Salute to Filipino sports icons

Pancho Villa was the symbol of the 1920’s. Caloy Loyzaga and Robert Jaworski fueled the basketball craze. Grandmaster Eugene Torre set higher standards for youngsters. Any book on Filipino heritage would not be complete without mentioning sports heroes who have, at many points in RP history, made the nation stand and cheer as one.

In Philippine Weekly Graphic’s special millennium edition "Salute to the Millennium," which will be launched tomorrow at the San Agustin Church garden in Intramuros, these sports heroes made it to the list of "1000 people, places and events in the Philippine saga."

They are world flyweight champion Villa, Loyzaga, tennis star Felicisimo Ampon, world junior lightweight champion Flash Elorde, Olympic silver medalists Anthony Villanueva and Onyok Velasco, chess grandmaster Torre, hardcourt superstar, and now Senator, Jaworski, and bowling champion Rafael Nepomuceno.

National Artist and Philippine Graphic Editor-in-Chief Nick Joaquin (a.k.a. Quijano de Manila) elevates Villa as the symbol of the 1920s in a new essay which is a highlight of the millennium book.

Wrote Quijano de Manila of the 1920s in his essay "The Growing Up of a Century."

...The great symbol of the era is, of course, Pancho Villa, the most brilliant fighter of a period that bred such great fighters as Cabanela, Young Dencio, Frisco Concepcion, Clever Sencio, the Flores brothers. All these fighters, like Pancho, placed the Philippines on the map by winning laurels abroad, but Pancho was the top idol because he personified the 1920s in a way that none of them did. Into his person Pancho collected all the swank and swagger of the period and the whole country felt a vicarious pride in his rise from rags to riches – and in his magnificent wardrobe, his collection of silk shirts and natty hats, his pearl buttons and gold cufflinks, and his princely retinue of aides and valets. He was perhaps more idologized as a magnifico than as a boxer, and when he died the nation’s heart broke. The hysteria that possessed the masses during his funeral was not to be equaled until the funeral of another popular idol, Magsaysay, in 1957.

The book also chronicles the pioneering efforts of the late Emerson Coseteng and Leopoldo L. Prieto in the organization and growth of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), and the Crispa-Toyota rivalry that turned basketball into the national pastime.

The 300-page millennium book, which includes political, economic and cultural personalities and events, is a collector’s item put together by Graphic’s special projects editor Monica Feria and art director Gilbert Perez.