Six nominees make PBA list

Six personalities, including NBA Asia’s Carlo Singson and SBP executive director Patrick Gregorio, have been officially nominated as candidates to the Philippine Basketball Association’s commissioner’s post.

Lawyer Chito Salud, marketing man Lambert Ramos, former PBA finance and technical chief Ricky Palou and businessman-sportsman Arben Santos also made the initial list.

League officer-in-charge Sonny Barrios refused to divulge who made the nominations.

“Nomination is open until next Friday or Nov. 23. Part of our job is to find the level of interest of the nominees since some of them may have been nominated without their knowledge. Their names will be crossed out if they don’t feel like being part of the process,” said Barrios.

Curiously, names of former senators Robert Jaworski and Freddie Webb were not included in the list.

The search committee has reached a consensus that the next PBA commissioner should have an excellent “general management perspective” with strong suits in marketing and finance.

Based on the timetable set by the committee, the league’s seventh commissioner will be named not later than Jan. 31 next year.

 The committee will spend the next two weeks (Nov. 26-Dec. 7) reviewing the candidates’ resumes and trimming the list to five. After the process, the group will work another two weeks on deliberating and conducting interviews on the five nominees from which the final three candidates will be selected.

 Then from Jan 7-18, 2008, the last three nominees will undergo another series of interviews from representatives of the other ball clubs who are not members of the selection committee.