DURING my heyday as a Baby Boomer, only athletes of amateur status were allowed to see action in the Summer or Winter Olympics and the various international sporting events.
That includes events sanctioned by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the world’s basketball-governing association.
The United States, of course, was virtually unchallenged in men’s or women’s basketball.
In most high-profile international competitions during the time, the Americans were represented by their best collegiate players – except in the first few decades of the FIBA World Basketball Championship (which has since been renamed to FIBA Basketball World Cup starting this year’s 17th edition in Spain from August 30-September 14), where the Stars and Stripes squad was bannered by players from the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and not from the top-tier National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) league.
Back then, Canada provided some excitement but the other teams from North and South America were hardly a factor in terms of material and strength.
Offering some resistance were the old Soviet Union, which banked on a huge reservoir of talents from its various republics (including Baltic state Lithuania), and the former Yugoslavia, which was bannered by its stars from Serbia and Croatia before the latter and several other republics gained their independence decades later.
The two European heavyweights at the time relied massively on their much-experienced “semi-professional” cagers.
Regardless, all the international roundball greats from the forties to the late seventies were mainly of the “homegrown” variety or of pure-breed nationality.
Hybrid-type athletes, or those holding dual citizenships, were a rarity. Likewise, eligibility to compete in FIBA-sanctioned tournaments was usually based on a player’s nationality at birth.
However, the FIBA liberalized its rules on player eligibility in the early 1980s. It was to be the first of two major policies that the FIBA would implement in the succeeding years. (The second is the “open basketball” policy that the FIBA introduced in 1990. This allowed the professionals to play in its games. The Philippines sent an all-professional team from the Philippine Basketball Association for the first time ever in the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing where the Robert Jaworski-coached Filipinos settled for the silver medal behind host China.)
On player eligibility, the FIBA introduced a “naturalization” scheme that allowed its members to employ no more than two players of different countries of origin on their national teams during various international competitions, whether it was regional in nature or world-class such as the Summer Olympics or World Basketball Championship.
There’s one restriction, though. The naturalized player must not have suited up previously for his country of origin in any FIBA-organized event.
The Philippines took advantage of this policy for the first time in mid-December 1985 when the country fielded in Americans Jeff Moore and Dennis Still as its naturalized players during that year’s Asian Basketball Confederation (ABC) tournament (later to be known as the FIBA Asia Championship) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A third naturalized player, American Arthur (Chip) Engelland (who’s now an assistant coach with the U.S. National Basketball Association champion San Antonio Spurs) also was ready to suit up for the Philippine national unit that was coached by American Ron Jacobs if not for the limit of two “naturalized” players.
Backstopped by the two gigantic Americans, the Philippines beat perennial powerhouses South Korea (second) and People’s Republic of China (third) en route to capturing the 1985 Asian diadem with a perfect win-loss record.
The team’s homegrown players included Avelino (Samboy) Lim Jr., Allan Caidic, Franz Pumaren and Hector Calma.
The prize for winning the prestigious biennial event was a ticket to the 1986 World Basketball Championship in Madrid, Spain. No thanks to the political turmoil in Manila (EDSA Revolution I), however, the Philippines skipped the quadrennial competitions.
In the last two decades or so, the country has been recruiting overseas-born players with Filipino lineage for the national team.
The FIBA, at the start of the 21st century, had also reduced its limit on naturalized players to just one per national team.
After Moore and Still, the Philippines had not exercised its option to acquire a naturalized player until the 2011 FIBA Asia Championship in Wuhan, China. American Marcus Eugene Douthit was the Filipinos’ naturalized player during their fourth-place finish in the Asian tournament.
Douthit again represented the Philippines during the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship in Manila. A silver-medal finish behind the Islamic Republic of Iran earned the Filipinos a ticket to the FIBA Basketball World Cup in Spain late this month. (Iran, the Philippines and FIBA Asia event third-placer South Korea are on the 24-nation World Cup roster.)
This time, the country will be fielding in 28-year-old American Andray Blatche, an NBA free agent who saw action with the Brooklyn Nets during the 2013-14 wars, as its naturalized player.
The Philippines will be competing in the World Cup for the first time since 1978 when it hosted the event in Manila and automatically qualified for the final Round of Eight where our boys lost all of their eight assignments, including the 7th-8th-place game.)
The last time the Philippines legitimately qualified for the World Cup (then known as the World Basketball Championship) was during the 1974 showcase in San Juan, Puerto Rico – a reward for our gold-medal finish during the ABC tournament in Manila the year before.
That golden triumph also was the most recent time that the Filipinos topped the now so-called FIBA Asia Championship.
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Bandera. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.