil Jackson, or I go by the logic that since Kobe Bryant is the closest thing to Michael Jordan, whom I was a big fan of in his Bulls days, I still maintain a sense of respect and awe for the Black Mamba. A third reason could be was that I just really found the picture nice, and an equally good caption was also written below it ("it's not a race, it's a marathon", or something like that) so I deemed it was well-worth sharing.

But the whole comment also made me wonder about how much my fanaticism or fandom or fanhood (whichever is politically correct) has evolved in the last few years. It probably hit a crescendo three or four years ago, wherein I just seemed to be really ticked off and tended to become depressed for several weeks when my favorite team or player lost. I barely monitored the NBA playoffs after the 0.4 debacle or the 4-1 loss to the Lakers in 2008. The highest peak I guess was Roger Federer's Wimbledon 2008 loss in what was deemed as the greatest tennis match ever. I completely stopped watching tennis until thankfully, Federer was able to recover during the US Open, which also helped me to finally stop sulking.

This year's fan experiences, however, have been very different from what I used to encounter in the past. In a nutshell, I think what happened was I just allowed myself to "face the music", so to speak, to not run away when things go south.

The first sign was the Australian Open, where I stuck with Federer to the end, tears and all. I remember saying to myself when Roger was behind that this time, I won't abandon the match like how I turned off the TV when he was down two sets in Wimbledon. The crying bit was moving, and I guess having to kind of go through that ordeal with your tennis idol helped me to reach another level of fandom. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I guess it's creating some sort of solidarity between you and the player. It's not just feeling sorry for him because he lost, but like a friend, I stood there and stayed with him, even if I did not say or do anything to make him feel better. I know it sounds weird but bear with me a bit more.

The next one came in this year's playoffs. The Spurs got booted out early and unceremoniously by the much hated Dallas Mavericks, but this time, I didn't abandon watching the playoffs. Maybe the lowered expectations of the Spurs winning the championship that season helped, but more so, there was also a better understanding of the flawed nature of the team, coupled with a love for the sport which I think I'm beginning to control and harness a lot more than I ever imagined. Just for the simple fact that I love basketball, I found myself contributing game threads to PtR, even if it was time-consuming and the Spurs weren't playing anymore.

Don't mistake this for a lack of hope, though. Indeed, I was probably to the point of being delusional that the Spurs can win it all. I even had a Facebook status rooting for the Spurs and promptly got bashed by my friends, telling me that the Spurs are done. That I'm living in the past and should learn to let go. But I replied to one of my friends, "is it bad to stay loyal to one team?" The thought seemed to rejuvenate me, and helped me realize that again, as with your true friends, no matter the highs and the lows, wherever and whenever trouble arrives, one important aspect of being a fan is to stick to the team or player that you are rooting for. A dose of compassion aside from solidarity, maybe. A feeling that helps you to draw strength from others in times of adversity.

Now that I think about it, when I posted that Lakers photo, it felt painful. At the same time though, it was also a liberating experience. That's why I followed it up with photos showing some Spurs helping Manu to get back on his feet, and Timmy boxing, training in the offseason.

The acceptance of a loss, while painful every single time, can always be countered with a dose of optimism and faith, kind of like what friends offer to other friends in times of trouble. "Don't worry, we'll get 'em next time," or "You'll make it eventually, so just keep at it," are words of encouragement that keep us moving in the worst of times. While they will never hear us saying these words or see us watching and cheering down to the final buzzer, I think that the heart of true fanhood makes it possible for us to connect with our favorite teams or players through unimaginable psychological, mental, and even spiritual ways, allowing us to attain that "oneness" in feeling, even if for just a second or two in sports history. And that, I hope, is what helps us mature a little bit more by the day in the business of being sports fans.

On PJ and the One Ring to RuleThem All

2009-06-15T08:53:00.003+08:00

I think I like this younger Phil than the current Phil who sits on a high chair.

There's a great article over at ESPN.com on Phil Jackson, his quest for that elusive tenth championship ring and how his coaching has evolved to how it is now. Even though a lot of people seem to dislike him because of the arrogance he projects and maybe too, because he's a part of the Los Angeles Lakers, I have a ton of respect for the guy. Unique seems like an ordinary word to describe him, because he's much more than that. I'm a fan of his books - I've read two of them so far - and I guess by reading them you kind of understand why he does the things that he usually does, but above all, you realize that this man is more than just a basketball coach. He'll make a good speaker when he retires, and I hope he comes over to my country someday.

And yeah, even though I'm not feeling the Lakers much, I still hope Phil gets number ten this time around.

The Most EPIC Tennis Assist. Ever.

2009-06-01T00:06:00.007+08:00

Gee, thanks man. I am forever in your debt.

Holy shit. I cannot believe it. Holy, holy, holy mother of clay. Rafael Nadal's four-year reign in the French Open is officially OVER. Pencil it in. Write it in the history books. And don't freakin' forget to include the name of Robin Soderling in it. (as of this writing, Ana Ivanovic also got eliminated)

The whole match, aside from kinda "wishing" Nadal would lose, my mind increasingly wandered to the possibility of the draw opening up for Roger Federer. And I do mean opening up huuuuuge. Novak Djokovic, who is in Federer's bracket, is already out. Now, Rafa. As I texted to a friend, it's as if the tennis gods have finally conspired to set everything up for Roger. Other exceptional contenders are still around like Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Andy Murray, Gael Monfils, and Fernando Verdasco, but I swear on my tennis career (which is, er, not much really) that this is Federer's for the taking. He's not playing up to speed as of late, but I'm sure the news of Rafa's defeat should give him added motivation. Please. If Roger wins, I will never, ever root against Nadal again - whenever he's not playing Federer, of course. Damn. Unbelievable turn of events. Oh, and memo to Fed: if you do manage to win it all, please, take the time to send Soderling something nice for his troubles.

Before I end this entry, I have to give props to Robin Soderling. Matter of fact, I'm honoring his feat by putting his picture on this webspace (which, unfortunately, no one reads). Wow. The guy seriously played out of his mind for more than two hours, and was rewarded handsomely. He also made me understood one way of defeating Rafa, which is to use Nadal's backhand against him to set up points. I never realized Nadal has a hard time putting a lot of pace on his backhand shots whenever forced to that side often. Soderling just peppered that backhand, and Nadal's replies were weak and ready to be blown apart. What a game plan by Soderling and his trainer, Magnus Norman (a former clay court specialist). As I say this, I also realize that Federer will have a hard time pulling off such a strategy because of his one-handed backhand and difficulty with high-bouncing balls. I guess somebody just had to defeat Rafa for Roger. Nice assist. I owe you my tennis fandom, Mr. Soderling. Please, continue to play well in this tournament.

I guess that's sports for you, strange things happen. But at the same time, it's also awesome for anyone who's on that winning side of the upset special. Imagine being written off even before you stepped on the court, and then totally proving the critics wrong (hello, Orlando Magic). I know the day will come when Rog will experience that same kind of ax. Heck, it might even happen tomorrow. Either way, underdogs will always, always have a chance. I love this fact of life.

I was supposed to sleep early but that epic upset kept me awake. I'm off now. Work beckons, but I'm salivating for Federer's chances. Man, oh man, I think it's time to claim that GOAT status.

Time For Some Randomness

2009-05-27T09:29:00.007+08:00

Real men wear pink. 'Nuff said. (weird Rafa in pink rap song here)

I haven't provided any new entries for the last couple of weeks so it's good to be back. Anyway, despite not posting here I've managed to put in some contributions over at Pounding the Rock, which I've thoroughly enjoyed so far and look forward to every time I put up a post. I realize I haven't been able to regularly write about the basketball games that I played in, specifically our company tournament. Well to sum it up, the tournament ended much the same for my team as last year's as we finished the season 0-4. Yeah, it's a 3-team league and we were winless. Bah. But the good thing is, I played pretty decent, if not perhaps my best game, during the last game. I even played center, for chrissake, since our big men went MIA and nobody wanted to bang inside. Next season will be equally tough if we fail to find more good AND smart players, but I guess as a team, we can still improve. Hmmm now if I can only discipline myself enough to practice those jumpers...

NBA playoffs this season has so far been really awesome, and it's a pleasant surprise for me to still be watching the games. The Spurs are gone, yeah, but the basketball world moves on, just as how it continues to tread forward despite the injuries, losses and the like to a lot of teams. Just for the record, I'm rooting so hard against LeBron. I really find the guy (and his teammate Mo Williams) annoying and arrogant. I respect the skills, but man, just go out there and play and stop acting like you've already won a championship. Go Magic. As for the Lakers-Nuggets, I'd prefer Denver but not too much of a Laker-hater either so, I wouldn't mind seeing Kobe in the finals. I just hope they play harder though, and show that they really want to win it all.

Also, tennis has managed to get a lot of my attention these past few days. The French Open just started, so that's going to be great. Rafael Nadal will probably win it all again, but I'm still pulling for my old man, Roger Federer. I'm particularly positive this year about his willingness to use the drop shot. Rog has one of the most exquisite drop shots I've ever seen. The spin that he puts on the ball has so much bite that when it bounces off the surface, the ball really comes off to a different direction. I know most drop shots/slices often do that, but on TV it's hard to notice. Fed's shot isn't. The ball REALLY changes direction, you can see it as clear as day. Incredible. Using the drop shot and perhaps the slice backhand on a more varied and consistent basis should help in keeping Nadal off-balance, which probably might be the only chance to beat the guy. Rafa's defense and consistency's so good, Roger will never win trying to go toe-to-toe with him in long rallies. Oh, and of course, exercising a bit more patience in constructing the points will help too.

Lastly, I have a semifinal basketball game this Saturday, which I hope we win. We're 3-0 in a four-team league, but I still think the team's defense is suspect and that we're susceptible to an upset by any team, any time. Hopefully I can provide a defensive spark (yeah, that's what scrubs like me do) and contribute to the W.

Fight Night Looms Closer

2009-04-23T11:11:00.004+08:00

Trying to work diligently so not much time for the internets lately. Still, here's a piece of Pacquiao-Hatton 24/7, Episode Two to get y'all pumped up for the fight. My dad, brother and I already got our tickets for moviehouse-turned-big pay-per-view event, so it's all good. Also, I love the great lines used in this episode, which you can read on this site. I especially like Ricky Hatton's line: "If someone asked me to write down on a piece of paper how I would like my son to be, I think it would be everything that my son is." Noice. Too bad though, he's going down. Heh.

Weekend Loser Extravaganza

2009-04-20T08:35:00.003+08:00

This is soooo over.
(taken from the Lidell-Evans fight)

As a sports fan, I always look forward to packed sporting events on weekends. This weekend served up six major events.

The festivities kicked off on Saturday, with the first day of the Fil-Oil Preseason Tournament. The three-game schedule included my beloved Ateneo de Manila Blue Eagles going up against archrival De La Salle Green Archers in what was supposed to be the super debut of much sought-after prized La Salle recruit Arvie "The Scholar" Bringas (stupid nickname as stupid as he is for choosing green over blue) but turned out to be a no-show. I'll recap this in another post. We lost by two points. It's just a preseason game and heck, I'm so invested in it already, which sucks.

Sunday was the eagerly-awaited start of the NBA playoffs, and had my favorite team the San Antonio Spurs squaring off against interstate rival the Dallas Mavericks. We got bit by the Barea bug. Spurs lost, which had me rethinking really hard about our chances in this series. You can read both realistic and hopeful analyses over at Pounding the Rock, which is like heaven for me in the internets.

That's two losses. Add to that Chuck Lidell's loss, and Anderson Silva's pathetic win that I count as a loss, and that equals to a quadruple-whammy for me. At least there were saving graces that ultimately cushioned the impact of seemingly unnecessary sports attachment. Thank the FSM for that!

Our proud Filipino boxers, Nonito Donaire and Brian Viloria, knocked out their respective foes. Viloria, especially, managed to redeem himself in the eyes of Filipino fans after a hard-fought performance. Just a few years ago he was being booed for refusing to punch in his two losses, but now he seems back in the mix after beating a quality, quality opponent in Ulises Solis. Hopefully they can keep it up so the Pac-Man won't have to deal with too much publicity and gossip here in the country.

So there, I guess the sporting gods won't allow me to go 0 for 6. Plus, my friends and I got to visit our friend-turned-Jesuit yesterday, hung around, just talking about crazy stuff and got to have some good clean fun. Attaching the words good and clean in any activity is always good. Until the next big sporting weekend then.

Superfights are Baaaack!

2009-04-15T12:30:00.004+08:00

This is the first of four episodes of the HBO 24/7 promotional series for the Manny Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton bout on May 2. I love how these episodes are made, and it really does a good job promoting the fight's protagonists.

It's gonna be a barn-burner, and at least a temporary relief for me after the Ginobili injury. I just hope Manny gives Hatton and that smart-mouthed mofo Floyd Sr. a serious beatdown. Let's go Pac!

Pacquiao - Hatton 24/7: Episode 1

Role Player's Basketball Diary #2

2009-04-14T08:47:00.008+08:00

One of my three three-pointers during the championship game, circa 2007. Bragging time.

It's kind of weird to have this website as a roleplayer's blog, and only have the second "diary entry" after almost two dozen or so previous posts (in all fairness though, I have some diary-like posts that just aren't numbered/titled accordingly). But basketball-playing season is back again and I plan to chronicle my adventures for the next few weeks or so (time and motivation permitting).

Just to give a background on this year, our team didn't join the 2009 Ateneo Basketball League Season mostly due to I think the absence of our main Batch League organizer, who I heard has migrated to greener pastures. So without that, I was left without any basketball practice for a considerable amount of time, and managed to get probably only 4 or 5 pickup games (in a span of two days) since the MAAI tournament last year. Wow, that's a long layoff, indeed.

The only tournament that I'm probably going to play in this year is, of course, the company tournament which stands as the most convenient as well. This tourney only has three teams (yeah, we're like only about 140 employees, most of them either women or geeks that play zero sports) so it's not really a good venue to hone one's skills. There are a few good players while the others have extremely low basketball IQs. I'm not kidding. You might call me a humbug for that but I'll explain my point in a bit.

The tournament began last night and my team (White) played the Green team, the dominant team in our league for the past 3 years that I've been working here. For about the five games we've played them for the past two seasons, we lost 3 by a pretty awful margin, played them close for one game (the championship game during my 1st season) and then beat them once, when they decided to sellout the game to prevent the other team from making the championship game. So you can probably tell that going into tonight's match-up, our team wasn't too enthused about the idea to play them in our first game.

I won't recap the entire game here, and just probably summarize it by saying we fought them close for three quarters and then lost steam in the payoff period. However, on the way home, the game managed to get me thinking a lot about not only that particular game, but in general, the game of basketball.

1) The importance of fundamental basketball, while often noted as lacking in today's generation of basketball players, is still massively understated and misunderstood.

I think "fundamental basketball" is not only defined by the proper mechanics (i.e. how to correctly dribble the ball, shoot the jump shot, great footwork, etc.) but also having that correct mindset when playing. A lot of old-school guys often blame the promotion of superstars and big-time scorers as culprits for today's generation of players with scoring mindsets, and that merits a lot of consideration (Hello MJ!). But I also feel that, while most players get to develop their skills early on by practicing alone or through random scrimmages, a lot of players don't get to be a part of real team basketball that helps shape a player's mind to the team concept.

Even though I'm about the 10-12th man in our ABL team, I get to experience what it's like to play with or against a good, disciplined team and that helps me tremendously. Often, our team captain/coach (who used to be a team captain in the high school big league ranks) preaches a lot of fundamental stuff like using fake passes, rotating the ball, perpetually moving without the ball (but with a purpose, and not just mindless movement), setting screens for teammates, staying calm when you have the ball in your hands, playing defense with your feet and not your hands, and all those things that help make you a better player every single game. For a limited player such as I, I try to soak up everything because I know that by following these precepts, I'll be able to earn a few minutes of burn on the court and develop my game as well.

For the White team, most of our players are -- dare i say it? -- fundamentally flawed athletes. One of the simple things that you expect a decent basketball player to understand is to share the basketball, and we did that surprisingly well for three quarters. We kept the defense guessing, and we got off good shots, along with some nice penetration by our guards, hot outside shooting and ball-hawking defense.

But we came apart in the fourth quarter when our players, maybe because of fatigue, regressed to their old habits. One of our point guards kept on driving the lane, got swarmed everytime by 3 defenders and still forced the damn shot! Another guard played like a blackhole or a racehorse with 12-inch blinders, always looking to score or shoot whenever he got the ball (and for that, he got blocked I think four times, at least). And we had another player who seemed to panic every time he touched the ball, dribbling it down court when he had zero handles, and took pointless long jump shots when the lane was so open.

On defense, our players kept on reaching in for the ball even if the opponent already secured the defensive rebound, and that kept us from getting back on defense to prevent the fast-break. Indeed, the blowout began when we left the other team so wide-open for fast breaks and they made a ton of layups. Also, one of our centers kept on biting on ball fakes and went up after every shot to block it, thus conceding the lane to cutters who easily received drop passes underneath for the score. The other forwards were too ignorant to rotate to cover the center's back, so that alternative also wasn't on the table.

The mistakes sound so glaring despite us being in the game for 30 out of 40 minutes, and I guess because they really are. It wouldn't surprise me to see a dropoff in our performance the next game, but I'm also hoping that I can witness again those 30 minutes of good, fluid team basketball.

On another, but still related note, that's why I love the Spurs so much. I mean, it's just pure joy to watch fundamentally sound basketball, with The Big Fundamental leading the way.

2) I am someone who loves the game so much, but is very limited to excel in it.

I know I'm not the only one in this earth who feels this way, but I like to reflect on this particular point after every game. A list of my limitations would contain these:

- Small hands. This limitation makes it tough for me to handle the ball well and hold the ball while driving and make (and finish) a decent layup in traffic

- Height. Of course, you cannot teach height! I'm 5'7", probably 5'8" when I got my back straight (I have a mild scoliosis I developed from high school because of a heavy backpack that I lugged around for four years)

- Motor. I don't know if I understood this concept correctly, but I don't commit myself fully to the game when I play. I sometimes play half-heartedly through possessions, and lose interest at times when I get tired, which moves me to...

- Poor stamina. I get tired easily. I've been going to the gym for a few months now so I think it has helped a lot, but still, I'm not your typical workhorse who can play 40 minutes on 5th gear.

- Handle. I am adept at using my right hand. My off-hand? Nah... not so much. When I do a crossover, I usually turn the ball over. A few months ago, I started developing my left hand but the busyness of life cut that one short. Guess I'm back to zero again.

So that list, and let me see how my strengths match up:

- Shooting. I think I have a fundamentally sound stroke that I developed while shadow-shooting most of the time. Sometimes, I fade while taking my jump shot but I'm aware that I need to correct it. It's just a matter of taking a lot of shots in practice in order to increase my percentage.

- Roleplayer mindset. Hence, the blog name. My high school classmates liked to call me "Steve", in memory of Steve Kerr because they said I was the best shooter in class and I had a nice-looking follow-through in my shot. But I liked the Steve Kerr monicker more for Kerr's admittance in knowing his role within those great Bulls and Spurs championship teams. He was always ready when called upon, and stayed within his limits.

- Basketball IQ. Again, my high school buddies said that I had a high one. I don't think so. But still, I'll just put it here.

Those are the only strengths I can think about, so basically, that explains my limitedness but also shows the areas that I can work on to improve. Now, motivation... where are you?

3) Is it worth pursuing a career in the local basketball industry?

Despite being in my mid-20s, I can honestly admit that I haven't really found my true calling in life, or at least the job that I'm made for. And I can honestly admit that I only find interest in a few other things, which effectively limits my options in finding a career that I want to pursue (this might also be a positive, in that I don't have to look too far or be confused with so many options).

Getting older has really forced me to think about my future. I mean, I have a decent job that pays me fairly better than the others, and I'm cool with just staying the course. But am I to fall in that trap of convenience, where billions of people prefer to succumb to? As one matures, you can easily spot people that are just lumbering through every single day of their lives, not happy with work but preferring to stick to it because it pays the bills. In a crowd, there are probably only less than ten people that are truly happy about what they are doing. It's a sad sight, but it definitely is real.

Basketball belongs to the privileged list of the things that I am passionate (even if secretly) about, and someday I would like to be actively involved in the sport here in the Philippines. But there are some fundamental questions about it, particularly, is there money in it, especially if you'll be coming from a team staff standpoint? Is there room for progression and promotion? This country is batshit-crazy about the sport, and I think there will always be a lot of opportunity. But I have a totally unrelated degree, and my folks might frown at the idea of me taking a pay cut just to pursue what I like.

I've been reading a lot of basketball books lately (I'll discuss those in a separate post), and I find myself being able to connect to the backstories of coaches and assistant coaches. The successful ones indeed pay their dues. Phil Jackson labored over the CBA and the Puerto Rican league for quite a number of years before getting called up in the NBA. Mike Brown and a lot of other coaches started as a video coordinator. Sometimes I feel like God won't be giving me any easy passes to success (unlike some other people that often get lucky and succeed early), so I really have to work and put the requisite time in to get what I want. I've told myself that I won't rush things, and work up the chain carefully and patiently, even if it means it'll take me some time compared to my peers. I hope to be just like Phil, Mike and all the others who started from the bottom and got there through a lot of sweat and blood.

So what now for this potential career? I'll really think it over, and if I do decide to enter I'm planning to be an assistant to someone coaching a kids' team, which might entail becoming a teacher in a school where there's that little league team.

Just thinking about that possibility makes me thrilled. I guess it would be really something if you get into doing the thing that you really like. I intend to not fall into the career trap so many people have surrendered to. We'll see.

Surviving the Fantasy

2009-03-30T15:05:00.005+08:00

This is uh, say it with me now... Aaaawwk-ward! (But hey, at least the dude's Asian)

Let's see here... after almost six years of joining fantasy basketball leagues, here's what my trophy case looks like:

2 Championships
3 Second-Place titles
1 Third-Place title

So that's like six titles in six years, which roughly amounts to a title per year ratio. Not bad, considering that I've joined some bad-ass, tough-as-nails leagues (okay, I did join a few JV ones where users didn't even bother fixing their lineups). In case you're wondering, I usually join about 2 to 3 leagues a season, and my yahoo profile shows I've joined a total of 13 Yahoo fantasy basketball leagues.

This year however, I'm a part of only two leagues. In one, I barely made it to the head-to-head playoffs as the sixth and last seed, while on the other, I almost made it - falling into the consolation bracket as a result of my seventh seed. It's a pretty tough year for fantasy today, but I'll be happy if I manage to snag at least a minor title. Hey, if you think upsets are a plenty at NCAA tournaments, wait'll you see the upsets in fantasy leagues where 1 vs 8 isn't such a sure thing.

Fantasy talk got you all bored, huh? Actually the thought of writing about it kind of made me iffy, but hell, maybe I wanted to also understand, even if for a bit, this love for numbers that can ultimately diminish the real value of the game of basketball (that's a slur against those who don't fully appreciate and understand the game, in case you didn't notice). In a nutshell, fantasy basketball might probably be for the stat geeks who aren't geeky enough (read: smart enough) to appreciate the value of statistics beyond what appears on paper. Sounds confusing? Read on and I hope to confuse you even more.

I think there are really just two kinds of fantasy basketball (FB --- sooo NOT facebook) users - the stat-surface guys and the "effort" players. No, these aren't assistant coaching or off-the-bench positions, but rather the demeanor of FB players.

Stat-surface players are usually those who just look over the game logs, game averages, and all the easy-to-view-and-use statistics that are shoved right in front of their faces. These guys probably worship Rick Kamla or their neighborhood fantasy freak, and get easily tricked by incredibly good-looking but ultimately deceiving stats. Case in point: Allen Iverson. In his fantasy prime, AI was an awesome player - scores a bunch of points, hands out dimes and gets steals. But I know people into FB who have never ever gotten AI in their team. For all his good stats, they almost all get canceled by the bad - volume shooter (equals low FG%), turnover machine (thereby canceling out the steals), and horrible at rebounds and blocks. Okay, you get the picture.

So does that mean anyone who can see through this belongs to the second group, the "effort" players? Not really. Most people (like yours truly) are probably stuck inside the first category. You see, stat-surface guys almost always base their decisions not just on obvious stats but also through a little intuition. The effort guys are the ones who really take time to research and monitor their lineups and the league as if they were shares of stock and their life savings depended on it. For instance, I knew someone who joined a league wherein you only get to change your lineups ONCE a week, in this case, Mondays. What he did was to get all the games of his players, laid it out on an electronic spreadsheet and organized it in such a way that you can tell who has the most games in a certain week. But he didn't stop there. He carefully filtered the games, particularly how many Home vs. Away games his players had. He probably dug in deeper than that but I didn't bother to hear the story. He said it himself - it was just too much effort.

I also had a friend who monitored developments in the league 24/7, and was ALWAYS the first player to make moves or pickup players whenever injuries or trades happened. Dude was consistently on the prowl. That's as simple a categorization of FB players that I can think of. There are probably others, like gamblers vs. the casual players, or whatever category you can imagine.

But how about the geeky part? The John Hollingers and Daryl Moreys of the world are people who are always looking to objectify things, and as such use stats to measure the value of players. Their geekiness allows them to create various formulas such as Player Efficiency Rating (PER) or "+/-" (plus-minus) to kind of "sanitize" or filter the surface-level statistics and make it more accurate, so to speak. Yay, first-rate nerds they are.

If you're not in this class, you're probably just another FB player who appreciates stats for the way it boosts your team's standings in whatever fantasy league you're in. But hey, that's where the fun comes from, right? I mean if you use Hollinger's PER then you'd probably pick Mareese Speights over Derrick Rose because the former has the darned highest PER among rookies. You'd also probably lose that league before it even starts if you do that.

For regular FB dudes, there's a certain joy seeing D-Wade score 40 points in consecutive games despite having a gazillion turnovers, or that awesome feeling of having picked up a sleeper like John Salmons (while saying eff you to the competition). After all, fantasy basketball is as it's namesake suggests it to be - unreal yet not too difficult to understand and get addicted to.

*Postscript:
I realize that there is hardly, if any, cohesion or unity in this entry. Pardon the mess, the topic's about freakin' fantasy basketball!

Crying Time

2009-03-23T08:45:00.005+08:00

"Crying?" the NBA great said in response to a reporter's question. "I'm not crying. Not for me, anyway."

Alright, so the Spurs lost two in a row now to some playoff-bound super powers, most notably the second game to the Rockets and subsequently ceding the West's second seed to Houston. I'm feeling slightly depressed and sad again, but I'm just trying to think positive and view all of these as part of Pop's plan. He's like God in that way you know, where every Spurs loss is probably pre-ordained by the great Popovich. Right.

Anyway, I got to the office really early and to wash away the bad taste of losses, I'd like to share two articles that I found quite interesting. The other is basketball-related while the other isn't (to hell with this basketball-themed site, for now).

1. MJ, the REAL Superman, is becoming more and more human.

Of course, this includes his General Manager blunders. But an article in Rivals.com (courtesy of Yahoo) reports how His Airness cried when his son, Marcus, won a high school state championship. While little Marcus and Jeff might never live to surpass their father's achievements, it's good to hear that they're still having some sucess in the sport. Also, we all love a feel-good story, especially if it involves MJ, who hasn't quite gotten things to go his way since taking over for the Bobs. Although I must say, I'm rooting for Charlotte to get to the playoffs. But I digress.

2. Bruce Willis weds supermodel girlfriend.

I'm not even gonna post the link/s to this one. There are a bazillion of them. Hello Google. I just want to vent out that life is unfair. So what I did to ease the pain was, I surfed across the web and managed to come across pictures of Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush painting the town whatever color your head thinks of when you hear the words "Kim Kardashian." Hmm.

And now I shall work. It's a freakin' Monday.

Change Has Come... to this Site

2009-03-20T09:23:00.002+08:00

Alright, not quite Obama-like and the degree of change is not as huge as the program to fight global economic crisis. I just made a few changes to this "blog" (I hate calling it a blog... I like to view it as my own WEBSITE), which I will briefly summarize through the following points:

1. Profile pic removed

Alright, I kinda removed my geeky profile pic (I was a Naruto freak during the time I put this one up, and was so enamored with Itachi and his coolness) in favor of a no pic at all. But seriously though, I contemplated putting up my own photo and was just stopped from doing so by the value of maintaining your anonymity in blogospheres. Yes, I do have a willingness to finally launch this site for public consumption (more on this in a bit) but I still want to keep that distance from my readers, which right now, number about zero to five. Maybe I'll put up a Charlie Villanueva pic soon just because he's become famous now for twittering and hopefully it'll get me a few more hits.

2. Links to your right

In my other, more personal blog, I had some links posted but since this is the one that I'm regularly updating nowadays, I decided it was best to add some more stuff to it like links and all that tech crap. If people are gonna view this site, I want to do my best to promote my other sites (personal fave is my lyrics, LSS blog) and also the blogs of other people I know of and I want to promote. It's all part of being public property right now, which leads me to...

3. Ad-Sense

Hah! As if I'm going to earn any because of it. Still, I put it up with the dreams of someday becoming a professional blogger and many people always checking back to this site, allowing me to pay the bills while not slaving over 8-hour, five-day work weeks. Like the Spurs winning back-to-back championships, this remains a pipe dream.

4. Personal updates

Who the fuck cares about my life, right? Well I do so allow me to share a few updates on my secret but super duper interesting life. First, I got one of my works published for the second time this year (and probably the second time in my life EVER) in the March 2009 issue of Gadgets Magazine. Pretty awesome, huh? Especially since it's about real estate outlook booya! Okay, a little geeky but an achievement is still an achievement. Now if only that darn magazine will pay me soon...
Second, I got accepted at writers.ph as a freelancer, but I'm not feeling too jiggy wit dat because when I looked at the available writing topics, they were just flat out not in my best interest. Who the hell would want to write about statistics anyway? Oh yeah, John Hollinger maybe, but not me. There are about 200+ jobs available there, so maybe I'll skim the site a bit more and find something to write about. I need the extra income badly because my full-time job doesn't compensate me enough for my superb talents. Yes, I am one of the gazillion people in the world who keep on mouthing off that they're "underpaid".

I guess in four basic points, that's it. That didn't blow my mind at all, and I hope yours didn't get blown (TWSS!) as well. Whoopee. Role players are supposed to be underwhelming and all that low-key shit, right? Anyway, I'm off to the province this weekend. I hope to tweet, I mean... update soon.

Word Up

2009-03-13T11:38:00.000+08:00

"H" is for Hainanese you f-tard. I don't know why the cockamamie word reminds me of Big Bird. Stupid me, it must be the first syllable, you green-minded fool.

"It’s just a cockamamie rule. It’s a rule (that) has some sense in it, but doesn’t stand up all the time. It just doesn’t."

- Phil Jackson, on Lamar Odom's suspension after leaving the bench during the Lakers-Rockets game last March 11, 2009

The Princeton University website defines the word cockamamie as "ludicrous, foolish". Wow, PJ is really some smart dude. Either that or he's a smart-ass show-off. I mean, who uses cockamamie as part of his everyday language? But I do think that the word is cool, so I might use it some time during my random writings. It's like a cross between a cuss word and a chicken, I'm not sure, but it'll probably feel good using it to mock someone or something, just like what Phil did.

Anyway, I might be writing just to ease the pain of the Lakers beating the Spurs at the AT&T. Oh well, so much for peaking just in time for the playoffs. Manu, come back. We need you. I need you.

P.S. On a side note, check out GTAS comics' latest offering. This might just be the best one yet, and it's actually a compliment to Shaq's entertainment value.

Having A Heart For The Game

2009-02-20T15:40:00.002+08:00

Just a feel-good story about basketball not just being a competitive sport but also about life - how it has helped people, especially kids, in becoming better persons.

Read the article here. Awesome stuff.

I remember Chris Paul's game where his grandfather died before the game, and he gave his grandpa a tribute by scoring as many points as his grandfather's age. He made the last point in a dramatic scene - fouled and about to shoot two free throws, he made the first one that put him at the same mark of the age, and then intentionally missed the second, walked away, crying.

I mean, that story was also incredible the first time I heard it, but when you think how CP3 has been acting like an a-hole at times in the NBA (constantly complaining, flopping and then acting as if he was totally abused, whining and acting like he's better than his coach), you'd think he's not as classy as the media projects him to be (the media determines who the stars are, right). Sure, that scoring tribute was cool and all, but maybe it's still a little bit too over-the-top and showy when you can just simply win the damn game and dedicate that to your loved ones.

Anyway, I hope any basketball player can pick up something good from the story of that one high school basketball game.

The R in R. Nadal Stands For Respect

2009-02-01T22:32:00.000+08:00

I never thought I'd put Rafa on a pedestal, but here it is. Much deserved props to him.

It's exactly 10:30 in the evening and I should be sleeping, considering that it's a Sunday and the work week begins anew the following day. But I'm feeling a bit too depressed to sleep right now. Roger Federer lost again to Rafael Nadal, this time in a new turf - hard courts - and it was absolutely crushing for Federer, to say the least.

I remained silent since Rafa won the last point, texting a couple of people who've been watching the incredible tennis match. I was thinking to myself that any more of these all-too riveting and heart-stopping sports showcases and it would likely give me a heart attack sooner before I reach 60 or 80 years old.

The loss also left me crushed, because I expected too much from this day with regards to the teams or players that I root for in different sports disciplines. The San Antonio Spurs won big at home against division rivals the New Orleans Hornets. French-Canadian Georges St. Pierre gave B.J. Penn a serious ass-whoopin' in UFC 94. So that set the stage for me looking ahead to a Federer win and finally tying Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. I was feeling good. But with all things in life, you get your hopes up a bit too much, but don't get the result that you were looking for, and then things just come crashing down. It was not just a little pill - it's actually a huge, bitter pill that's rough on the edges - and I had to swallow it because I thought ahead too much.

Rooting for a side in sports can both be tremendously exhilarating and dejecting, and many sports fans the world over will probably agree with me on this one. The feeling of winning can spin someone up into a frenzy, making your heart race like it's on crack and you feel almost every inch of your team's win even though they don't know who the hell you are and you weren't even in the place and time when the winning moment happened.

As for me, I've noticed some of the habits I've acquired from the few years when my favorite teams or players won or lost. I sleep better when my team wins. I read every article that I can find on the web or in the papers about the wins, and relive the moment thinking, "Man, that was unbelievable." Even days after the victories, I read back on them, savor them as if they were my own personal milestones in life. You can say that I'm a little obssessed with my teams winning. Maybe, I'm too obsessed that when they lose, it's like I played a huge risk that didn't pay off and I crash and burn into a depressed state.

I don't take losses that badly when I'm the one playing, as opposed to watching my favorite teams fail. During pick-up basketball games, there are moments on the court when I find myself running and thinking at the same time, that if my team loses, heck, it's alright. I'll feel a bit bad about losing, but I immediately say to myself, damn, this is just a fucking pick-up game. But I noticed that even when something's at stake, I still don't feel quite the same dedication to my own efforts as I do when I root for someone.

Once, we got to the finals of a league that my high school friends joined in, and for us, it was such a big moment and we wanted to win badly. Back in high school, the closest that we ever got during intramurals was to the semifinals or final four, and that happened only once. Then, a few years later, we found ourselves in the last dance, with the title within reach and our hoop dreams close to becoming a reality. We've dreamed about winning a title, any title for that matter, so as to be able to know what it feels like to win the whole thing.

We ended up losing. It was a close match, and it was a battle. One of our top three players failed to make it in time (he got caught in traffic, somewhere far away), but I can say that we still gave the other team a heck of a fight.

The team's tradition after every game, win or lose, was to pray. Our sort of team manager/player led us in that solemn moment, and he was sobbing intensely as he spoke. He was the only one who cried so obviously it meant a lot to him, but our team captain was pissed off as well, since it was his brother who failed to show up, thinking that if he did, we could've gotten a much better chance to win the championship.

I've been stuck at the deep end of the bench for the last three games because quite frankly, I suck as a player. Maybe that contributed to me not feeling so miserable after the loss, since I was detached and didn't get to play in a winner-take-all atmosphere. But I didn't really wallowed over playing time, and I was really happy for the team for having made it that far. Still, things didn't quite hurt as much as being a spectator on the losing end of a game.

When the Spurs lost to the Lakers in last year's playoffs, when the New England Patriots squandered their perfect regular season to the New York Giants during the Super Bowl, and when Nadal took Federer's Wimbledon crown in an epic, I completely detached myself from each and every single article related to those outcomes. A personal media blackout, as one might call it that. I wanted to think of other things, and whenever the losses pop up in my head, I try to go to sleep and hope the sinking feeling goes away.

Such is the predicament of sports fanaticism. Winning is like a drug in the likes of Prozac, addicting and makes you feel all levels of happiness. Losing is like giving your heart out to someone you love and then some evil force grabs it with his entire fist, crushing it so hard that it becomes a lifeless little pulp. During these losses, I blame myself for rooting too much, for committing and getting in too deep. Sounds a lot like love, doesn't it?

I guess it IS love, probably in another one of its gazillion forms. Loving someone you haven't even met or talked to in person can be the craziest thing, but sports allows us to do just that. We stalk our favorite players and teams, fascinated not only with their play but how they live their life, what kind of person they are, their eating habits, their family backgrounds - did they grow up in the projects or born with a silver spoon in their mouths? - their personal triumphs and miscues, even how they look when they get up from bed in the morning (okay that last one may be too fanatical and homo-erotic). We like being fed with all sorts of information about our heroes, and we suck it all up and love them with such unbridled passion.

Tonight, Roger Federer lost to the best tennis player in the world. I admit that I bailed out on Roger in Wimbledon last year, turning off the telly after he got down two sets to love, and went to sleep to forget my impending sorrow (and it was a Sunday, already approaching 12 midnight after all, so I really had to sleep). When I woke up, I got a text message from a friend saying it was the greatest tennis match she had ever seen and that she was so happy. She was a Nadal fan. And she didn't even have to mention the result for me to know who came out on top. I knew I missed the best tennis game ever, but who cares if you were on the losing side of that match? At that time, I felt even more down than I've ever experienced.

This time, I stuck it out to the end with my tennis idol. I watched as Nadal stuck a dagger once more into Roger's heart and psyche. Right after that last point ended, the cameras focused quickly on Roger, and I felt his pain. He needed this one, and he lost it, fair and square. I felt scared at the same time, because I wondered if he can ever beat his rival again.

If I'm ever going to be considered as one of the true and loyal Federer fans, I had to make it up to him by being there for him until the end, and so I watched even the awarding ceremonies. When Roger was called up for the obligatory speech, I knew that something had to give, and it happened. Hearing him say with a bit of anger and frustration, "God, this is killing me," then proceeding to fight back tears and eventually all the bottled up disappointment bursting like a dam, he cried like a man who lost something that resembled closely the meaning of life itself. I just stared at the television set. I wanted to cry too, even though I knew it wouldn't make him feel any better and not that he'd even know it or care about it. He was, in some aspect, one of my heroes in life. And when you see your hero falter, it sucks the life out of you. It was that crazy.

While all the crying was going on, my friend the Nadal fanatic, chimed in with a text message, saying he felt sorry too, for Federer. I replied back that it was alright, and the whole thing inevitably had to demonstrate one of the purest facts in sports - there's a winner, and then there's a loser - every single time.

I felt a little bit of relief and reprieve when I said that. Maybe having had to endure the motions, of toughing it out to congratulate the winner and genuinely feel good for him about it, helped much more than I expected. The ups and downs of being a spectator in sports is so uncontrollable that perhaps the only way to stem the wave of emotion is to learn how to be gracious and accepting in defeat, which, I must say, has been very difficult for me to learn.

When someone breaks up with you, you feel sad, depressed, frustrated, as if you lost a critical game in the playground of life. But at the point when we learn to accept the breakup and you appreciate it for the experiences you have gained and learned, we are able to move on.

Similar to sports, losing in the course of our lives hurts, but it doesn't last. Establishing and maintaining a level of emotion to absorb and be saddened at a loss but at the same time, be respectful for the one who is on the other side, is as challenging as say, being immediately happy for your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend the day he/she broke up with you. As human beings, it is natural to be overwhelmed by emotion on the outset, but running away or throwing a fit isn't the way to get over the emotional hurdle.

Finally having the guts to watch the ceremony initially had me thinking that I was torturing myself some more. But watching Rafa lift up the winner's trophy, I knew I had come to, even if for just a bit, learn a sense of respect and deeper love for sports, more than I ever imagined. I felt a little more at peace, not just because sports makes you see how it brings out the best in athletes, but how sports also brings out the best in fans - that if you can learn how to love during the best of times, you can also learn how to love during the worst of times.

Lastly, I dug up one of the prayers that we had back in school that had the simple title of "The Athlete's Prayer." I guess in a nutshell, it sums up not only what an athlete should strive for, but also what a fan is supposed to be. I hope that many other fans can find solace in it, and from time to time, when losses seem too unbearable to handle, they can be comforted with this prayer, just as how God comforts us when we stumble in life.

The Athlete's Prayer

Lord, in the battle that goes on through life
I ask but a field that is fair
A chance that is equal with all in strife,
And courage to strive and to dare.
And if I should win,
let it be by the code,
With my faith and honor held high;
And if I should lose,
let me stand by the road
And cheer as the winner goes by.

The Greatest E-vah

2009-01-29T16:28:00.000+08:00

You better recognize one of the greats, foo'.

I got this nice quote from PtR, and I found it really cool despite the threat of sounding too cocky or arrogant:

Unbidden, Floyd Mayweather Sr. will tell you how good he is as a trainer. It doesn't hurt that he trains Oscar De La Hoya, but even if he were prepping a palooka, Mayweather would boast.

"I am the greatest trainer of all time," he said Thursday. "That's this time, that time, full time, part time and all time."

Sounds like Muhammad Ali, but only in the trainer profession. But still, it's something that could've been used in a Fight Night game and one that you can taunt your opponents with, if you were playing a pick-up game of basketball. Very nice.

Isn't It Too Early For A "Where Are They Now?" Article?

2009-01-22T15:52:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time, these guys were seen to vie for the title of the next Great White Hope.

Maybe if I had real, live readers, I'd get chastised for posting links to great pieces of writing instead of writing my own content. But heck, I know I can write a bit than most but at the same time, I'm not even half the talent of sportswriters who've been in the business in like, forever. I can probably outduel some Filipino writers (although I'd certainly lose the X's and O's aspect and the fact-geek style of Quinito Henson), but the international ones? God, I'll be butchered. My best example of a master class sports feature, which I always refer to, is the one I read in The New York Times, regarding Roger Federer. I don't have the link with me now, but just google "Federer as Religious Experience", and it should come out clean and ready to go. If someone in this world writes better than that, please, give me his name and his works.

I just came across a good read in Sports Illustrated, which kinda gives an update on Adam "the 'Stache" (or maybe already formerly known as?) Morrison and J.J. Redick, two college standouts I followed before, until they came to the NBA and got bummed early. I still read any articles about them that I come across, and I still unknowingly monitor their progress in the league, hoping that both can find success later on. I've since liked their offensive games, and I looked at myself as a 1/10000000th version of Redick then, because I only knew how to shoot and attempt 3's, at probably a 12.6% clip (yeah, I'm a delusional ball player). The article shows the usual life lessons in the NBA, and probably the only difference is that he's using current players, instead of, say, Jimmy King or Ray Jackson or Eric Montross or Bryant Reeves, all college-to-pro busts. Still, it's not just about playas learning about the league, but also about life and how it can be unkind for those who fail to stay patient and positive. (kinda like me)

Anyway, you can read it here. Enjoy :)

Back from the Graveyard of Hopes and Dreams

2009-01-21T15:53:00.001+08:00

The new President makes a living beating up on sucky white basketball players.

Alright, I haven't written in awhile since I don't know. Anyway, I thought of just sneaking in a short one today, seeing it as the right time to update anyone who cares about this site about what's happening in my narrow spectator's view of sports. Just a quick run down:

1) Australian Open
I am honestly scared for my hero, Roger Federer, in this tournament because of ugly Andy Murray and his monster biceps. He also has curly hair that look like they're going to pop out if Andy throws another temper tantrum. Murray's been playing superb tennis since last year, but I hope Fed again puts him in his rightful place - below the king of the tennis world. Yeah, baby.

2) San Antonio Spurs
I haven't written much about the surprising record of the Spurs this season, but really, I'm quite happy with it. The team might rank dead last in the shortlist of contenders, but I expect a second half surge from the old farts. Also, I've been posting actively in Pounding the Rock, an awesome Spurs fan blog in SB Nation, to make up for my non-posts. The guys and gals over there are absolutely hilarious and are die-hard Spurs fans like I am. If you aren't a fan, I still suggest you visit the site. I kinda absorbed some of the sarcasm and humor there already. And oh, they have great writers too. Catch me there as silverandblack_davis.

3) Margarito vs. Mosley
Just browsed over some articles about this fight. It should be good. I'm going with the Tijuana Tornado aaalll the waaaay baby!

4) Barack Hussein Obama
I really hate the worldwide hype, but I gotta give credit to the man. He's a historical and cultural icon, and I hope the sporting world benefits from his presidency, aside from the world, of course. I chose the above picture because it's kinda funny, so you better not say anything negative about it because I'm keeping this site for my own little pleasure. Buzz off.

All Great Things Started Small and Messed Up

2008-12-19T08:45:00.000+08:00

Is that smoke or a transparent hairball?

I was lucky enough to find a copy of Tales of Beedle The Bard for my girlfriend last night at Best Sellers in Galleria, after looking in vain at about a gazillion other bookstores. It was the last one on the shelf so I was feeling lucky about myself, until I found out that there were other copies stashed just behind the counter. Why they were hiding it, I didn't have the slightest clue.

But what I really wanted to share is that in the process of searching, I randomly picked up The Rivalry by John Taylor, which was really the last copy in that bookstore. I did a double take on it before I picked it up, thinking if I wanted to do anything about an era that I wasn't even born in yet. But the other thought of reading about basketball history, which I've also been kinda interested about, turned out to be the victorious one, and now I'm reading the book with glee and a whole lot of interest. Just thought I'd write about this, and since I'm still in the early chapters establishing Red Auerbach as a legendary asswipe who also happened to be a basketball genius, I posted a picture of him puffing out his lovely, arrogantly irritating Victory Cigar.

The Best Teacher

2008-12-10T20:28:00.000+08:00

The Fundamental Brotha'

I recently read about Glen "Big Baby" Davis crying because of Kevin Garnett's harsh lecture to the bench about blowing a 25-point lead. I mean, that's all well and good I guess, and even Jordan did it to his teammates. But as I look at the game's so-called "fierce" competitors like KG, Kobe, LBJ, who give their teammates a verbal beating, I can't help but also be in awe of Tim Duncan. His stoic demeanor has been long despised by the media, and he rarely shows his emotions on the floor. But what I love about him as a leader is that he doesn't need to show he's angry whenever he wants to drive a point. He's still calm and composed, and I think a lot of players find that more respectable than someone who gets up in your face and tells you squat. A friend of mine who's a teacher told me that she doesn't need to get mad or shout at her students (Grade 2, bratty, shrieky, all-female students, by the way) to tell them what they should do or make them realize their mistake. She has her own patient yet authoritative approach, and I know it works very well on her kids. TD is just living proof that you can get things done in a more diplomatic and calm manner, and probably save your intensity for the rougher moments in the game.

Schadenfreude

2008-11-17T09:32:00.002+08:00

Ricky: Okaaaay... if eet's always like dees in Americuh then...

I was thinking of doing something like a weekly post, instead of writing whenever my gut tells me so (as I'm typing this, I get a whiff of my officemate who smells like SHE has B.O.... err, not such a good start to the week and poor girl). Anyway, here are some nice links below, which includes, of course, the customary links to some stories about the Spurzzz. By the way, I am officially declaring that the Nuggets are my second favorite team behind SA. You know, I've been a fan of Carmelo "Stop Snitchin'" Anthony (yes, despite the sucker punch and being left behind by his 2003 draft class buddies) and now that he has Chauncey, I can now breathe better and be more confident about Denver's future. Whew.

The Reason for this Post's Title

First Green Franchise? (Sorry, Boston)

Some Up-Coming Basketball Books (some of which I'm damn excited about... I hope they get here in the Philippines)

It's Ricky... Ricky Rubio mothaf***a! (vote for this kid... I have a man-crush on him.)

Hope Amidst A Fading Light

2008-11-07T21:31:00.000+08:00

This has got to be one of the best articles on my Spurs. Fancy that I'd put it here since I haven't posted anything in awhile even when the NBA season has already begun. And oh, the Spurs are mighty struggling without Manu. I'm really concerned but I've got to keep the faith. Thanks to Timothy Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell and True Hoop for leading me to this great piece.

A Greater Glory

I watched last night's Spurs-Wolves game on broadband, which is always good for local color. During their game call, Tom Hanneman and Jim Petersen waxed eloquent about how underrated Gregg Popovich is as a coach. Why, they wondered, is Pop's name not a constant fixture alongside Pat Riley and Phil Jackson? Is he the best coach in the league? Surely, his name is in that conversation.

Every postseason, without fail, brings the familiar moment when some national writer or radio host has a "Oh my, Tim Duncan is really, really good" epiphany. In recent years, this has morphed into the annual revelation that Duncan is the best power forward to ever play. Three years ago this revelation constituted controverted discussion fodder, but increasingly it's more of an operating assumption. Or maybe something of a begrudging concession. Even this morning, ESPN is running a poll that asks, "Which big man is currently playing better?" Your choices: Amare Stoudemire, Dwight Howard and Chris Bosh. This despite the fact that ESPN's preferred metric rates Duncan ahead of Howard and Bosh.

ESPN is also running a teaser this morning which suggests that the second most dominating performance of the last decade was turned in by Manu Ginobili. Do you remember it? Probably not. Somehow one of the great games of basketball history has simply dissolved within our collective consciousness. It's sandwiched in between a threesome of Kobe Bryant performances, which we all recall with glee. Manu Ginobili is at least the third best shooting guard on the planet, and might be bested by only Bryant depending on how one rates him against Dwayne Wade. Yet, he's rarely spoken of in those terms.

Individually, Tim Duncan is the most successful--rated by win percentage and championships--player in team sports this decade. As you might expect, the Spurs are the most successful team in sports over that span. They're more dominant than the Patriots and Red Wings. Better than the Yankees and Red Sox. The Duncan-Popovich Spurs are one of the great teams in the history of American sports. This is fact.

So what are we to make of Tony Parker's epic 55, 10, and 7? He is only the third player in the history of the league to do so. The other two were Oscar Robertson and Michael Jordan. If you didn't believe it before, believe it now. Tony Parker is one of the league's elite point guards. He's one of the world's great players. And, at this early stage, he's the best player in basketball. Yes, Tony Parker.

Some readers might find this laundry list tedious. "Another Spurs fan who thinks his team doesn't get enough attention," they're thinking. But here is the thing, I don't mean any of the above as a complaint. The Spurs lack of fanfare is their glory. The fact that their team is consistently under appreciated is the most telling testimony of their greatness.

Gregg Popovich likes to say that a Spur is someone who has "gotten over himself." In other words, in San Antonio you play as a team, and you play to win. Individual achievement be damned. So let Tony Parker's big night stand as a memorial to this. He could erupt for 40 0r 5o points a little more often, but he doesn't. He has the talent, but it rides in the back of the train. Team success is the lead car. Tim Duncan's usual 20 and 10 could just as well be a more occasional 30 and 15, if not for the fact that he is deferential and rations his minutes for when they count, the playoffs. Manu Ginobili is irreplaceable, as attested to by the Spurs 1-3 start.

Tony Parker's 55, 10, and 7 is a testimony to the fact that the glory he possesses as an individual, for all its titillating brilliance, was forsaken long ago for the glory of the team. The glory of the Spurs is that sometimes their glory is lost to us, even though it could hardly shine brighter. They are, as the poet said, lost in a luminous light."

Parteh Like It's 2002

2008-09-26T09:19:00.001+08:00

I was going to spell it parte-y (coño style), or just the straight up party (no flavor whatsoever), but as a tribute to MVP Rabeh "gRabeh" Al-Hussaini and all the not-so-smart signs splashed all over the Ateneo gallery that actually pisses you off more than it makes you laugh, I decided to go with Parteh.

(Speaking of signs, didn't you feel that the Ateneans have really gone waaaaay overboard this play of names... I mean, I'd probably get a headache trying to name them all but it started with the off-made Tiuperman and the rest played out like bad lyrics to a well-composed melody that was the Blue Eagles [although I have to admit... I found the sign "gRabeh na Tiu" a bit cute]. By the way, I didn't see any La Sallians trying to copy our thing... maybe because either they're sosyal not to stoop down to the Ateneo level, or just plain dumb to think of anything creative.)

Anyway, I just had to share some thoughts during Game 2, and perhaps the series in particular:

I'm glad we won but it wasn't the prettiest or most exciting game.

The first half was the most exciting part, especially if you're an Ateneo fan and the Eagles seemed to be running away with the victory, posting a 15-point lead at the half. For awhile there I thought I saw a little bit of Larry Bird - yes, Larry Legend himself - in Chris Tiu, he of the seemingly unathletic shooter build who was outsmarting everyone on the court including the Mensa members in Araneta who were there to calculate how many bad calls were made. He made smart passes, didn't panic while bringing down the ball, made some incredible shots - mostly jumpers mid-and-long range - and just fooled everybody into thinking that he doesn't have a lot of moves when in fact, he has a slew of drop steps, head and shoulder fakes, bicep and tricep curls (wait... that's a gym move), and some of the sweetest bank shots. Okay, I'm totally gaying it up now. But he's the leader of this team and he grabbed his balls and took care of business when it mattered - as I've said before, it's always the best player that will win or lose the championship for you.

But come the second half, particularly after the Maierhofer fiasco, the game just came crashing down to unexplainable levels of awkwardness. The drums of both schools were still there and slamming like robots were pounding on them, but the fans on both sides seemed like they got the life sucked out of them. I think there were a good 2 or 3 minutes there when I was just thinking to myself, "What the hell is happening? I don't feel too good and I don't feel like cheering at all! Did the ghost of bad close out games of past suddenly arrived and put a blanket over the entire arena? Did Franz Pumaren finally summon his underlings from the pits of hell to spoil the winning feeling of Ateneo and spark outright rage and hatred for the losers? Why were there so many cute girls around and I don't know any of them? How can Jack Santiago whine like a baby for 40 freaking basketball minutes?" Those were the thoughts that actually circled my head while the game was slowing down to almost a screeching halt.

When Rico and Jvee got into all sorts of trouble, I think it just really showed how bad DLSU's other players were, or how also good Franz Pumaren was at masking their weaknesses during the entire season. Barua really can't make a decent shot with a hand in his face and tries too hard to be Tony Parker, both in his teardrop shots and his facial expressions; Ferdinand is only good for two things - jumping, dunking and acting like a total idiot (wait, that's three... my bad. I'm acting like a Maierhofer who couldn't count his number of technical fouls); Malabes' head is still in Iran where he's worshipped a superstar; Atkins is Chris Tiu version 0.3 that improves by 0.1 every season, and has a mean streak for a guy with Mon Jose-like basketball skills without the defensive smarts; Revilla is still a future blue-chip PG who's not quite there yet; Mangahas is the Lamar Odom of Philippine basketball; and Walsham is a Kindergarten student inside a man's body. The bench points of DLSU were always highlighted by the stats, but in reality, Rico was the main reason for that. Franz wanted someone reliable who can pick up the scoring load of the second unit and make life easier for the not-so-talented ones.

The Ateneo defense was just plain good.

My friend and I were talking about the hard and committed shows of our big men, and how the rotation was ultra-crisp to prevent drop passes or cross-court kickouts to shooters. There were some defensive lapses here and there, but basically the defense was like clockwork and totally suffocated the already gasping DLSU offense.

And let me give a huge shout out to Nonoy the Boy Who Lived, who was just a man possessed. He sure looked like a cross between Ben Wallace and Kevin Garnett right there, saving time and again his teammates' backs, using his smarts and long arms to grab precious offensive boards, and inflicting a deep mental scar on Rico Maierhofer. I read in an online news article that he even apologized publicly to Rico for shouting at him in Game 1! Man, if a good person is going to heaven, then Nonoy's headed to some place that's even beyond heaven, while Franz Pumaren will be going the opposite way and heading farther into the depths of hell. Don't you hoop heads out there just love it when the hardworking, simple and level-headed dude gets the credit that he's due? It's like a tribute to all working Filipinos who are busting their butt out there to make a darned living even if their taxes fatten the pockets of fat, half-a**ed politicians. No wonder the iamnonoy shirts are a real hit nowadays... the guy's a modern hero that the ordinary person can relate to!

Props also to Coach Norman and his coaching staff, who are masters of player development. But I seriously doubt if they could've improved Badjie del Rosario or Paul Tanchi. Indeed... those were the dark days of Ateneo basketball. (I'm shivering uncontrollably just by the thought of those two)

JVee Casio is someone that I respected from Year One... and still do.

I'm tempted to give a piece of my mind on the non-appearance during the ceremonies and the refusal to give congratulatory handshakes, but I won't. I almost got into a serious argument with my carpool mate this morning, when she raised her voice at me saying that Ateneans were a bunch of airheads who couldn't just let the whole fiasco go and allow La Salle to wallow in its sore loser mentality without giving them an earful. I told her that they totally deserved to be chastised for their unsportsmanlike conduct, but later on I saw her point (and also read a few forum posts echoing the same point) that we only fan the flames of bad sportsmanship if we continue to put down and bash La Salle for the way the team conducted itself.

So instead of wasting my time digging a grave for DLSU, I will pay my respects to a little Green man. I think I even respect Casio more than I do LA Tenorio, who obviously showed his disgust in 2004 when they got creamed by a powerful DLSU team in the Final Four. Can't blame him though, any team with Badjie in it is bound to drive a superstar nuts. But still, JVee (ugh, I don't like how his name is spelled) showed tremendous heart in Game 2, and I'm glad that our Beda boys Yuri and Mike risked going into the hostile La Salle team huddle to offer their regards to a former teammate. There were moments in the game when you could see him visibly tired and frustrated, but he showed everyone out there (including Marcy Arellano) what it means to have the heart of a champion - he didn't give up until his last foul and didn't abandon his stubborn teammates. La Sallians, you can definitely be proud of this guy. I only wish that he could've kept Rico's head straight, but you just can't teach a dumb person how to un-dumb himself.

The Next 2 or 3 Seasons show tremendous promise.

The Beda Bunch of Ford Arao, Yuri Escueta and Mike Baldos is down to one, and I'm giddy for the era of the Baste Bad Boys to begin! Ryan Buenafe and Eric Salamat are already starting the revolution, and we're just waiting for Arvie Bringas to complete Tres Terribles, who hopefully, will continue beating up on the flimsy frontcourt of La Salle. I'm actually salivating over the possibility of Marko Batricevic finally receiving his rude welcome, which he has been avoiding for 2 years already. Wait, he may be ineligible already next year due to old age. What? He's not over the age limit yet? Oh... I thought he aged five years warming his behind on the bench.

Of course, it's the last year of our super frontcourt of Rabeh and Nonoy, and this championship only boosts their confidence 100,000 fold. Plus, we have Vince Burke and his can't-miss practice jumper that will hopefully translate into a can't-miss game jumper. Nico Salva is following the trajectory of the Rocket JC Intal, but the All-Rookie team selection should give him some motivation to improve, if not his game then probably his hair. And Justin Chua should be the next big thing and the next Chinese hope, or at worst, maybe the next made-in-China version that Chris referred to himself as. Mike Baldos and his soft hands and soft game will still be hanging around, and Oping Sumalinog might just try to dominate the IAC leagues if he still fails to get some burn. And we also got Tonino Gonzaga, who totally trashed us in one pick up game. Dude, if ever you don't make it big in the UAAP, just imagine that you traumatized a group of working guys who were trying to get by with their marginal basketball game and completely had no clue what they went up against.

Adversity makes champions

Chris Tiu said a line similar to that one, and I believe that quote. But I just want to air out that the 2002 championship experience was way better for me than this one. This is not a knock on the team since it probably had one of the best seasons in Ateneo basketball history, but the lack of adversity kind of made for theater that was watchable and still enjoyable, yet a bit short on the drama. But forgive me for being a little biased. I was a sophomore when that 2002 Hail Mary Squad won, and now that I'm working and kind of detached from school life, the uplifting high that I once experienced didn't quite resurface this time around. The ordeal that the 2002 team went through was incredible, and it helped being a college student. It was also doubly enjoyable watching with your best buds until your careers inevitably ruin your UAAP routine by splitting you in all sorts of directions.

The mass at Gesu was marked with a celebratory and joyous mood, and it's all good. But on a personal level, I feel the community spirit more during times of losses. Last year when we lost to DLSU in the final four, only a few people showed up in the mass to offer their support to the players. Seats were aplenty, and the somber mood undeniably moved people to pray and hope for a better season. I also loved going around the church after the mass, talking with people I know and just trying discreetly to console each other with jokes and other funny musings about another season that came up short. And just by going around and looking at the players, the coaching staff and the fans, you can see that, despite the defeat, a glimmer of hope is trying to escape a community that longs for a defining victory.

But still, I am happy for this team. The adversity that Chris was talking about came in the form of 4 years of always experiencing defeat, and the team is all the more better because of it. Meanwhile, La Salle is dangerously treading the thin line between sustained excellence and a blinded, desperate drive to always win, and I hope that their loss can also make their community stronger. A lot of students are paying hard-earned money to go to both schools, and they deserve to be taught well in dealing with times of victory and most especially defeat.

So with that, I would like to say a hearty goodbye to Season 71, and whatever nonsense that I said during the past few weeks. On to the NBA and NFL!

Game One Recap

2008-09-23T16:48:00.000+08:00

I personally don't like the caption, but what the heck. The words in this picture are worth more than the ones written here.

My life as an 8 to 5 corporate slave hardly allows me to write lengthy entries. But I think the picture above best demonstrates how Game 1 was won. Words won't do justice, so I'll leave the talking (or shouting) up to Nonoy the Boy Who Lived. It's just weird how the image came from archerpride.net. Hmmm... hindi pa naman kami nadidiskubre doon ah. Time to end the season on Thursday! One Big Fight!

UAAP Finals Notebook: Making The Rounds

2008-09-19T09:57:00.001+08:00

I am currently going about my own business with a heightened sense of irritation, caused by a huge pimple on my nose. Yes, it's probably one of the worst places to grow a pimple, and mine is located in the upper middle part near the bridge, and the size of it makes my nose red. Oh the shame. Nothing is more embarassing than a nose pimple. I was vigorously treating it for the past few days with some derma concoction that my mom always recommends, but the darn thing just won't go away or even subside. And today, after taking a bath, I decided to pop the darned sh*t. I won't go into details how the totally messed up "self-operation" go, but just reveal the fact that the goddamned pimple got even redder (is there such a word? if no, then i'm creating it and copyrighting it for my pimple). So now I'm a walking bozo with a tomato smack dab in the middle of my face.

For the past few days, my mind has mostly been preoccupied with the impending UAAP finals. Remember how I said that my girlfriend didn't give a damn about it? During our yahoo messenger conversation yesterday, she showed to me once again how she tends to just float around life while reading her books and not even caring about basketball, the only thing that I wish she'd care about aside from myself. Here's an excerpt from our conversation:

Me: no gimik naman din tomorrow
GF: really? kahit night with the guys?
Me: ay, baka. uwi ulit si S para sa UAAP finals haha
GF: heehee lucky him he can watch. ikaw? makakanood ka ba?
Me: not sure.. hirap makahanap ng ticket
GF: sino ba kalaban ng admu?
Me: erm... la salle?
GF: ah talaga? hindi ko alam!!! hehehehe
Me: it's okay dear... i understand
GF: hay nako, huli na naman ako sa balita.

Her ignorance actually increases her cuteness factor. But you wouldn't be interested with that anyway so I'll leave it at that.

On the way to work, I was thinking of doing an interview with the Ateneo and La Salle players before the finals started. And despite of my lack of resources or connections to the team, I was able to sneak in a couple 'o questions, even to La Salle players that would make other beat writers be "green" with envy. I'm really not good at puns, you know.

[[Moro Lorenzo Locker Room]]
Me: Hey Rabeh, big fella. I have a question for you.
Rabeh: Huh? Who the f*ck are you?
Me: Writer ako for the team.
Rabeh: Talaga? Ngayon lang kita nakita ah. Bakit ka nandito?
Me: Doesn't matter. Quick question. What's the reason for the big turnaround this year?
Rabeh: Practice lang talaga at kumpiyansa. At saka confidence ni coach at ng teammates ko sa akin.
Me: Boring answer. Didn't you get any girlfriend or hook up with some hot piece of a** while you were training in the US?
Rabeh: Um... no comment.
Me: Silence means yes!
Rabeh: Basta... alam mo naman, minsan kelangan ng inspiration.
Me: Bwahaha may pang-black mail na ako! If you don't give me your complementary tickets, I'll show this to Coach Norman! [dashes out of the locker room]
Rabeh: Oh sh*t you trespassing motherf*****! Halika dito!!!

[[Moro Lorenzo Weight Room]]
Me: Hey Chris, you have a minute?
Chris: [clearly surprised] Huh? Oh ok... sure. What's up?
Me: I just have a few questions.
Chris: Ok fire away.
Me: I have a crush... on your biceps and triceps. How'd you make 'em so big?
Chris: [clearly embarassed] Ha? Ah... you know, just working out a lot in the weight room.
Me: Mmm... I'd like to have a piece of that... I mean, I'd like to have my own biceps as big as those! Here's a tough one. Who's the worst Ateneo teammate that you've ever played with?
Chris: [clearly shocked] I... I can't answer that! What kind of question is that?
Me: Ha! Finally a weakness! You're a damn coward! Afraid that they'll hit back at you huh?? Bok-bok-boook! Chicken!!! This out to lose you some fans pretty boy! [dashes out of the court]
Chris: [clearly stupefied] Who the hell was that?

[[Moro Lorenzo Basketball Court]]
Me: Yo, Kirk my man.
Kirk: Hey man. How are you?
Me: Just chillin'. Got a minute? I have to interview you for my blog.
Kirk: Oh, sure.
Me: A lot of people are saying that your play this year has decline from your rookie season. What seems to be the problem?
Kirk: You know man, I get a lot of questions like that. It's just that I---
Me: [interrupts] Wait, forget about that then. What's it like to be one of two token white guys in the team?
Kirk: What do you mean by "token" dude? Vince and I are contributing, obviously.
Me: No you aren't. You haven't contributed anything significant since your game winner against UST last season. You obviously can't handle the PG spot, and worst of all, you can't shoot even though you're white. You can jump a bit, I'll give you that, but still not enough that you can dunk. And I hate to say this, but Vince is contributing more than you are.
Kirk: Man, that ain't helping my confidence one bit...
Me: Damn right. You better shape up kid. Get some white man lessons from Alex Compton. And maybe you can pick up some Filipino tips as well!
Kirk: F**k you! Who the hell are you to tell me what to do? Hey Vince! Vince! This guy over here says you got a small d**k!
Me: Uh-oh... that's my cue... [dashes out of the room]

[[Moro Lorenzo Men's Showers]]]
Me: Hey coach, um.. uh... [stares down below] Ah... uh... coach, that's a pretty big reptile you got there. What kind of food does it eat?
Coach Norman: [shoots a stony gaze]
Me: Oh... yeah, I gotta go now... good luck on Sunday! [dashes out of the shower room]

[[DLSU Practice Facility]]
Me: Oi Peejay!
PJ Barua: Sino ka?
Me: Writer ako sa DLSU paper.
PJ: Ow? Anong paper?
Me: Basta, yung di mo alam. Anyway, may tanong ako. Dati ka daw adik?
PJ: Huy san mo nalaman yan? Di totoo yan!
Me: Ok lang yan. May stash nga ako dito eh. Smoke natin mamaya?
PJ: Hindi ko alam yan pare. Tsaka pano ka naka-smuggle ng ganyan dito? Lagot tayo kay Coach Franz!
Me: Sus... pakipot pa. Let's go man, my treat. Tawagin ko pa si Walsham.
[Walsham arrives]
Walsham: Uy ano yan? Pulburon?
Me: Oo... eto o, have some.
Walsham: Sure, thanks ha. [takes a fistful and shoves it in his mouth] Hmm... bakit parang maalat?
PJ: Tanga! Drugs yan. Kelangan ng pipe tsaka hinihithit!
Walsham: Sino kaya tanga? Ang drugs naka-tableta! Pulburon kaya 'to, hindi pa lang nababalot kaya maalat pa!
Me: (I gotta get out of here before my brain degenerates...)

Me: (Perfect timing! Nag-iisa lang si Joshua Webb... ma-interview nga) [approaches Webb] Hi Joshua!
Webb: Wahhuuu--waaaa--oooo--aaahhhh...
Me: What the...
Webb: Uuuuuaaaaahh----eeeeoooohhaaa...
Me: Ok lang kaya 'to?
Webb: Hoooohh---wiiii---aaaaahhhwwuuu...
DLSU physician: Hoy sino ka?
Me: Reporter ako. Bakit ganito 'to? [points at Webb]
Physician: May pagka-autistic yan. Si Coach Franz lang nakakakausap dyan.
Me: Ah ganun ba? Sige, salamat ha. (I'm f**king outta here!)

Me: Uy si Simon Atkins... [approaches] Hey Simon, saw your Hanford Ice billboards. So who's got the bigger package, you or Chris?
Simon: Anong package?
Me: Alam mo na... yung ano. Diba naka-underwear kayo dun?
Simon: Oo. Aaahh package! Mas malaki yung akin syempre.
Me: Talaga ha? Bakit mo naman nasabi yan?
Simon: Eh ako unang model nun e, so mas malaki talaga yung package na in-offer sakin.
Me: Uhh... ok sige sabi mo eh. (Ganito ba karaming tanga dito???)

Me: Eto, someone sane... Hi Coach Franz!
Franz: Hello. Do I know you from somewhere?
Me: Nope! But I know you so ok na yun. Can I ask a few questions?
Franz: Ganon... sige, what are your questions?
Me: Is it true that your players don't study at all and just train for basketball?
Franz: Sino ba kasi nagsasabi ng rumors na yan? Hindi yan totoo... in fact, dean's lister mga players namin! Si Ty Tang dati palaging DL yun.
[Water Boy interrupts]
WB: Coach, pa-pirma daw pala 'tong jersey ng anak ni Ms. Guzman sa mga players. Sigurado daw A na kaagad yung mga players mo na nasa klase nya.
Franz: Teka, sino ba mga nandun?
WB: Si Rico, Ferdinand, James at saka si Walsham.
Franz: Ah ok. Sige pero pakisabi kay Ma'am ibagsak si Walsham. Masyadong tanga yun e. Obvious na nandadaya tayo kapag binigyan ng A yun.
WB: Kahit B or C lang?
Franz: Gusto mo bang mapahamak tayo??! Hindi pa rin. Itsura pa lang nun di na kapani-paniwalang makakapasa e.
WB: Ok coach!
Franz: [turning to me] Ah, ano ulit yung tanong mo?
Me: Ha? Eh... wala na coach, ok na po yung sagot niyo. Thanks beri mats! (makaalis na nga dito)

Hopefully as the finals series goes, I can sneak in some more interviews. Depends on how my TV responds to all that's happening, since I can't even get a hold of those golden tickets. You'd almost think that people were trampling over each other for that rare trip to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory when the truth is, you'll just be getting a trip to hell where alumni are cussing every 0.8 seconds. But of course, when your team wins, no matter how many scratches or broken eardrums that you have, the feeling is just pure heaven.

The Worst Finals Preview Ever

2008-09-18T08:22:00.002+08:00

Enough of my man-crush entries on Roger Federer. The US Open has been over for two weeks and there are more interesting things to write about, so I gotta stop gaying it up already. Roger, sorry but I will just write again next year, even if you win the Shanghai Masters.

Okay now on to something more interesting here in the Philippines - the UAAP, in particular, the finals series between Ateneo and La Salle. Now, people keep bragging that this thing, aside from a Manny Pacquiao fight, ignites the flames of fandom in this basketball-crazed little collection of islands. I beg to disagree, fellas. I can name five people I know who aren't even the least bit interested in this championship and for all its supposed global implications - our household helps (that's 2 already), my girlfriend (who's Atenean but she sure doesn't give a sh*t about Chris Tiu. I asked her once, "Hindi mo ba crush si Chris Tiu? Ok lang naman sa 'kin eh, crush naman sya ng lahat." And she coyly replies, "Hindi talaga eh." I love my girlfriend. Sometimes, she's too sane.), another friend from UP (who is friends with Tiu but is dumbfounded by his ability to attract so many girls; and you think UP students are interested in this thing? The country has bigger problems to think of, my non-existent readers), and lastly, the students from the NCAA league, who are probably pissed that the UAAP championship has to coincide with their league's. Sorry, Sam Ekwe, you'll just have to wait for next year again to bust out your Nigerian celebratory shuffle. (speaking of coinciding, is this the first time this has happened? Usually the NCAAs finish earlier. I think the bookies and underground syndicates have something to do with this... beware you fools, Manny Pangilinan is not getting much sleep over this scheduling fiasco and may threaten to pull out his funds in San Beda and Ateneo. If that happens, 7-foot African imports and Mr. Perfect jocks will all be happily trotting over to NU)

Now that I've gotten that "this is the most imporant sporting event in the Philippines" argument out of the way, let me share some of my thoughts on this basketball extravaganza:

1. No F-ing way this is gonna be over in two games. But if not for the money-making machine that this monster is, it should be over in two games. Blowouts will be the best scenario, but I bet my blue bottom that Franz Pumaren, the devil himself, will make sure none of that happens. You can already see that he's pulling some of his Hellboy antics when you read the papers - he's pining for "fair" officiating! For goodness sake... as far as I can rememeber (and that's not too far though. I'm not such a basketball nerd like some of the writers out there) not since the heydays of Mark Telan did La Salle get itself on the bad officiating end of a UAAP game. The last FEU game was nothing. You should see how refeerees keep on siding with DLSU, and look up for it on youtube during the Final Four game against Ateneo last year. Even La Sallians admit to this. In fact, their students are always hoping that some rich alumni buys out the refs. I wonder how these alumni can keep the funds up? Or maybe it's from Franz himself, and the people's money that he steals as a councilor in Quezon City? Okay that's a bit below the belt but this is such a good take-off point for a million UAAP conspiracy theories!!! I want John Nash in here now. Wait, is he dead? Is Denzel Washington available? No? How about Ping Lacson? Busy? Dammit.

2. This Ateneo team is finally ready to win it all. There is no single hint of bias right there in that statement. In 2006 when the triumvirate of JC, Macky and Doug got the 'chip swept under from them by the Allan K-led UST Tigers, it showed how fragile the King Eagle, JC Intal's psyche was. He couldn't buy a bucket in a big game, and only Macky came out firing. As for Doug, I think he left his mind in the Bench Underwear show. In big games, your best player should always step up. A lot of times, how well the best player on each team plays determines who will emerge victorious. Now, Chris Tiu I think (sorry Rabeh, I'll give you next year), has been coasting the last few games and hasn't been looking for his shot. Come Sunday (and Thursday and Sunday), he'll bring the guns and fire away. For sure, he'll still play smartly, but definitely he'll be looking for his shot more. As for La Salle, of course it will depend on JV Casio if, of course, he doesn't sell the series out. Wow, another conspiracy theory right there! Formulated of course by the amazing La Sallians. I think we should get the short, fat guy roaming their bench over here and share with us more of those.

Anyway, another evidence points to the talent level that Ateneo finally has. Last year's bunch was worse than a sinigang mix. And Chris was also turning the ball over a lot then because he didn't have decent teammates around who can do something worthwhile with the damn ball. Imagine, getting double or triple teamed and then being forced to kick the ball out to Ken Barracoso. Goodness.

(Let me also take the time out to thank Ken for his decision not to play out his final year. As my friends and I agreed at the start of the preseason, this could be the BEST decision ever made that will have the biggest impact this year, and I think it's becoming true. Woo. We can't forever endure "project" or underdeveloped players getting recruited every year and having to wait for their fifth year for them to blossom. In no time, Ateneo basketball fans could've been the equivalent of Atlanta and Minnesota fans. Yes, that's how bad that practice was.)

This season, the team has got so many weapons. Rabeh can finally hold the ball and not let it be taken from him like a big baby. Nonoy Baclao is finally figuring out how to avoid foul trouble while still staying effective. Ryan Buenafe is the realness. Jai Reyes, as Rick Olivares wrote, is adapting to his role as a defensive stopper. Or at least he's trying to. Yuri's play at the backup point is steadier than ever. And Eric Salamat is finally looking a lot more like Kokey. (I can see another vicious stare down at a hapless LA Revilla in one of the games. I love Kokey. If he was probably 7-feet tall he'd be dunking over everybody and smiling at them and twirling those imaginary guns of his. If he saw Ryan Arana's dance in 2005, he'd probably kick Arana in the nuts right then and there.)

3. La Salle is finally ready to show everyone that they have the best fair-weather fans in the world. And that Gang Green is the worst name for a group of sorry fans. A ten year old can think of better, more creative names. Heck, even Joshua Webb, he of the semi-autistic baller kind, can even think of something worth our time.

4. It's time for some Black Magic. For me, the real Black Magic will be for the Ateneo wins to become blowouts. In 2005, La Salle didn't show the least mercy for an Ateneo team that lost Larry Fonacier to an ACL injury for the season. Ateneo fans, remember Arana's dance, Mac Cardona's cockiness and Joseph Yeo as the devil-in-training. It's time to give them a dose of their own formalin. Franz, payback's a bitch, especially if it's 10-foot long and hard, belongs to a black man and someone who's holding on to his job for dear life. You can't beat that, even if you're the devil incarnate.

And finally, despite all the possible maneuverings that NABRO and La Salle can think of, I'm going with ADMU in two games. Stick that up your a** Rico Maierhofer.

One Big Fight!

P.S. I wanted to put up a nice picture in this entry but I'm one of the poorest writers out there and I can't even get a hold of those great-looking ADMU basketball photos. Nope, this isn't a call for pity. Just keepin' it real, as my brothas say.

Witnessing One of the Greats

2008-09-11T15:52:00.001+08:00

As one of the more popular celebratory lines go... "How sweet it is!"

Peter Bodo, one of the columnists at tennis.com beautifully described how Roger Federer was feeling during one of his matches in the US Open wherein he was trying so hard to motivate himself to win:

"At times this tournament, Federer has resembled nothing more than a distracted man who's misplaced his car keys and is wandering around the apartment looking for them while thinking about other things. He's going to find those keys; he knows they're around here somewhere, yet. . . where are the danged keys!!!!! He's been brooding, and at one point during his unexpectedly tough quarterfinal battle with Gilles Muller, I jotted the note that if I had to guess what he was thinking, it would have been: 'Man, this is a drag, but I guess I've got to hang in here because if I lose this match i'll probably feel even worse'.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a mind reader, but at the same time I believe people give away a lot with their facial expressions and body language. The other way to look at this - and Federer KADs undoubtedly would prefer it - is that Federer suddenly has become very good at something at which his pal Pete Sampras was expert - looking bad but playing well. Don't feel badly if you don't understand - it's a champ thing.

A comment Federer made in his post-match presser on the subject of his increasing tendency to show his emotions is relevant to this discussion: ". . . It is true I am trying to push myself, you know, not to be actually more emotional but (rather) to try to play well." In other words, he's less interested in venting, or expressing his feelings, than in using them to lift his game. The difference between playing well as a matter of course, and searching for ways to motivate yourself to play well, often while looking utterly disengaged, is the difference between a 21-year old aspiring talent and a veteran champion who's at the stage in his career when appetite is no longer his driving force.

But it wasn't like Federer needed to grope for extra motivation against Djokovic; the young Serb is one of the few players capable of striking real fear in Federer's heart, and the role fear plays in the show of courage is generally underestimated. "

Boom. I couldn't have put it better, and reading the article made me realize how much sustained excellence can also be very tough to maintain, just as tough probably as when you're still only trying to work up to becoming excellent. The fear part is also a very interesting point, to realize the truth that the presence of adversity allows us an opportunity to rise beyond our limitations.

And such is the case of Mr. Federer, who makes me very privileged to have lived during his era and be able to watch him play tennis. I think he's close to tying Michael Jordan up there as one of my greatest sports icons. And I think someday, I'll be able to get the chance to watch him (I probably have a 2 or 3-year window... gotta work on that now).

I think Roger will continue to struggle against Rafael Nadal, but if anything else, the emergence of players who are finding ways to beat Rafa will benefit Roger's evolving gameplan against him. Right now, tennis is indeed in a good place with a lot of emerging talent. And if the Fed Express can overcome these challenges, there will be no doubt in people's minds that he is the G.O.A.T. - Greatest Of All Time, baby!

Glory Be Gone

2008-09-08T13:30:00.000+08:00

"Hey Coach, you can't teach thousands of years of slavery."

I'll be writing about the double victory of the Blue Eagles shortly. But for now, gotta pay tribute to the man that inspired the movie Glory Road, Coach Don Haskins. That movie was my only medium of getting to know this person, and he did a lot for the game of basketball. Here's a link paying tribute to a man who truly knows no boundaries. Rest in peace, coach.

Smoke Weed Everyday and Party Like A Rockstar

2008-09-05T09:42:00.000+08:00

And I thought the Spurs front office were dumb to pass on Mario Chalmers. RC and Pop's careful and unparalleled eye for character (talent I think, is not that impressive compared to Jerry West's) reigns supreme. I won't be too happy if Chalmers tears up SA in the regular season, but when I think of him being kicked out of the Rookie Camp, I'll feel better. I just hope George Hill will blossom into a good athlete, since it's always nice to hear of low draft picks succeeding in the league and making teams that passed on them eat crow. Arthur and Chalmers' drug bust is now one less thing to worry about for (Curious) George (thanks to the boys at Pounding the Rock for providing that hilarious nickname).

Summer League Review

2008-09-04T15:49:00.000+08:00

I just felt the need for a quick recap of what happened during our MAAI season, a post-Ateneo Basketball League (ABL) tournament held for two months. It was our team's first venture into this kind of post-ABL tourney, and I think it produced good results.

We earned an automatic berth into the semifinals/final four by virtue of having the best record in our division (3 wins, 1 loss), with our sole loss coming to maybe one of the weakest teams in the tournament. We didn't play with our top 3 players then, and we got caught with perhaps one of the worst games that we could play. Our team got booted out of the semis by a very hardworking and organized team, though I think talent-wise, we were even or maybe slightly ahead. But I guess that's what happens when your team hasn't had that much chemistry and come in to the game without much of a gameplan.

We got whacked by as much as 20 points, and we couldn't find a way to solve their pressing defense while also having some trouble with our own offense. Our superstar A was firing blanks from near and afar all day, and we couldn't catch a break with the referees. Though the opponent's full-court press was daunting at the start, we couldn't recover from it and eventually kept turning the ball over even when the pressure lessened as the game wore on. I think the whole pressure thing just stuck in our players' minds, and that really affected our game.

But despite another failed attempt at a championship (we lost at the finals of the last ABL season... we were THIS close), as B said, there were lessons to be learned. Our team this tournament was reinforced by V and P, A's buddies from way back, and because of their talent, playing within our roles became much easier and we were more organized. I think this experience will help us stay more under control for the next seasons, except maybe for M, who was unfortunately still having a hard time getting his head on straight when on the court.

Still, there's no substitute for working hard to get better in the offseason. I myself am trying to bulk up (which I've been trying to achieve for so long, but I'm only taking it really seriously this time), and hopefully hone some of my dribbling and shooting skills at the same time. I understand that I don't need to do much for this team, but if I can be a reliable ball handler and distribute well, then hopefully I can earn some more valuable minutes next season (as R said during our last game, we got called up for garbage time haha).

Next ABL season will start January 2009. The championship is in sight. Gotta train now.

Coming Out Of The Shell: Tennis Outtakes

2008-08-19T13:49:00.000+08:00

I am actually reading tennis sections again in sports websites after abstaining for a certain period after Roger's loss to Rafa at Wimbledon. Maybe, just maybe... I am actually starting to realize that Roger's drop from No.1 will make the sport a little more interesting. And it could help R-Fed in that it'll ease up the pressure for him to always win every tournament. I think McEnroe said in an article that Sampras' record appears to be safe... well I hope Roger will prove that brash American wrong and let McEnroe eat crow.

Anyway, this is a nice article on ESPN The Magazine, an interview with Ashley Harkleroad, a player on the WTA circuit who recently posed for Playboy (announced after she flamed out in the earlier rounds of Wimbledon). Here's a funny but uplifting excerpt for Federer fans:

"And finally, who's hotter: Federer or Nadal?

That's another tough one. I've never been a huge fan of Nadal looks-wise; I'd probably go with Federer. The other thing with Federer is, he's so nice. He always—OK, maybe not always—talks to me when we're at an event. Last spring I had ovarian cyst surgery, and he was so sweet to me when he saw me, asking me how everything was. He's a great guy and yea, a little better looking than Nadal."

Honestly, I think Roger looks good in some angles but overall, he's not even close to being an Adonis (I sound gay talking about this whole looks thing). But I guess in terms of being a true gentleman, I couldn't agree more with Ms. Harkleroad. Here are some funny excerpts that I got from the comments section, for your enjoyment:

"I was listening to her until she said Roger's hotter than Rafa.....! OK, so looks are subjective, i'm sure Roger probably wins as a complete package: His confidence is attractive, and he's fluent in 4 languages, which is mind boggling!!!!....... but i'm team Nadal!!!! (his butt is icing on the cake...lol!!!)"

"I wonder what Federer is up to, being so nice to Harkleroad, chatting her up, etc. I mean, no one wants to see Mirka pose nude for Playboy."

"I would take Federer over Nadal too. I have met both and Roger takes the cake. Up close Rafa is too neanderthal-looking. Just didn't like him upclose. But he is a nice kid. Roger is breath-taking up close. And he looks you straight in the eye when he talks to you. It's the whole package that gets you with Roger.

But both are nice guys." [the winning comment, in my opinion hahaha]

"I have no idea what an "optomologist" is, LOL, but the whole initial question was dumb, re: who's hotter between Federer and Nadal. They're both amazing tennis players, but neither one exactly a movie star when it comes to looks. But to each his/her own..."

Let me repeat that last phrase.... to each his own:

On to the US Open then!

Olympic Glory - Beijing 2008

2008-08-11T22:43:00.000+08:00

I think it's been awhile since I really paid attention to the Olympics (since my grade school days, probably). My only memories from the past two spectacles centered on basketball competition, with Sydney highlighted by Vince Carter's high-flying dunk over Frederic Weis (of Germany I think), and in Athens, the debacle that was Larry Brown's Team USA.

And so with this edition, the fact that the Olympics is being held in Beijing hits closer to home, literally. Maybe there aren't just enough sporting events, or maybe some of the athletes I follow closely are competing in this year's version (Roger Federer, Team USA). But it's a welcome relief to watch other sports, like swimming and boxing. A friend told me that I might fall into some sort of depression when our athletes representing Team Philippines lose, but I guess I'm not that attached to them so I don't have to worry. Yes, I'm probably belittling our chances but I'm still rooting for them of course. I especially have high hopes for our lone boxing bet and the taekwondo jins (being a yellow belter jin myself... yeah right haha).

It's been an incredible sporting event so far, what with the 3-hour spectacle during opening night, and the tremendous chase of Michael Phelps for the elusive record of 8 gold medals in swimming. Just today, Team USA won a medley that most experts have tabbed them to lose, yet they won, thanks to a monumental come-from-behind effort by their oldest member of the team, who also happens to prefer practicing alone! Talk about incredible self-discipline and understanding of the game. So thanks to that, Phelps remains on track to beat the record. I'll be keeping close tabs on that.

I came home a little late tonight from work, and despite feeling sleepy, I turned on the TV just to see what sporting event was on. What appeared before my eyes was weightlifting, which at first, seems like an ultra-boring sport, but after I saw Heidilyn Diaz of the Philippines, my eyes were glued. I really don't understand the whole scoring system behind this sport, but it's just a joy to watch lifters raising their game to levels even they didn't know they have. Heidilyn couldn't lift 102 kgs in her first attempt but was able to do so on her 2nd, which became a personal best for her. Incredible. And a lot of the other lifters even set the bar much, much higher, lifting to I think as much as 132 kgs. God, what strength these women have. China won I think... and their lifter looks so young, you'd think they were already training her to lift 100 kgs when she was 10 years old. Our own Diaz is just 17 and she just got in the Olympics through a wild card, so hopefully we can expect big things from her. It'd be cool if she can elevate her game to world-class standards.

That's that for now, I haven't written in awhile and the Olympics is just a really fresh break from all the tension-filled sporting moments that have happened recently (with my side on the losing end most of the time). I'll probably sulk again if Roger doesn't win the gold and Nadal does, but I really really hope Fed can salvage his season with a gold haul for both singles and doubles (c'mon, I hope he gets greedy after a poor season). As for the Redeem Team, I'll be glad if Spain actually won haha :p

A Kind Of Pregnant Pause

2008-08-06T13:32:00.000+08:00

Been awhile since I last posted. Anyway, here's a quick link, another article I got from Henry Abbott's Truehoop. Talks about how the noise in NBA arenas have eliminated the opportunity for spectators to really analyze and reflect on the little details going on during the game. I know that in the UAAP (the premier collegiate league in the Philippines), they already disallowed cheering during timeouts so it kinda gives us fans to talk about what just happened during the last 2 or 3 plays, or give a general analysis of how the game has gone on so far, and even muse about what could possibly happen next. I never thought that the move to abolish cheering during timeouts could also have a positive effect. Props to the UAAP for doing that, letting the fans breathe and appreciate the game more (even if most people, non-fans usually, still wouldn't get it and would prefer screaming and screaming).

An excerpt that I like the most out of the entire blogpost:

"In my formative years I not only played the game of basketball, but attended both professional and college games often. My father would take me to the Frank Erwin Center to see the Texas Longhorns or to the Alamodome to watch the Spurs play. Neither is a particularly good venue: in the era of Kevin Durant and D.J. Augustin, the Erwin Center was often only half full. Imagine how uninspired the crowd was during the halcyon days of Chris Mihm. And the Alamodome may in fact be the worst place to watch a basketball game in the history of the sport. A cavernous concrete football stadium built to hold 65,000, they would drape a gigantic blue curtain across the 50 yard line, poorly disguising the 30,000 empty seats. It was amidst the mediocrity of these locales that I received my education. You see, those arenas, however underwhelming they may have been, did have one huge advantage over any current NBA arena in the country: they had moments of silence.

In these quiet moments, in which no spectacle was there to distract me, my father taught me the particularities of the game...

The games were not just about mindless entertainment. They served as a space for discussion and debate. I’m not trying to hold them up as the New England town hall meetings A.J. Liebling refers to in his brilliant piece “Boxing with the Naked Eye.” The most important power we ever touched upon in conversation was the power forward. But the verbal back and forth encouraged under my father’s tutelage had value in its own right. It instilled a sense of reflection, and an appreciation for the game at a level beyond the final score."

A Real Baller's Mind

2008-07-10T09:37:00.001+08:00

I'll write the second part of my long sports weekend probably this upcoming weekend or after, depending on how I'm already feeling. No, I'm not sick, what I mean is when I'm already over all the emotional stress of rooting for sports figures and coming up short. It usually takes me a week or two, depending on the gravity of the game. Anyway, here's just a nice little link from Truehoop, which the site took from Eric Musselman's basketball blog. I don't know if he's still coaching in Sacramento, but EM seems to have a great basketball mind. Somehow, I would also like to be a coach someday, but I'm not sure how I'll get to that dream. Maybe I should start by learning how to edit game tapes, just like how Mike Brown and Erik Spoelstra started.

"The real key to excellence in both sports and business is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in your head; rather, it is mental toughness. Elite performers in both arenas thrive on pressure; they excel when the heat is turned up. Their rise to the top is the result of very careful planning—of setting and hitting hundreds of small goals. Elite performers use competition to hone their skills, and they reinvent themselves continually to stay ahead of the pack. Finally, whenever they score big wins, top performers take time to celebrate their victories."

Wow. MJ is like, the perfect example of a success-driven guy who possesses the right amount of abilities to succeed. Overall, a nice entry Coach E.

UAAP Notebook #1: The Ugly Game

2008-07-07T08:20:00.000+08:00

It was a pretty eventful sports weekend in my book, but I'll focus on two topics (one in this entry and another in the next) and just mention the others in passing.

Quinton "Rampage" Jackson lost to Forrest Griffin by unanimous decision. I found myself rooting just a bit for Rampage, and when he lost, I didn't feel all that bad. There are two points worth mentioning. First, Rampage is incredibly strong, almost animal-like. There was this one sequence wherein Griffin already had Rampage locked into a triangle choke, and at that moment, it seemed that the match would be over. But Jackson, with all his might, lifted Griffin's whole body and slammed it back to the ground to escape. Unbelievable how a guy can lift someone who's as heavy (or maybe heavier) as he is, and to be under tremendous pressure at that. Lastly, Griffin was the winner of the first season of The Ultimate Fighter reality show, and just like one of the UFC announcers said, it was a validation of how the UFC has grown and succeeded, and a testament to the legitimacy of the reality show and how it really produced a deserving champion.

The other topic is that Barangay Ginebra won. I really don't know the implications of that win, only because Red Bull won and took the last semis seat, but still, I've always rooted for Ginebra. So those are the two events in passing.

Blue Eagle Rising

Big win for Ateneo yesterday. I agree with Norman Black when he said that beating your arch rival is always a big win. And somehow, I get the feeling that since last season, Black has finally found a way to win now against Franz Pumaren, unlike in previous years. So I hope this year, having a better team, the Eagles will finally get over the hump.

The game was slow and tightly called, resulting in an outrageous number of trips to the free throw line for both teams. My friend L called up after the game all the way from Sing City, and after we celebrated the win for a few seconds, I found myself asking him, "Tingin mo fairly called naman? Ang dami kasi nating free throws e." He thought the game was evenly called by the refs, and I added that we earned (and thankfully made) our free throw attempts. You really can't take away the fact that there will be phantom fouls called each and every game, and I thought that both teams had their fair share of questionable calls. Maybe one of the things that I hated about the game though, was the excessive flopping of some players, with the referees falling for those acting jobs several times. Some La Salle players (I'm looking at you, the fake Rico) were trying to draw the charge, but the strangest thing about it was that a lot of those plays actually ended up hurting the offensive player more than the one who supposedly got barreled through. In short, some of those charges were to what we call "sahod," or an act of undercutting (is there even such a word?) the offensive players' legs as he's in the air making the shot. That is incredibly dangerous stuff.

Anyway, I just want to take note of several players and my observations of them during the game:

Chris Tiu - Tiuperman (God, I hate this nickname) was a scoring machine at the free throw line. I don't know how that sentence fits, but he was actually that, as he took I think 18 or 19 attempts and missed just two. That's Kobe-like or Lebron-like, or D-Wade in the 2006 NBA finals-like. Lucky for us that Franz Pumaren isn't the Pinoy version of Avery Johnson and Bro. Oca is definitely not Mark Cuban and his childish sneer, although there were some awkward shots of the La Salle brother restraining himself from launching some good 'ol profanity-laced tirade (believe me Bro when I say that you did the right thing). I'll say this about Chris though - he probably has the most lethal and legit shot fake in the college game. Either it automatically baits the defender to launch his feet off the air, or if they don't bite, somehow the pump fake always lifts their toes a few centimeters, which is enough time for someone like Chris to make a good pass, blow by his defender, or take the shot himself. Maybe Tiu's good looks make the opponent say, "Ok pretty Chinese boy, I'm gonna embarass your sorry ass in this game and show the world that basketball is an ugly man's game," only, Chris is so savvy and smart as a shooter, he also believes that his defender will bite on every single fake and uses it to maximum effect. Five stars for the fifth year.

Rabeh Al-Hussaini - Black finally recognizes that Rabeh has a really soft touch for a big man, and his hook shots will utilize those feathery fingers. I agree with some observers that he probably has one of the worst hands among big men, and an even worse motor than a Manny Pacquiao watching the game (He looked utterly disconnected and bored out there, the cameramen didn't even bother focusing on him when the game got more exciting in the later stages. I don't blame the man, really. He's a multi-millionaire international celebrity and he gets treated to this foul-fest of a game).

Eric Salamat - He looked a lot like Paul Lee out there, or was it Paul Lee looking more like Eric Salamat, and Salamat looking more like himself? Did that even make sense to you? Or will it make more sense if I said that Salamat looked a lot like Kokey the loony alien out there? Why don't people from the UAAP bring up funny stuff once in awhile? I miss watching the games live with my best buds, dammit. They always seem to have something hilarious to say every game.

Kirk Long - The point guard project is not quite turning out to be a good idea, in the first game at least. Hopefully we'll see better results.

Yuri Escueta - Damn, he looked really poised out there. He better be, only Badjie del Rosario had the poise of a high school student even when his sorry butt already played 25 years of college ball.

Ryan Buenafe - It's been said a lot of times but I'll say it again for irritating measure: this kid is fearless. I bet if he didn't take up basketball, he'd take up boxing and beat the hell out of Joshua Webb, who'll probably win the award for unintentional comedy (as popularized by Bill Simmons) this season. I mean, are you kidding me? Why is it that his face looks bewildered at first and then turns into an open-mouthed smile and then bewildered again? Does he even know this? Can somebody please tell him? Please? When Buenafe gets the hang of things and develops a decent jumpshot, he'll be kicking Hyram Bagatsing's nuts for the next few seasons.

Vince Burke - This guy looks a lot like Kirk Long from afar, but I think he has a better jumpshot than Kirk, which is just horribly wrong on all angles. Kirk, you're a guard and you're WHITE for heaven's sake, dead-eye shooting should be second nature like breathing! Man, having two legitimate white guys on the team make me giddy.

Nico Salva - I hope he doesn't imitate the trajectory of JC Intal's college career because it seems like it so far. JC became a big-time player though, so maybe I shouldn't complain.

Justin Chua - Is this guy really Gameface's Player of the Year? Or is he the proverbial "raw talent/the Norman Black Project" on the roster that Ateneo always seems to have every season?

JVee Casio - Probably the second-worst spelled name behind Jonathan's Jahnke. But seriously, this little man's a big-time player who has really improved a lot. He's like Chris Tiu with the similar ice in his veins and scary shooting ability, only JVee has two hands and can drive incredibly strong to the basket and finish with flair. He's also the only DLSU player I've ever liked, a kind person in a sea of wolves. That's why I respect his game and I'm showing him some man-love right now. I wish he was my little brother.

LA Revilla - I was actually scared of this rookie during the preseason, but it's just tough for such a little man to make a big impact. He's good though, and I never doubt the coaching of the devil himself. Hold on to your soul little boy, don't hand it over without a fight.

Rico Maierhofer - He's a legit athlete but a stubborn one, although I'm not complaining if he just takes jumpers all the time instead of blowing by past Ateneo's lead-footed bigs. Jobe gave him a good shot to the gut at one point and Rico responded with a looping kick while tumbling on his back. I love MMA. What? This is basketball? Really?

PJ Barua - Boom Gonzales said "It's good to finally see this guy healthy." I mean, Boom, seriously, shouldn't he be locked up or something? This guy looks like he's going to murder someone this season. I'm betting one of my office vacation leaves to predict that Barua will be ejected at least once during the season. I'm serious, this dude belongs to a correctional facility. Bagatsing, you better be careful because you're darned close. I got my eyes on you for knocking Chris' legs out and almost single-handedly earning the repressed hate of all female Ateneans, most of whom still dream about getting Tiu for a boyfriend, to this very day.

In the end, a win is a win. Celebrations are still premature though. Let's just see how the Eagles will hold up for the next few games. Adamson is up this Thursday, so we should see if Michael Galinato is the second coming of Ken Bono or the second coming of Joel "El Aparador" Dualan. I'm hoping for the latter, obviously.

To my UAAP boys, who I sorely miss watching games with: I'm seriously thinking of Kokey as my season pick. This early.

When Less Means More

2008-07-04T09:50:00.000+08:00

From Zero to (maybe) Hero.

Here's an interesting bit of basketball news from the Washington Post I read this morning:

"Arenas Agrees to Take Around $16 Million Less

One quote from Gilbert Arenas says it all: "What can I do for my family with $127 million that I can't do with $111 million?"

Arenas told me a little while ago that he has agreed to a six-year, $111 million contract. The Wiz had offered the maximum level contract, one that would have paid him between $125 to $127 million over six years. Arenas said he is willing to take less in order to help the Wizards have room to add key pieces over the next few seasons. The deal still has to be finalized once the league releases salary cap and luxury tax numbers next week but Arenas said his mind is made up.

"We have another room to add a piece," Arenas said. "There is a window of opportunity open for us. Adding key pieces leads to championships and that's what we all want."

I don't exactly awe at Gil for his antics and quirkiness, but I sincerely admire Agent Zero for this move (Bong, your boy's got a brain, at least I'll give him that). In fact, I've always admired players taking less money if that means a better chance for their team to win. Maybe that's why I can't bring myself to like likable players such as KG and Shaq, because they've always taken more than half of the pie, and left the bits and crumbs for other teammates. Sure, KG is a hell of a player and a freak of basketball nature, but he also had something to do with Minnesota's inability to get top-flight help for him. And one of those reasons was KG's cap-killing contract. I don't know exactly what it was worth, but I've read somewhere that it was a long six-year deal and was one of the last, if not the last, remnants of the ABA, cap-free era. Of course, aside from that, KG is a major choker.

I've always wondered how the NBA won't imitate the flexibility of the NFL's salary cap structure, the way it enables players to restructure their contracts so as to accomodate other players within the cap. And the New England Patriots, with all-world QB Tom Brady leading the way, were probably the best at that. In the NBA, despite no salary structuring, San Antonio and its franchise players resemble the closest thing. I think just two seasons ago, Duncan agreed to an extension with less money in order to give the Spurs some flexibility going forward. Now that is a sign of a true leader. In the end, people won't remember you by how much money you made, but by how many championships you've won. Let KG and Shaq get their boatloads of cash and a chip here or two, but still, the ultimate acclaim and respect will go to the one who leads by example, on and off the court. We know that in life, in order to be the best, you've got to make some sacrifices. Hats off to the people who strive towards that ideal.

(Hopeful) Spur of the Moment

2008-07-03T16:14:00.001+08:00

It's a fact that I'm a Spurs fan. I can't remember when, but if I'm gonna take a guess, it came during the time when they drafted Tim Duncan. A friend and I were betting on TD's draft class, trying to find who has the clearer crystal ball and predict the best player out of that batch. Naturally, I took TD and not only did he wind up as Rookie of the Year, he also ended up becoming the BEST POWER FORWARD TO EVER PLAY THE GAME of basketball. Boom. Oh, and his career's not over yet. I hope one or two more titles can come, so he can totally leave Shaq Fu and his sorry a** in the dust.

Speaking of the Spurs, since it's the NBA offseason, I'm just wishing that they indeed land Corey Magette. Damn, that would top any free agent signings, beating even that of Baron Davis going to the LA Clippers. Magette would be enough I think, to get SA over the top. Like the guys over there at Pounding the Rock (poundingtherock.com), I'm giddy over the possibility of getting a player of Corey's caliber. And, to sign a 20+ point scorer with a Paul Pierce-like ability to get to the free throw line for only the mid-level exception? Crazy stuff. But it's winning time Mr. Magette, and if you want to win the big one, you have to make sacrifices, right? Go Spurs Go!

The Nerve-Wracking Effect of Being A Sports Fan

2008-07-03T09:22:00.000+08:00

The symbol of beauty and grace in sports.

The Wimbledon Finals are again fast approaching, and again, my heart is always thumping because of nervousness. Admittedly, Rafael Nadal is closer to beating Roger Federer, for me the greatest tennis player of all time, and on the verge of taking away Roger's several years of dominance in the men's tour. I'll key in on everything and my love for watching the game of tennis after the whole tournament's over. For now, here is one of the best pieces I've ever read, an article from The New York Times, and it concerns the greatest of them all:

Federer as Religious Experience
By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Published: August 20, 2006

Correction Appended

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound. “60 Minutes” did a feature on him just last year. Anything you want to know about Mr. Roger N.M.I. Federer — his background, his home town of Basel, Switzerland, his parents’ sane and unexploitative support of his talent, his junior tennis career, his early problems with fragility and temper, his beloved junior coach, how that coach’s accidental death in 2002 both shattered and annealed Federer and helped make him what he now is, Federer’s 39 career singles titles, his eight Grand Slams, his unusually steady and mature commitment to the girlfriend who travels with him (which on the men’s tour is rare) and handles his affairs (which on the men’s tour is unheard of), his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess — it’s all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out.

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.” It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver’s phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.(1)

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations. Plus Nadal is also Federer’s nemesis and the big surprise of this year’s Wimbledon, since he’s a clay-court specialist and no one expected him to make it past the first few rounds here. Whereas Federer, through the semifinals, has provided no surprise or competitive drama at all. He’s outplayed each opponent so completely that the TV and print press are worried his matches are dull and can’t compete effectively with the nationalist fervor of the World Cup.(2)

July 9’s men’s final, though, is everyone’s dream. Nadal vs. Federer is a replay of last month’s French Open final, which Nadal won. Federer has so far lost only four matches all year, but they’ve all been to Nadal. Still, most of these matches have been on slow clay, Nadal’s best surface. Grass is Federer’s best. On the other hand, the first week’s heat has baked out some of the Wimbledon courts’ slickness and made them slower. There’s also the fact that Nadal has adjusted his clay-based game to grass — moving in closer to the baseline on his groundstrokes, amping up his serve, overcoming his allergy to the net. He just about disemboweled Agassi in the third round. The networks are in ecstasies. Before the match, on Centre Court, behind the glass slits above the south backstop, as the linesmen are coming out on court in their new Ralph Lauren uniforms that look so much like children’s navalwear, the broadcast commentators can be seen practically bouncing up and down in their chairs. This Wimbledon final’s got the revenge narrative, the king-versus-regicide dynamic, the stark character contrasts. It’s the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who’s taken the modern power-baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who’s transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot-speed, but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man. A British sportswriter, exulting with his mates in the press section, says, twice, “It’s going to be a war.”

Plus it’s in the cathedral of Centre Court. And the men’s final is always on the fortnight’s second Sunday, the symbolism of which Wimbledon emphasizes by always omitting play on the first Sunday. And the spattery gale that has knocked over parking signs and everted umbrellas all morning suddenly quits an hour before match time, the sun emerging just as Centre Court’s tarp is rolled back and the net posts driven home.

Federer and Nadal come out to applause, make their ritual bows to the nobles’ box. The Swiss is in the buttermilk-colored sport coat that Nike’s gotten him to wear for Wimbledon this year. On Federer, and perhaps on him alone, it doesn’t look absurd with shorts and sneakers. The Spaniard eschews all warm-up clothing, so you have to look at his muscles right away. He and the Swiss are both in all-Nike, up to the very same kind of tied white Nike hankie with the swoosh positioned above the third eye. Nadal tucks his hair under his hankie, but Federer doesn’t, and smoothing and fussing with the bits of hair that fall over the hankie is the main Federer tic TV viewers get to see; likewise Nadal’s obsessive retreat to the ballboy’s towel between points. There happen to be other tics and habits, though, tiny perks of live viewing. There’s the great care Roger Federer takes to hang the sport coat over his spare courtside chair’s back, just so, to keep it from wrinkling — he’s done this before each match here, and something about it seems childlike and weirdly sweet. Or the way he inevitably changes out his racket sometime in the second set, the new one always in the same clear plastic bag closed with blue tape, which he takes off carefully and always hands to a ballboy to dispose of. There’s Nadal’s habit of constantly picking his long shorts out of his bottom as he bounces the ball before serving, his way of always cutting his eyes warily from side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict expecting to be shanked. And something odd on the Swiss’s serve, if you look very closely. Holding ball and racket out in front, just before starting the motion, Federer always places the ball precisely in the V-shaped gap of the racket’s throat, just below the head, just for an instant. If the fit isn’t perfect, he adjusts the ball until it is. It happens very fast, but also every time, on both first serves and second.

Nadal and Federer now warm each other up for precisely five minutes; the umpire keeps time. There’s a very definite order and etiquette to these pro warm-ups, which is something that television has decided you’re not interested in seeing. Centre Court holds 13,000 and change. Another several thousand have done what people here do willingly every year, which is to pay a stiff general admission at the gate and then gather, with hampers and mosquito spray, to watch the match on an enormous TV screen outside Court 1. Your guess here is probably as good as anyone’s.

Right before play, up at the net, there’s a ceremonial coin-toss to see who’ll serve first. It’s another Wimbledon ritual. The honorary coin-tosser this year is William Caines, assisted by the umpire and tournament referee. William Caines is a 7-year-old from Kent who contracted liver cancer at age 2 and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo. He’s here representing Cancer Research UK. He’s blond and pink-cheeked and comes up to about Federer’s waist. The crowd roars its approval of the re-enacted toss. Federer smiles distantly the whole time. Nadal, just across the net, keeps dancing in place like a boxer, swinging his arms from side to side. I’m not sure whether the U.S. networks show the coin-toss or not, whether this ceremony’s part of their contractual obligation or whether they get to cut to commercial. As William’s ushered off, there’s more cheering, but it’s scattered and disorganized; most of the crowd can’t quite tell what to do. It’s like once the ritual’s over, the reality of why this child was part of it sinks in. There’s a feeling of something important, something both uncomfortable and not, about a child with cancer tossing this dream-final’s coin. The feeling, what-all it might mean, has a tip-of-the-tongue-type quality that remains elusive for at least the first two sets.(3)

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

One thing it is not is televisable. At least not entirely. TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy. Television’s slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we’re not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what’s lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. This loss is simple to explain. TV’s priority, during a point, is coverage of the whole court, a comprehensive view, so that viewers can see both players and the overall geometry of the exchange. Television therefore chooses a specular vantage that is overhead and behind one baseline. You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court. This perspective, as any art student will tell you, “foreshortens” the court. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen’s image is only 2-D. The dimension that’s lost (or rather distorted) on the screen is the real court’s length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot’s pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold. That may sound abstract or overblown, in which case by all means go in person to some professional tournament — especially to the outer courts in early rounds, where you can sit 20 feet from the sideline — and sample the difference for yourself. If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving,(4) how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover. And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.

Interestingly, what is less obscured in TV coverage is Federer’s intelligence, since this intelligence often manifests as angle. Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision, and television’s perspective is perfect for viewing and reviewing these Federer Moments. What’s harder to appreciate on TV is that these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere — they’re often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer’s manipulation of opponents’ positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce. And understanding how and why Federer is able to move other world-class athletes around this way requires, in turn, a better technical understanding of the modern power-baseline game than TV — again — is set up to provide.

Wimbledon is strange. Verily it is the game’s Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren’t so intent on reminding you over and over that it’s the cathedral of tennis. There’s a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and -branding. It’s a bit like the sort of authority figure whose office wall has every last plaque, diploma, and award he’s ever gotten, and every time you come into the office you’re forced to look at the wall and say something to indicate that you’re impressed. Wimbledon’s own walls, along nearly every significant corridor and passage, are lined with posters and signs featuring shots of past champions, lists of Wimbledon facts and trivia, historic lore, and so on. Some of this stuff is interesting; some is just odd. The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, for instance, has a collection of all the various kinds of rackets used here through the decades, and one of the many signs along the Level 2 passage of the Millennium Building(5) promotes this exhibition with both photos and didactic text, a kind of History of the Racket. Here, sic, is the climactic end of this text:

Today’s lightweight frames made of space-age materials like graphite, boron, titanium and ceramics, with larger heads — mid-size (90-95 square inches) and over-size (110 square inches) — have totally transformed the character of the game. Nowadays it is the powerful hitters who dominate with heavy topspin. Serve-and-volley players and those who rely on subtlety and touch have virtually disappeared.

It seems odd, to say the least, that such a diagnosis continues to hang here so prominently in the fourth year of Federer’s reign over Wimbledon, since the Swiss has brought to men’s tennis degrees of touch and subtlety unseen since (at least) the days of McEnroe’s prime. But the sign’s really just a testament to the power of dogma. For almost two decades, the party line’s been that certain advances in racket technology, conditioning, and weight training have transformed pro tennis from a game of quickness and finesse into one of athleticism and brute power. And as an etiology of today’s power-baseline game, this party line is broadly accurate. Today’s pros truly are measurably bigger, stronger, and better conditioned,(6) and high-tech composite rackets really have increased their capacities for pace and spin. How, then, someone of Federer’s consummate finesse has come to dominate the men’s tour is a source of wide and dogmatic confusion.

There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer’s ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan,(7) who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss’s will — there’s real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After a July 7 semifinal in which Federer destroyed Jonas Bjorkman — not just beat him, destroyed him — and just before a requisite post-match news conference in which Bjorkman, who’s friendly with Federer, says he was pleased to “have the best seat in the house” to watch the Swiss “play the nearest to perfection you can play tennis,” Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was “like a bowling ball or basketball.” He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better, to confirm that he’s surprised by how unusually well he played today; but he’s also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won’t experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.(8)

Velocity’s just one part of it. Now we’re getting technical. Tennis is often called a “game of inches,” but the cliché is mostly referring to where a shot lands. In terms of a player’s hitting an incoming ball, tennis is actually more a game of micrometers: vanishingly tiny changes around the moment of impact will have large effects on how and where the ball travels. The same principle explains why even the smallest imprecision in aiming a rifle will still cause a miss if the target’s far enough away.

By way of illustration, let’s slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner’s baseline. A ball is served to your forehand — you pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball’s incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualizing up to where you’re about halfway into the stroke’s forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court versus down-the-line return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke’s motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you’re swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent’s court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course — like, there’s heavy topspin vs. light topspin, or sharply cross-court vs. only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you’re allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you’re using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight’s moving forward, and whether you’re able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent’s doing after he serves. These all matter, too. Plus there’s the fact that you’re not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you — coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic’s first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it’s 78 feet from Ancic’s baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you.(9) This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

The upshot is that pro tennis involves intervals of time too brief for deliberate action. Temporally, we’re more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought. And yet an effective return of serve depends on a large set of decisions and physical adjustments that are a whole lot more involved and intentional than blinking, jumping when startled, etc.

Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what’s sometimes called “the kinesthetic sense,” meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on. For promising junior players, refining the kinesthetic sense is the main goal of the extreme daily practice regimens we often hear about.(10) The training here is both muscular and neurological. Hitting thousands of strokes, day after day, develops the ability to do by “feel” what cannot be done by regular conscious thought. Repetitive practice like this often looks tedious or even cruel to an outsider, but the outsider can’t feel what’s going on inside the player — tiny adjustments, over and over, and a sense of each change’s effects that gets more and more acute even as it recedes from normal consciousness.(11)

The time and discipline required for serious kinesthetic training are one reason why top pros are usually people who’ve devoted most of their waking lives to tennis, starting (at the very latest) in their early teens. It was, for example, at age 13 that Roger Federer finally gave up soccer, and a recognizable childhood, and entered Switzerland’s national tennis training center in Ecublens. At 16, he dropped out of classroom studies and started serious international competition.

It was only weeks after quitting school that Federer won Junior Wimbledon. Obviously, this is something that not every junior who devotes himself to tennis can do. Just as obviously, then, there is more than time and training involved — there is also sheer talent, and degrees of it. Extraordinary kinesthetic ability must be present (and measurable) in a kid just to make the years of practice and training worthwhile...but from there, over time, the cream starts to rise and separate. So one type of technical explanation for Federer’s dominion is that he’s just a bit more kinesthetically talented than the other male pros. Only a little bit, since everyone in the Top 100 is himself kinesthetically gifted — but then, tennis is a game of inches.

This answer is plausible but incomplete. It would probably not have been incomplete in 1980. In 2006, though, it’s fair to ask why this kind of talent still matters so much. Recall what is true about dogma and Wimbledon’s sign. Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros who’ve ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that’s said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.

According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’s backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine...a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child’s question — the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn’t be grotesque?

It’s 2-1 Nadal in the final’s second set, and he’s serving. Federer won the first set at love but then flagged a bit, as he sometimes does, and is quickly down a break. Now, on Nadal’s ad, there’s a 16-stroke point. Nadal is serving a lot faster than he did in Paris, and this one’s down the center. Federer floats a soft forehand high over the net, which he can get away with because Nadal never comes in behind his serve. The Spaniard now hits a characteristically heavy topspin forehand deep to Federer’s backhand; Federer comes back with an even heavier topspin backhand, almost a clay-court shot. It’s unexpected and backs Nadal up, slightly, and his response is a low hard short ball that lands just past the service line’s T on Federer’s forehand side. Against most other opponents, Federer could simply end the point on a ball like this, but one reason Nadal gives him trouble is that he’s faster than the others, can get to stuff they can’t; and so Federer here just hits a flat, medium-hard cross-court forehand, going not for a winner but for a low, shallowly angled ball that forces Nadal up and out to the deuce side, his backhand. Nadal, on the run, backhands it hard down the line to Federer’s backhand; Federer slices it right back down the same line, slow and floaty with backspin, making Nadal come back to the same spot. Nadal slices the ball right back — three shots now all down the same line — and Federer slices the ball back to the same spot yet again, this one even slower and floatier, and Nadal gets planted and hits a big two-hander back down the same line — it’s like Nadal’s camped out now on his deuce side; he’s no longer moving all the way back to the baseline’s center between shots; Federer’s hypnotized him a little. Federer now hits a very hard, deep topspin backhand, the kind that hisses, to a point just slightly on the ad side of Nadal’s baseline, which Nadal gets to and forehands cross-court; and Federer responds with an even harder, heavier cross-court backhand, baseline-deep and moving so fast that Nadal has to hit the forehand off his back foot and then scramble to get back to center as the shot lands maybe two feet short on Federer’s backhand side again. Federer steps to this ball and now hits a totally different cross-court backhand, this one much shorter and sharper-angled, an angle no one would anticipate, and so heavy and blurred with topspin that it lands shallow and just inside the sideline and takes off hard after the bounce, and Nadal can’t move in to cut it off and can’t get to it laterally along the baseline, because of all the angle and topspin — end of point. It’s a spectacular winner, a Federer Moment; but watching it live, you can see that it’s also a winner that Federer started setting up four or even five shots earlier. Everything after that first down-the-line slice was designed by the Swiss to maneuver Nadal and lull him and then disrupt his rhythm and balance and open up that last, unimaginable angle — an angle that would have been impossible without extreme topspin.

Extreme topspin is the hallmark of today’s power-baseline game. This is something that Wimbledon’s sign gets right.(12) Why topspin is so key, though, is not commonly understood. What’s commonly understood is that high-tech composite rackets impart much more pace to the ball, rather like aluminum baseball bats as opposed to good old lumber. But that dogma is false. The truth is that, at the same tensile strength, carbon-based composites are lighter than wood, and this allows modern rackets to be a couple ounces lighter and at least an inch wider across the face than the vintage Kramer and Maxply. It’s the width of the face that’s vital. A wider face means there’s more total string area, which means the sweet spot’s bigger. With a composite racket, you don’t have to meet the ball in the precise geometric center of the strings in order to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that (recall) requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flat through it — this was quite hard to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot. Composites’ lighter, wider heads and more generous centers let players swing faster and put way more topspin on the ball...and, in turn, the more topspin you put on the ball, the harder you can hit it, because there’s more margin for error. Topspin causes the ball to pass high over the net, describe a sharp arc, and come down fast into the opponent’s court (instead of maybe soaring out).

So the basic formula here is that composite rackets enable topspin, which in turn enables groundstrokes vastly faster and harder than 20 years ago — it’s common now to see male pros pulled up off the ground and halfway around in the air by the force of their strokes, which in the old days was something one saw only in Jimmy Connors.

Connors was not, by the way, the father of the power-baseline game. He whaled mightily from the baseline, true, but his groundstrokes were flat and spinless and had to pass very low over the net. Nor was Bjorn Borg a true power-baseliner. Both Borg and Connors played specialized versions of the classic baseline game, which had evolved as a counterforce to the even more classic serve-and-volley game, which was itself the dominant form of men’s power tennis for decades, and of which John McEnroe was the greatest modern exponent. You probably know all this, and may also know that McEnroe toppled Borg and then more or less ruled the men’s game until the appearance, around the mid-1980’s, of (a) modern composite rackets(13) and (b) Ivan Lendl, who played with an early form of composite and was the true progenitor of power-baseline tennis.(14)

Ivan Lendl was the first top pro whose strokes and tactics appeared to be designed around the special capacities of the composite racket. His goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstrokes, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball. The blend of pace and topspin also allowed Lendl to do something that proved crucial to the advent of the power-baseline game. He could pull off radical, extraordinary angles on hard-hit groundstrokes, mainly because of the speed with which heavy topspin makes the ball dip and land without going wide. In retrospect, this changed the whole physics of aggressive tennis. For decades, it had been angle that made the serve-and-volley game so lethal. The closer one is to the net, the more of the opponent’s court is open — the classic advantage of volleying was that you could hit angles that would go way wide if attempted from the baseline or midcourt. But topspin on a groundstroke, if it’s really extreme, can bring the ball down fast and shallow enough to exploit many of these same angles. Especially if the groundstroke you’re hitting is off a somewhat short ball — the shorter the ball, the more angles are possible. Pace, topspin, and aggressive baseline angles: and lo, it’s the power-baseline game.

It wasn’t that Ivan Lendl was an immortally great tennis player. He was simply the first top pro to demonstrate what heavy topspin and raw power could achieve from the baseline. And, most important, the achievement was replicable, just like the composite racket. Past a certain threshold of physical talent and training, the main requirements were athleticism, aggression, and superior strength and conditioning. The result (omitting various complications and subspecialties(15)) has been men’s pro tennis for the last 20 years: ever bigger, stronger, fitter players generating unprecedented pace and topspin off the ground, trying to force the short or weak ball that they can put away.

Illustrative stat: When Lleyton Hewitt defeated David Nalbandian in the 2002 Wimbledon men’s final, there was not one single serve-and-volley point.(16)

The generic power-baseline game is not boring — certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he’s shown it from within the modern game.

This within is what’s important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions like touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it’s not either/or. The Swiss has every bit of Lendl and Agassi’s pace on his groundstrokes, and leaves the ground when he swings, and can out-hit even Nadal from the backcourt.(17) What’s strange and wrong about Wimbledon’s sign, really, is its overall dolorous tone. Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It’s just that that’s not all he is. There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace — all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.

Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it’s not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead — all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Correction: Aug. 27, 2006

An article in PLAY magazine last Sunday about the tennis player Roger Federer referred incompletely to a point between Federer and Andre Agassi in the 2005 United States Open final and incorrectly described Agassi’s position on the final shot of the point. There was an exchange of groundstrokes in the middle of the point that was not described. And Agassi remained at the baseline on Federer’s winning shot; he did not go to the net.

Waiting For A Star To Fall

2008-06-23T14:18:00.000+08:00

A Quote from an interview with Andre Miller, point guard for the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers:

"People look at basketball the wrong way. Some parents look at basketball the wrong way. They feel like if their kids can score the ball that their kid is going to be the next Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. What I want to give back to the game is how to play the right way. Everybody can't be Kobe or LeBron. Be able to make simple plays and communicate. Be able to not be an individual. You have to play as a team. If you play it the right way, everybody is gonna get the attention. There is always going to be somebody who gets more exposure because of their talent. Just as they notice that star they notice the little things that makes the team get better. People see that eventually. ... You have role players, you have stars and you have the blue collar worker. The way this league is, it promotes stars. That's how the league makes their money. I think a star in this league is a guy that can make all his teammates better, that's willing to communicate and is willing to make plays in the clutch. A leader and a star is also a guy that when things aren't going right is able to step up and say these are the things we can do right as a team. A star is also someone who can admit when they aren't playing to their potential and accept criticism."

I think Andre Miller is spot-on with this remark (although it also has been echoed mostly by other coaches and players), but also, it points out to the truth at how basketball has been promoted for several years now: that the game is all about the stars. And that's how most of the young kids are being developed nowadays, to be able to score and dazzle on the court, forgetting how important it is to be a team player.

However, I'm happy that this superstar mentality is hardly existent in the UAAP (or NCAA for that matter). College teams know they need to work as one if they are to win. I asked a friend once, why there seems to be a lack of "franchise" players or rookies in the collegiate ranks, unlike before when we had Kenneth Duremdes, Marlou Aquino and Benjie Paras-types of players dominating. Maybe the last one was Arwind Santos, and he wasn't that dominating compared to the ones they had before. And I think I have my answer - that the individual skills are now mostly covered because supposed "star" players are forced to play in a team concept. You can say that this absolutely limits the emergence of superstars, but I guess that's the price you pay for working in harmony as a basketball team. Plus, if the system wins championships, why not continue to do it?

I'm thinking how Ryan Buenafe, the prized rookie of Ateneo this season, can truly show off his supreme talent if his coach releases the reigns on him. But I'm also worried that it might alienate his other teammates. Which is why I believe in Phil Jackson's philosophy of considering other players in the mix, letting them have a stake at the team's ultimate goal. More often than not, this philosophy is also similar in life, and how we work with other people towards accomplishing our own goals. But going back to Buenafe, I hope he gets to become the star defined by Andre Miller. That'd be the greatest thing for Ateneo basketball (not Enrico Villanueva getting big-headed about his King Eagle status).

Kobe came up short in the Finals, and probably because his communication style wasn't exactly the best kind to use, just missed out on making his younger teammates better on the biggest stage, and didn't exactly hit clutch shots every time. He's no Jordan, for sure. But I'd wish he'd reflect on the true meaning of a leader during the offseason, and bounce back. In two years, because the Spurs are going to win next season. Haha.

Role Player's Basketball Diary #1

2008-06-21T18:17:00.000+08:00

6.19.2008
The Deep Gash

We played our second game in as many weeks in the Company Basketball Tournament. We faced Team Admin (or the Purple team), which I initially thought matched up better for us than Ayala (Black), just by the reasons that the height advantage wasn't much of a factor and that they can't be as overpowering as the Ayala men were.

Because I was too giddy with the thought of having a better match-up, we lost focus on what the players on the other team can do. First on that list was J, who absolutely killed us with his talent. He's perhaps the most talented player in our little league (which consists of only 3 teams), despite the entire league not having too much talent overall. But that's not to downplay J's abilities at all. Maybe his thin frame has always been a weakness when playing the big boys of Ayala, but I think his explosiveness and ability to carry the ball, create off the dribble and shoot well-placed close-range jumpers definitely make him difficult to guard.

But the guy who really made the difference in that game was Dr, who was probably the craftiest guy on the floor. As we Filipinos like to call it, "magulang," but Do described it better by qualifying it as "tamang gulang," which means something like putting in the right amount of veteran savvy without getting caught by the refs. He bumped and clawed his way to scoring a lot of points, which put us in a big hole and ultimately deflated our team's collective spirit.

I only played a few minutes that game, maybe because I was still coughing a lot and my lungs didn't seem up to speed. I was also concerned about managing the playing time of everyone, to ensure that most would be able to play and wouldn't feel that they wasted their time coming to Makati. Of course, it didn't help that I was playing a terrible game. I shot two wide-open threes that completely missed the rim... and to think shooting was supposedly my only calling card.

I was proud, however, of my defense on Dr. I think after he scored on my side of the court twice, I figured I've already seen that style of play before, most notably from R (a good friend), who's a lot more athletic, had twice as many moves, and had this mid-range runner that was almost impossible to block if you're not as athletic as he was (I saw N block that shot a few times, which was pretty amazing). I tried telling my strategy to Rh - to body up on Dr, block his path just as he makes his move and try to stop him from getting into the paint and launching his baby jumper from close range. Either my advice fell on deaf ears or we just got outworked badly and didn't have the right amount of energy during the game.

As I watched the game unfold from the sidelines, I realized how untalented we were. Guys were completely airballing shots from point-blank range, dribbling out-of-control and turning the ball over a thousand times it seemed. Ri, who was supposed to be our go-to scorer, couldn't buy a bucket and kept on shooting heavily contested shots. He shot them in the paint, which was something I had wanted him to do more, but he lacked maybe the mental make-up to create space for himself by pump faking or what have you. The guards were also making tons of mistakes, not getting the ball inside to our bigs, not driving to the hoop when the other team's bigs were resting, or driving wildly to the basket without any plan in mind. For a while there I thought I was Bt and I was seeing our ABL team there, madly running about like headless chickens.

Still, despite our lack of talent, we gave ourselves a chance in our first game versus Ayala. I think it was a combination of the opponent missing a lot of close-range shots, and us playing like there was no tomorrow. But for today, we weren't as lucky and the refs didn't exactly give us favorable calls.

All throughout the blowout loss, I kept saying to myself that I wish I had players that knew how to play. If someone lacked the skills, at least he knew how to play within the team concept. What probably killed us the most, as one of my teammates put it, was our lack of chemistry and trust with one another. This is one of the most common problems in team sports, and probably one of the hardest things to achieve. Maybe because achieving chemistry is one of the most important keys to victory - sometimes, it even trumps talent.

During the fourth quarter of our game against Ayala, for a moment I saw glimpses of that potential to play together, play calmly, play in control, and play as one unit. But I also saw how adrenaline, the heat of the moment, and perhaps a little overconfidence and a small taste of success, can kill that oneness. In the dying seconds, Rl just made a very lucky three point shot, which he banked home and gave us a precarious one-point lead with about 20 seconds to go. We would then end up fouling Dn from Ayala, who made both free throws (he actually missed the second but was given another after a lane violation) to recapture the lead. We had around 10 seconds, and we got the ball quickly to half court with about 6 seconds remaining. Rl was given the ball in the 3-point area, pump faked and then drove left towards the baseline, and was met by two defenders. G and I were open outside - WIDE OPEN - and we kept on shouting at him to pass. But he ended up throwing a wild shot with the two defenders in his face, with the ball hitting nothing, not even close to the back board.

Initially I was angry at him (although I didn't tell him, I just kept it to myself) for reverting to me-mode, because a lot of guys were open that time and could've made a better shot. But eventually, I understood that that was what a little success can do. Suddenly, you feel so confident and you wanted to be the hero. I guess there's both some good and bad in that, but maybe in our case, as just casual basketball players, the stakes aren't really high and we can afford choosing the mistake.

But the point I want to make now is that, for such a very under-talented team, we made life a bit more difficult for the other, more talented team because of our common desire and will to win. Those things brought us together even if for mere stretches, but ultimately, we also found out that you'll need to sustain a certain level of togetherness consistently to be able to beat a good team. Of course, it won't hurt to have better basketball players, too.

To end, I want to say that despite getting overwhelmed in our second game, I found something good during the loss. I think that despite our lack of talent, we play hard and with energy. This was evidenced by G, who seemed to be all over the court and was great in defense, had he not bumped and cut his chin against one of the most physical players in the company. Now, the hard part is to be able to channel that energy and hardwork into team play, and for us to play intelligently and under control. The shortage on skills will be there, but hopefully we can overcome it with our will to win, and also, maybe a little bit of luck. Two more games to go that are must-win, we'll see what happens.

The First Of A Future

2008-06-19T10:37:00.000+08:00

I've been inspired to put this site up by many factors. First is after picking up one of Phil Jackson's books, Sacred Hoops. (as of this writing, I just started reading it) It's very serendipitous how I came about it. I was initially looking for a copy of Phil's other book, The Last Season, maybe in an effort how to understand Kobe Bryant's mind, part of the frenzy that was the Boston-LA reunion in the recently concluded NBA Finals. I was sifting through Amazon.com, and even though Filipinos weren't allowed to order from there, I stumbled onto Sacred Hoops. I went looking for the two books by calling up bookstores here in the country, and I ended up with Sacred Hoops just because a copy of The Last Season, my first choice, was nowhere to be found. God is amazing.

Second, I revisited just recently my issue of not knowing what I want to do in life. I eventually figured that I wanted to do, just for kicks at least, two things that I've always enjoyed, which were basketball and writing. So here we are. I leave to the higher power whatever happens to me from hereon.

Just to keep things in perspective, I intend this site to keep track of my experiences as a casual basketball player (i.e. I play ball occassionally... like once a week or at worst, once a month), and a casual sports fan. I also figured that out of these experiences, I can take some learnings which I might later on need in life. So in effect, a lot of Phil's experiences have moved me to try something similar on my own. It's just also something that I thought of doing to express my love for sports, how these man-made spectacles manage to bring the best and worst out of people, athletes and fans alike, and how they resemble the triumphs and tribulations of real-life.

And so I embark on this simple project, without expectations - just a guy writing for literature's and life's sake.