Basketball’s new status quo

In the last 50 years, the big picture of basketball has changed tremendously, more so in the Philippines. When you talk to the men who played for the national team until the late 1970’s, you realize just how big the seismic shift in our sports culture has been, and you see little chance of things going back to the way they were.

Until the early years of the Philippine Basketball Association, players wanted to make it to the national team because they wanted to represent the country more than anything. While that may still be true now, it is not the only consideration, and is often not the primary consideration. Young men have discovered professional basketball is a ticket out of financial hardship, and making it their livelihood, for many, is the priority. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Then came open basketball at the end of the 1980’s. The world realized that there was really no line separating professionals and amateurs other than simply declaring you were one or the other at any given point in time. This was how it was done in Europe. But even if you had Euro pros reverting back to amateur status for big tournaments like the Olympic Games, it wasn’t a big deal, simply because the US was still winning. Until the 1988 Games. Karl Malone likened it to watching your kid brother being beaten up by the neighborhood bully. He, and other NBA All-Stars, wanted in. Besides, it had already been done in tennis. Pros were allowed in the Olympics, and Steffi Graf won a Grand Slam and Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year.

Actually, the Philippines predated the US Dream Team by half a year, deploying a team of PBA players to China for the 1990 Asian Games. There, they realized the world had changed, that we weren’t the big dog in Asia anymore. It was also around that time that the practice of open tryouts stopped. Teams were now formed by invitation. You are less likely to find an uncut diamond in the rough from some small school or province.

That also ushered in the beginning of the end for full-time national teams. The situation which propelled the birth of the PBA was happening again. Previously, the national team (then through the BAP) abused its privilege of borrowing players from the MICAA so much and for so long, it was hurting the league. The only escape was to form a professional league, as pros were not allowed in amateur competitions yet in 1975. Today, since the best players are in the pros anyway, why not just commandeer them? Problem solved. Or so it seems.

That new habit also signaled the death of the full-time national team. In the US, NBA players’ enthusiasm to play for flag and country has been mitigated by their need to rest, protect their livelihood, fulfill endorsement obligations, be with their families. Besides, instinctively, they know that it’s not really their job. They have nothing to gain by playing, and risk everything if they get injured. Also, pro salaries are a far cry from allowances of amateur national athletes. Even younger players know that their future is in pro ball. The national team is just transitory.

This has created a vacuum. The government will not pay the equivalent of PBA salaries for a full-time national team. Likewise, a sponsor is unlikely to commit the enormous amount of money to sustain said team without the great media mileage a PBA team gets in return. Most of the time, the national team will be in training, not playing on prime time television and radio, giving value to a sponsor’s money.

This has created a limbo for younger players who dream of playing for the Philippine team in some capacity without being in the PBA. There are no open tryouts, so players in Metro Manila keep getting better because all the best training is concentrated there. The SEA Games team can be formed mere weeks before with the popular college players and a naturalized reinforcement. More and more players are now finding themselves playing throughout Southeast Asia, or coaching in smaller leagues in developing countries.

Like it or not, that is the new status quo. It won’t change, even if some people wished it would.