By JB BAYLON
LAST Easter Sunday I watched PBA games live, sitting for the first time in the venue called The Arena at the Mall of Asia. I was transfixed – it was as if I had been transported to a city in the United States, or China even, as the venue was truly a vast improvement from what we have anywhere else in the country.
But I was even more transfixed by the public – the basketball fanatics who had trooped to the Mall of Asia on an Easter Sunday.
But these were no “ordinary” Pinoys. They were the fans who have followed teams and cheered for players and booed their opponents for generations. And tonight their greatest cry – a loud and prolonged cheer actually — was reserved for one team. In fact, it was reserved mostly for one player, the one wearing jersey Number 18 while playing for the San Mig Coffee Mixers: James Carlos Yap.
Just that morning, James and I were seated across each other, having breakfast at Mary Grace at Serendra. It was an unusual day for James, I am sure. Not only was he having breakfast, he was having breakfast with me and nine others AND he was having breakfast in a public place! And he did not only have daing na bangus to feast on; he also had a heaping serving of “payo” from the well-meaning breakfast companions. Some of his breakfast companions were even bold enough to declare openly that they were members of “Team James.”
And so were the fans at the Arena, who made their loyalties known by shouting for him at the top of their lungs.
On court, James Yap is clearly A leader. Not THE leader, in part because his team has other players who are willing and able to take control of the game at crunch time. But it is also NOT in the nature of James Yap, despite his on-court brilliance, to impose himself on his team and his fellow players.
For by nature, the 6 ft 3 native of Escalante is a reserved, even shy guy – a stark contrast to some of his colleagues in the professional basketball world who are more than happy, eager even, to prance about in public like peacocks. The fact that for the last eight or nine years, he has lived a life in the public spotlight – and only recently was on national television, crying and thus revealing his human side — must make for a generous amount of discomfort for someone inherently reserved and who must now be wondering whether every move he makes is being watched, and commented upon.
And to a certain extent he is correct.
At breakfast, some of those who were meeting him for the first time began asking him about his roots: How did he break into the world of basketball? How were his grades? Was his early career filled with girlfriends?
He must have been surprised at how little his breakfastmates knew of his career – they obviously weren’t part of the basketball “groupies” that troops to Araneta or the Arena to follow games closely – but he didn’t show it. He studied high school in a Chinese school in Iloilo that had recruited him on a scholarship, he said. After that, he was recruited again to move to a university in Manila, again on scholarship. His grades were “Ok,” he said.
“If not for being on scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to study,” he added in Tagalog. “And my mom didn’t want me to go to Manila. She preferred Bacolod, which was much closer.”
And no, he did not have girlfriends when he was in high school. Hmmm….I guess you should just read between the lines.
I was watching James from across the table, and I was noticing how he was slowly warming up to the six individuals he really didn’t know from Adam, most of whom were old enough to be contemporaries of his own parents (maybe even older)! I could only imagine what was going on in his head as he tried to finish off, first, an ensaymada and then an order of daing na bangus with fried rice while politely listening to unsolicited advice from the “elders” and replying in turn, though he mostly was just politely listening.
And then I froze when one of the women said she was going to ask him a question pointblank, and could only let out a quiet sigh of relief when she asked him: “Do you get distracted by all that is happening and does it affect your play?”
“I just focus,” he said.
And that evening at the Arena I saw what he meant. His team lost that match even after they were able to force eventual winner Barako Bull to bite their fingernails in the last very long sixty seconds of regulation, when a single three-point shot from James or any of his teammates could have tied the game or given their team the lead.
His team lost the match, but not because their fans weren’t cheering enough when in fact they made it sound like the Arena was filled to the rafters. These were fans of the Coffee Mixers, and I could imagine that at least half of them were there for the guy playing in jersey Number 18.
There is no question that he deserves their loyalty. For he is, first and foremost, one of them: born not with a silver spoon in his mouth but with dreams of making it big in his chosen profession. Like them, he has suffered the burden of a society that is full of opportunities, most of which are beyond the reach of the “common man.”
And the burden, too, of not being part of the “ruling class,” which he has been made to feel at one time or another.
But for the basketball fans who call out to him or who wear reproduction jerseys bearing his name and number on their backs, he deserves their loyalty for the way he plays – focused, as he says, as only a few other players can do. How he twists to avoid a taller defender just to get the ball going towards the hoop – that alone elicits a roar from the crowd. The roar becomes a loud moan if he misses, but becomes a cheer 10 times louder when he makes the basket, as is the case more than half of the time. And he does it in a way that seems to make time stand still because everyone else on court seems to stand still when James Yap takes control of the ball and hangs in the air for a split second before letting go of another easy two or a game-changing three pointer. You’ll only know time is moving again when the roar wakes you up.
Which is why you almost can never fall asleep when James Yap plays, not with all the roaring all around you. Win or lose they roar for the man – the human — from Escalante, because they will forever stand by him who is one of them, one of us!
(JB BAYLON was a member of the PBA Board of Governors and was team manager of the Powerade Team Pilipinas in 2009 which included James Yap.)