Sports In Review: A year of controversies

With the Filipino athletes’ historic victory in the recent 23rd Southeast Asian Games, it was indeed the best of times for Philippine sports.

But the scandals and controversies that hounded it leading to that momentous feat showed the ugly side of Philippine sports, and they would forever be remembered by a discerning public, particularly those that involved the very sport so dear to the Filipinos.

Basketball, a national pastime, was stricken off the calendar of events in the SEA Games, marking the first time that the most popular sport in the land was scrapped from the biennial meet.

Then there was the shocking controversy involving La Salle.

The school actually got involved in three major issues, particularly concerning its men’s basketball squad that somehow tarnished the reputation of one of the country’s most respective educational institutions.

It buried other basketball-related controversies like the country’s suspension from the FIBA, the world governing cage body that led to that SEAG cage ban, and the return of the so-called Fil-sham players to the Philippine Basketball Association.

The first controversy to hit La Salle came on Sept. 29 when then assistant team manager Manny Salgado slugged Arwind Santos at the back of his head minutes after Far Eastern University nipped La Salle, 75-73, in Game 1 of their best-of-three UAAP title series. The Tams went on to win the title while Salgado was banned for life by the UAAP board.

Days later, La Salle admitted Mark Benitez and Tim Gatchalian used spurious Philippine Educational Placement Test Certificate of Rating (PEPTCR), or a document used for college admission in the absence of a diploma, that rocked the foundation of the 68-year-old varsity league.

For weeks, La Salle hogged the limelight, even generating reactions and commentaries from the country’s top opinion makers.

The school put up a probe team and investigated the scam but, with no police powers, could only come up with what many perceived as half-baked findings.

Dissatisfied with the La Salle findings, the UAAP formed a four-man committee to investigate the case further. Meanwhile, team officials involved in the school’s basketball program, led by coach Franz Pumaren, were forced to quit while the school decided to return the 2004 UAAP championship trophy.

The UAAP board is expected to come up with its own finding in January and observers say there is a possibility that the league would suspend La Salle for a year similar to what happened to Adamson, which was suspended in 1994 for fielding in an ineligible player in Marlou Aquino.

Just when La Salle thought it had heard the last of those controversies, then came Joseph Yeo, who nearly turned the Ateneo-La Salle "Dream Games" into a nightmare when he hacked Enrico Villanueva in an exhibition game at the Araneta Coliseum.

Yeo was subsequently ejected, and the game, though stopped for almost an hour, was resumed amidst threats of a walkout by Ateneo, which went on to win the contest, 88-85, with no less that Villanueva hitting the marginal triple.

But Yeo’s deplorable act didn’t go unnoticed with PBA chief Noli Eala threatening to ban Yeo, a certified PBA material who has since apologized to the Red Bull cager, from joining the league’s rookie draft in January.

Still, for some, the scrapping of basketball in the SEA Games was a shiner for RP sports.

No thanks to the seemingly endless spat between the Philippine Olympic Committee and the Basketball Association of the Philippines, severely hit for allegedly stunting the growth of the sport with its mismanagement of the country’s basketball program.

It came to a head when the RP training pool lost to a newly-formed team in a minor cage tournament, prompting the POC to call on its General Assembly, which in turn voted unanimously to expel the BAP from the POC family.

The Philippine Basketball Federation, Inc. was then formed but may be dissolved to conform with the conditions set by the FIBA as part of RP’s possible reinstatement next year.

The BAP later went to court to force the POC to reinstate the association into its fold to further muddle up the issue.

Also, Fil-foreign players like Eric Menk of Barangay Ginebra, Asi Taulava of Talk N’ Text, Rafi Reavis and Rudy Hatfield of Coca-Cola and Mick Pennisi of Red Bull Barako have found their way back into the PBA on different routes.

Menk and Reavis benefited from a recent PBA ruling giving amnesty to Fil-foreign cagers with incomplete citizenship papers while Taulava and Pennisi made it through court decisions. All four are back and playing for their respective squads.

Hatfield, for his part, got his return paper from the Office of the President, which overturned a DOJ decision naming him as one of the reported Fil-shams.

The Fil-Ams’ return, however, didn’t sit well with the homegrown talents.

There were also apprehensions that the nation might be mired in a messy staging of the SEA Games what with the organizational foul-ups that slowed down the country’s preparations and the actual hosting of the Games, plus the fact that Filipino athletes, a poor fifth in the last SEAG in Vietnam, might not deliver under pressure.

They did. And the rest is history.