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.

Last night, I decided to go out with friends instead of staying home to watch PBA action. I figured, “Hey, it’s just one night, what could possibly happen?”

Well, shit happened.

I turned to the replay of the Talk N Text walkout on BTV as I stumbled into my house past midnight, with the team already in the dugout. I read updates on Twitter over what happened, and, had an angry, drunken rant on Twitter about the issue.

I still feel the same way right now, even after the effects of alcohol had worn off. I am so tired of the Philippine basketball culture of whining about bad calls and bad referees, the persecution complex, and the incessant need to play the victim card.

Rain or Shine assistant coach Richard del Rosario tweeting about how the referees suck his team’s series versus Purefoods. Smart Gilas crying like babies about their whole PBA stint. San Miguel Corporation pulling out its advertisements from the 2008 PBA Philippine Cup finals after James Yap was suspended, and stupid Purefoods fans crying conspiracy against the team. UAAP teams filing every close game under protest. SBP executive director Noli Eala calling up PBL commissioner Chino Trinidad to suggest “fairer” officiating against San Beda during the 2008 NCAA finals. I could go on and on.

This walkout takes the cake. Chot Reyes pulled a total dick move by ordering the walkout—and, as a lifelong Purefoods fan, I’ve seen my fair share of dick moves from Chot Reyes—and Talk N Text management’s decision to condone it showed the organization’s total lack of class. I don’t care how bad the officiating was, this move was one big “FUCK YOU!” to the PBA, to all its other teams, and to all its fans. Seriously, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a lower-level ticket to a Ginebra game if you’re not connected to any PBA team playing that night?

I submit that the officiating might have been terrible. The foul that led to Ranidel de Ocampo getting thrown out might not have merited the flagrant foul penalty 2. The boys at Patay ang Butiki seem to think that Talk N Text might have a case against the officiating. Reyes himself cites the free throw disparity between the two teams for the whole series.

(I’m not a fan of using this metric to prove bias in officiating. It just proves that Ginebra shot more foul shots – nothing more. Now, if Talk N Text really wanted to prove that calls have been going against them, they could review the game and come up with a call-by-call analysis, similar to the ones done by 82games.com on controversial NBA games like Game 5 of the 2005 NBA Finals between Dallas and Miami, and Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference finals between the Lakers and the Kings. Otherwise, the free throw disparity would be just another empty statistic.)

Even then, if the Talk N Text organization really wanted to improve officiating, there are more effective ways it could have been done. With its influence on the PBA board, it could push for reforms in the officiating system, call for more transparency, and even move for the termination of officials that they accuse of bias. The PhP500,000 fine that they would pay for walking out could have been used to document issues that they have with the officiating, and they could even do stuff like statistical models and regression analysis to support their position. They could have done themselves, the PBA, and the Philippine basketball community a really huge favor.

Instead, they chose to walk out and screw the public out of a good game. Their subsequent statement about the officiating is a gun held to the head of the rest of the PBA, carrying with it the implication that if they lose, they got screwed by the officiating. You see, this walk-out doesn’t prove that Talk N Text is against biased officiating per se, just that Talk N Text is against biased officiating against the team.

The worst moment of my basketball fandom came in September 1994, in an NCAA championship game at the oven-hot Rizal Memorial Coliseum. I was in sixth grade then, and I was with my classmates rooting for the Letran Knights, who were defending their championship against their arch-enemy San Sebastian Stags. We went there expecting to win like we did the year before, but Baste started to pull away late in the 4th quarter behind the exploits of their high-flying swingmen, (the overage) Jesse Bardaje and Rodney Santos.

Watching your team lose was bad enough, but it was what happened after that really made it bad. With the game out of reach, the San Sebastian crowd decided to collectively, sarcastically, start rooting for Letran. Those fuckers just wanted to rub it in, so they started chanting “Go, Letran! Go, go Letran!” and cheering whenever the Knights made a meaningless basket.

It was just absolute, utter pwnage, and the worst thing was that we couldn’t do anything about it. When the Baste gallery started up their trademark “Poging Baste...” song (the single greatest pep song in the world), the Letran crowd couldn’t even muster up enough energy for our Palibhasa Letran. Over the years, I’ve developed a grudging admiration for that old Baste crowd, the baddest enemy crowd I’d ever faced.

I don’t know if there was a similar scene during San Sebastian’s clinching victory over defending champions San Beda last Saturday, but Baste’s pwnage of the rest of the league this season certainly merited sarcastic cheers from their gallery. Except for a funk late in the eliminations and the first game of their final four playoff series, the Stags have been pretty fucking awesome this season.

Frankly, I’m still confounded by the Stags’ championship run. It wasn’t that they won, it was how they won. Cinderella’s have gone all the way in Philippine college basketball before, most recently in 2006 when Pido Jarencio’s UST upset Ateneo. In that season, the Growling Tigers caught fire at the end of the eliminations and rode the hot hands of Jojo Duncil in the finals; they lurked all season long and snared their prey during crunch time.

San Sebastian did nothing of the sort; they dominated the summer leagues, and then they won their first fifteen regular season games in very impressive fashion. Even when they swooned, the players on the court always carried themselves like their losing was a mere aberration. In both games wherein the Red Lions beat them this season, the matches came down to the final possession.

I’m still curious about the Stags, and I don’t know quite what to make of them. I’m looking forward to seeing them next season, with a reasonably intact lineup (their only key loss will be main man Jimbo Aquino, who served out his fifth year). We’ll see if Ato Agustin’s magic works the second time around.

I am as interested about Aquino’s future prospects as a professional basketball player. Will he be Bardaje, the college cult hero who never made it in the big leagues, or will he be Santos, the longtime PBA veteran who’s had a solid run as a vital part of numerous championship teams?

In 1993, the powerhouse defending champions San Miguel faced perennial All-Filipino contenders Coney Island (nee Purefoods) in the finals of that year’s homegrown-only tournament. The Beermen were heavy favorites after making a trade for Allan Caidic in the offseason, reuniting the Triggerman with his former national team buddies, Samboy Lim and Hector Calma. The star-studded San Miguel backcourt was rounded out by the reigning Most Valuable Player in the league, Ato Agustin. The two teams’ matchup was a repeat of the previous year’s finals, a series that was capped by 32 points from Agustin in the deciding seventh game.

Rookie coach Chot Reyes was at the helm of Coney Island, which was making its sixth straight All-Filipino appearance. Everyone knew about the frontcourt of Alvin Patrimonio and Jerry Codinera, but their backcourt wasn’t too shabby either, with Glenn Capacio, Boy Cabahug, and Dindo Pumaren. Curiously, Reyes acquired an eclectic mix of players in the offseason; rookies Dwight Lago, Benny Cheng, Olsen Racela, and Freddie Abuda were drafted to provide hustle and energy, but Reyes also recruited a couple of grizzled veterans: Caidic’s old enforcer from Presto, Abe King, and a rugged guard from Alaska, Frankie Lim.

Lim had been, for many years, the starting point guard for Alaska, but he was let go in the offseason as Tim Cone and the Alaska brain trust decided to overhaul their team’s style and build around rookie point guard Johnny Abarrientos—an amazingly prescient move. Reyes, a longtime Alaska assistant, got Lim to join him with the Purefoods franchise. The veteran guard was there to provide insurance for Pumaren, knock down open three-pointers to take the pressure off his twin towers, and provide the kind of tough, old-school defense on opposing combo guards such as, yep, Ato Agustin.

Coney Island won that battle in 1993, but San Miguel got back at them in the tournament’s 1994 edition. Now, 15 years later, Ato Agustin and Frankie Lim are back facing off against each other in a championship series. Instead of duking it out on the court, Lim’s defending champions San Beda Red Lions are trying to hold off Agustin’s surprising San Sebastian Stags.

NCAA sportscaster Toff Rada, who has watched both teams closely, has some of the best analyses of the protagonists. He details the key weakness of the Stags’ game:

The San Sebastian Stags have been through a historic run in Season 85, with their 15-game winning streak spanning a stretch of almost 3 months. That streak was finally snapped by the Letran Knights of Louie Alas during their second round meeting, and things have been in free fall for the Stags, managing just a 2-3 win loss record, since then.

Much of the credit had been given to the physical play employed by the Knights, as the key to solving the San Sebastian puzzle. However, it is no coincidence that the Knights also utilize what may be the meanest full-court press in the league. I believe the press, more than the physicality, exposed the chink in the Stags' armor: the point guard position.

The coaching battle between the old hardcourt warriors is just as interesting. Ato Agustin has emerged as a surprise coaching maven, despite having had no prior high-level coaching experience. Meanwhile, Frankie Lim still has doubters even though he has led his team to two championships. This series, however, figures to be his biggest challenge yet.