Boy, it was a busy Easter weekend for news, wasn’t it? Heathens who didn’t take the time to reflect for their sins (or who couldn’t book a trip to Boracay) and were stuck on Facebook all weekend have heard the flap over Manny Pangilinan’s commencement speeches. Pangilinan was actually invited to speak at two graduation ceremonies for the Ateneo de Manila University, one for the School of Science & Engineering and the School of Management, and another for the School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

The PLDT chairman’s address at the second occasion drew controversy after analyses on Facebook showed that the several lines were lifted from commencement speeches by personalities such as Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling, and Barack Obama. (The speech from the first occasion stole a joke from Conan O’Brien’s famous Harvard address – still the funniest commencement speech of all time.)

Amid the furor, the Ateneo website took down the controversial speech, and a few hours later, published an exchange between Pangilinan and Ateneo president Fr. Bienvenido Niebres. Pangilinan, who chairs the university’s board of trustees, took full responsibility for the issue and called it “a deep source of personal embarrassment,” before offering his resignation from Ateneo. Niebres, in his reply, refused to accept Pangilinan’s resignation immediately, preferring to take it up first with the university’s officials and other board members.

Apart from his job as one of the country’s most successful managers and his involvement with Ateneo, Pangilinan is also an avid sportsman. He chairs the SBP, the country’s national basketball federation, and his companies bankroll the men’s senior national team Smart Gilas, and the varsity teams of Ateneo and San Beda, the schools that he attended.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Pangilinan enjoys the support of Chris Tiu, the team captain of Smart Gilas and a former UAAP superstar who played for Ateneo’s 2008 championship squad. In a lengthy blog post, Tiu defends Pangilinan in his usual articulate manner, and says that the incident happened because, well, MVP is a great man:

From accepting and making two separate speeches despite all the circumstances, it is clear that MVP wanted to impart his wisdom to the graduates in order to ENCOURAGE and to INSPIRE them to succeed in life. That alone tells us the kind of man that he is. He could have taken the easy way out and simply declined. It was indeed a mistake to fail to cite and give proper reference to JK Rowling and Oprah but his intention was not for people to praise him as a great speaker by borrowing those lines, but rather he wanted to extract their creative minds by supplementing those words with his personal experiences.

Along the way, Tiu compares Pangilinan’s situation to Tiger Woods, and expresses his wish, as an Ateneo alumnus, for MVP to stay connected with the university, because “MVP is truly a leader we should admire because of his love for the Filipino people, his exceptionally generous heart and his incredible courage!”

UPDATE: Inquirer had an interesting editorial this morning about the issue. Ahem.

UPDATE 2 (4/7/10): I really, really, really enjoyed Conrado de Quiros’ take on the matter in his column this morning. By the way, he is a proud Atenean, even though he admits most people assume that he is from UP. “I don’t know which is worse, being caught plagiarizing or being caught plagiarizing Oprah.” Awesome.