La Salle-Ateneo: A duel beyond basketball

Well, what a welcome change! We Filipinos have been wrestling with our demons for years. Ours was a tale of Job instead of a tale of jollity. It bade all of us to grope in the tunnel, wondering what would give at the end – the light of Providence or the light of an onrushing train. We hardly suspected something was building at the corners of the national neighborhood. Voila! It was basketball lifting the folds of its skirts, yielding the first gleam of enchantment, yielding spectator joy and wholesome entertainment, yielding a giant balloon that lofted all of us to dreamland.

It wasn’t just basketball. It wasn’t just the UAAP cage championship series. It wasn’t just the nation’s favorite sport. It was all of that and more. It was the duel of two titans, two prestigious Catholic universities – La Salle and Ateneo – the two bluebloods of private academe closest to the clouds, and, yes, God. Add the University of the Philippines of course, the state university. And you had all three tucked in the folds of the brightest and the best. But UP was not a titan in sports as La Salle and Ateneo were.

The huge layer of glamour was supplied by basketball and the two played their role to the hilt. A La Salle game won, or an Ateneo game won stocked parlor conversation with enough verbal spice to last a week. Watch them. Sometimes La Sallites and Ateneans look moony and goofy, each boasting of their respective prowess and genius, forever clinking glasses with the Muses, each sure that when God spun the wheel, the clay turned into gold – either Ateneo or La Salle.

In my case, there lies a tale that goes all the way back to my days as sportswriter half a century ago. Yes, it was the old NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). Yes, the rivalry and revelry were the same at peak height – the Green Archers against the Blue Eagles. Yes, yours truly walked in stardust, convinced the NCAA was the only beat worth covering. Come to think of it, I was the league’s unofficial swami.

Then the NCAA owned the town. And we thought as we grew older and possibly wiser as a journalist that those were bygone days – Luis (Moro) Lorenzo romping like a dusky fired-up gypsy, enthralling the same and the girls alike, Kurt Bachmann the sinister Kraut but the tall, gangly and deadly hookshooter nonetheless, Carlos (The Big Diff) Loyzaga elegantly loose in the court like a swashbuckling pirate amassing loot.

Well, those days are not gone. It’s not the NCAA anymore, but the UAAP that still owns the town, at least where La Salle and Ateneo are concerned. Having grown from college to university, these two have managed to dust up their old cage rivalry – and how! The locale changed for the better. The old Rizal Memorial Coliseum which could only contain at best 9 to 10,000 spectators – really a deafening boom-boom stadium when the cheers exploded – has given way to the Araneta Coliseum. Twenty to twenty-five thousand? Boom-boom all the more. The Ateneans and the La Sallites cheer, scream, bombinate the loudest in the UAAP menagerie.

The rivalry, oh yes the rivalry. It goes beyond basketball, kiddo.

The Atenean believes he is the salt of the earth. Maybe he is, maybe he ain’t. Ateneo – meaning Jesuit – education is indeed superb. How superb. Hunh, you haven’t heard of Jose Rizal, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, Ninoy Aquino? The eyebrows are arched, the accent elevated, the manner unto the manor. The La Sallite will reply DLSU has already surpassed Ateneo where academic excellence is concerned (consult Asiaweek). And besides, he adds with two tads of scorn, you Ateneans have forgotten to include Erap Estrada and Joma Sison. Heh-heh. When pressed, the La Sallite will mention the Grand Old Man Lorenzo Tanada as one of DLSU’s sterling graduates.

But to the game. When push comes to show, that’s where all the tumult begins, the sound and the fury. This is the grand sweep where all gates open, where the Philippines’ talkative middle class is sucked into carnival, where the national sport of basketball dances as superbly on a dime as it docs on the wide mahogany spread of Araneta. And who really cares when La Salle and Ateneo suit up what happens to Mark Jimenez? Or Piatco? Or the Diosdado Macapagal Avenue? Fie on Fernando Poe Jr. Fie on Abu Sayyaf. And the whole of Congress can go to hell. That’s it.

Sunday’s La Salle-Ateneo game was a lulu.

The Green Archers won 85-77, sending the series to sudden death this Saturday. If DLSU wins Saturday, it will be a record five-peat, meaning an incredible five times the UAAP varsity cage crown wreathes the brow of La Salle. Ah, render unto Caesar what is due Caesar, unprecedented triumph in the nation’s most celebrated basketball wars! If Ateneo wins, it will end a 14-year drought. If Ateneo wins, the dams break loose, and they will own the town as Ateneo has never owned it before. Bethlehem busting loose. Bedlam. Christmas in October. Oh, Jesus!

Ateneo couldn’t win that game Sunday. And yet, that was still the Ateneo that beat La Salle 70-72 in a past Thursday. That was the Blue and White on fire, Eagles in flight formation, the burly Enrico Villanueva playing Shaq. Larry Fonacier, Wesley Gonzales and Rich Alvarez alternating in playing Kobe Bryant. But La Salle Sunday was the La Salle of four-peat. And what was more, the Archers had a mercurial Jason Kidd in Mike Cortez. Already phenomenal in past games, Cortez Sunday surpassed himself shooting, guiding, play-making, defending, holding the team together. Lo, he was like Pete Sampras at times walking on air. And, behold, Cortez thrice parted the waters for La Salle’s big men to storm in close, gumshoe the Eagles, and bang that ball in over the shorter Ateneans.

Another man who won the game for La Salle Sunday was Adonis Sta. Maria. This guy struck me as a slugging stevedore out on a weekend spree. When he sought or took possession of the ball, Sta. Maria was a man possessed, elbows, arms, legs in whirling hooligan motion, and woe to the Eagle who came near. And there were Nick Cardona, Sharma and BJ Manalo, whose arrows streaked to target when the need arose.

When the first half ended 52-34 in La Salle’s favor, jubilation was Tom peeping from the Araneta ceiling, ready to swirl down in green and white confetti, a flood of green balloons, the shriek of primal victory as it has always been – guttural, jabbering at first, then wild as a tidal wave is wild, as an avalanche is wild. It was not to be. What happened was that Ateneo recovered in the third quarter, kept punching until late in the fourth, trimming La Salle’s lead to three points, 80-77. Egad!

An Ateneo recovery is something to watch. It comes from the medulla down to the guts, all the way up and down to the shoulders, arms and legs. Then the adrenalin pours out, hits the players, hits the Ateneo stands, hits anybody who ever studied or loved or fancied Ateneo. The roar comes out as only Ateneans can roar, like the ancient infantry of Thebes banging on their shields, a tempest of warriors trained to kill. Larry Fonacier, Cris Quimpo, Villanueva and Sonny Tadeo came fiercely and blithely alive. Shot followed shot in quick succession. Napoleon had mastered this tactic. A torrential display of might at a chosen moment created a moment of panic in enemy ranks. Just one moment. But charge forward instantly with the thunder of a thousand horses’ hooves, and the panic could turn into a rout.

You know, lose your gumption and you’re dead. Like Sonny Liston quavering in fear, and Muhammad Ali striding forth and craking his jaw into a hundred pieces.

The La Salle ranks faltered for a time but were not overwhelmed. And there the game was won. In prizefighting, get the foe with a sucker punch and you disturb or dismantle his rhythm. Not La Salle this time. Their lines held, the lines that coach Franz Pumaren had drilled into place a thousand times. Their defense held. Their morale held. The tension at times told on Ateneo. The flawless Villanueva started missing some foul shots. Not on Sharma, Sta. Maria or Mike Cortez, who bucketed their foul shots with unerring ease.

Unable to penetrate in those ebbing moments, Ateneo played David to La Salle’s Goliath. Potential three-pointers were lobbed like Stinger missiles. But this time they fell short or fell ill or fell out of muster. Two successive three-pointers in those last two or three minutes could have pulled Ateneo’s game out of the hole. But the once indomitable Hail Mary chargers were up against a La Salle that looked at the cliff and not for a single moment blinked. Ateneo could not deliver this one for The Gipper.

How do we look at Saturday?

In the old days we had a crystal ball. We were a soothsayer supreme, at times Oom the Omniscient, the Seer of Sotanghoen, Teodorus the Peerless Swamus. At times our crystal ball turned out to be a lousy, double-crossing doorknob. Oh well, I couldn’t win them all. Many fans would bet against the team I predicted would win. Once, I had to eat my column since I forecast an Ateneo win over La Salle. This bummed out and I said I would eat my column inside two slices of bread with lots of ketchup. I did, yuck. An incorrigible crystal ball gazer we, Teodorus again peers at the lighted globule.

Alakazam! Need I prophesy the obvious? The Archers will win.