The first meeting was postponed. The second "date" was cancelled due to miscommunication.
"It is very important for me to meet Jannelle and sit and talk with her about things that are very important and dear to me involving Philippine basketball, and more importantly, the Filipino people that I miss so much," the player known as "The Quick Brown Fox" wrote in his email to Del Rosario last month.
After a few weeks, an initial phone interview was finally arranged.
"I’m pretty sure I’ve already told you more information about me and about my life that I have ever told any reporter," the Filipino American said after the hour-long conversation on Saturday night. And I didn’t really believe he said enough, at least not after I finished transcribing five pages worth of that recorded conversation.
He said he preferred for us to meet and talk about "things." According to him, phone interviews were quite impersonal "somewhat insincere," he aptly described. So after agreeing to meet up this coming Saturday for a follow up interview, the basketball-star-turned-assistant-principal fired away with memories from the time he was recruited to play for the Philippine national team to his grand Great Taste days, to moving to San Miguel, and finally to coming full circle as he came back to the States.
"My goal, and this is something a lot of people don’t know, is that when I came to the Philippines, I had no intention of playing in the PBA," Brown stressed.
In 1980, he graduated from Pepperdine University with a degree in Physical Education. He was drafted by the Houston Rockets but his rights were released to The San Diego Clippers (now the Los Angeles Lakers) not long after.
"They offered me a contract. But at that same time, Mr. Cojuangco sent his people over here and they said they wanted to talk to me about playing for the Philippines. My mother was a Filipina. My grandparents lived in Cubao," said Brown who added that the offer came at the right time.
"I didn’t want to play here (States) anymore. I loved the idea of playing for the country. I respected and admired Mr. Cojuangco and in what he was trying to do. I felt he was strictly doing it for the glory of the country. So I said I was ready… strictly to play for the country, to represent the Philippines in international competition. That’s all that I was told. They didn’t tell me they wanted me to play for any companies," Brown said.
As early as 1980, then President Ferdinand Marcos appointed Ambassador Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco to become the project director for basketball. That was the reason Cojuangco sent his people to the States to recruit some Fil-Ams to play for the country. This was brought about by pressure from different camps to bring the old basketball glory back to the Philippines, a country that placed third in the 1954 World tournament and fifth in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
"Unfortunately he was not able to put together a Filipino-American group like they have now. Now they’re coming out of the woodwork. But back then, there either wasn’t that many or they didn’t do a good job of finding them," Brown said. "Plus they didn’t have a thousand agents trying to make money off the PBA, sending players from everywhere."
The result was a team formed by Coach Ron Jacobs — a line up of Filipino American and American players with the goal to become naturalized citizens of the country and thus be able to represent the Philippines in international meets. (At the time, this was already being practiced in Europe.) Brown was a part of this team, along with Willie Pearson, and a "player whose name was Eddie Joe Chavez who wasn’t really Filipino but just had the ‘Chavez’ last name. He was Mexican," said Brown.
"That turned out to be negative for me and that’s something that I fought for several years. All I wanted to do was play for the country. I kind of wore that black hat for a while, because of that," Brown admitted.
When the team disbanded in 1982, Brown was able to heave a sigh of relief. But that also paved the way for him to become "very inactive." He started playing for De La Salle University which, according to him, was upon instructions of Mr. Cojuangco.
"Mr. Cojuangco is a very, very special man. And I think that Mr. Cojuangco saw me differently than any other players he had in that group. One reason is that he knew that I was not only half-Filipino, but I was very proud to have those ties. I became very close to Mr. Cojuangco. I trusted and respected him," Brown said.
He added that he wasn’t very happy being inactive, especially since he was at the peak of his life at 24, wanting nothing more than to play basketball. But this posed a dilemma for him since, at that time, he also didn’t want to cut ties with the Philippines since he said he had already "fallen in love with the country and the people already."
"I don’t pull any punches. I say what I feel," Brown interjected in the middle of our conversation. And perhaps it was just sort of a warning that he was not holding back in the interview; that he was going to be very honest and open about his feelings and thoughts about his experiences in the PBA.
More from this interview with "The Quick Brown Fox" next week.
To reach this writer, log on to www.jannelleso.net.