Sports Weekly Magazine
July 21-28, 1978
On the Line, Vic Villafranca
“You asked for it. You got it.” – Toyota slogan.
Finally, last Saturday, on its 22nd playdate, 91 days after it opened its campaign and two weeks after it sputtered and floundered in the semifinal round and made Coach Dante Silverio seemed like a very old man at 39, Toyota “got it” – the 1978 PBA All-Filipino championship, the coveted, most prestigious local pro circuit title that has eluded Toyota these past three years.
It was the Tamaraws’ second straight title in six months, their fourth since the PBA’s fledgling year in 1975 and Silverio’s crackerjack crew of Toyota originals and ’78 recruits pulled off the coup with a pressure-ridden 132-113 victory over Cinderella finalist Filmanbank in the fourth game of the pennant playoffs before a whopping crowd of 15,000 at the Araneta Coliseum.
With the win, the Tamaraws pegged the playoff count in their favor at three games to one, their only loss coming last Thursday when the Bankers got off the floor after dropping their first two games with a stunning 124-117 turnaround triumph.
Toyota’s 19-point winning margin in the fourth game should seem to indicate that the Tamaraws danced through it all, but as a still tense, still drawn Coach Silverio at the windup: “it’s been a hard game….a hard campaign…and you better believe that.”
It really has been that kind of a season for the touted Tamaraws since they got bumped by defending champion Crispa towards the tail-end of the first round eliminations of the double-round qualifying tilts for the semifinals.
Their 13-point, 123-110 setback to their arch arivals didn’t actually blur the Tams’ first round won-loss record since all that it did was to pull down Toyota’s slate to the same level as Crispa’s at 6-1, but the jarring defeat left a dent in the ’78 Tamaraws’ widely-hailed armor of invincibility.
It showed that the supercharged Tams were only human, after all, and in the second round, in an out-of-town match in Davao City, it was the pesky Tanduay Esquires who showed up the Toyota machine for what it was not – flawless, finely-tuned and purring – when they pulled the rugs from under Toyota, 133-128.
The Tams somehow made up for that sneak punch by Tanduay by turning its wrath and mangling the Crispa Redmanizers in the last game of the second round, 158-127, and things got to be shaky for Toyota.
In their second round game, the Tams got even with Tanduay, 137-125, but then two days later, came their crippling 143-127 loss to the Redmanizers, and they were in a bind, serious enough to dump them by the wayside should they suffer another setback.
With two losses against only one win, the Tams must now win all their three games in the second round to figure in the finals, a feat which at that stage seemed unlikely with the way the Tams had sputtered and hiccupped and had generally done everything short of self-destruction in the first round.
It was set to be sure, the lowest point in what earlier in the season had looked like a no-sweat Toyota trip to the finals, and both the friends and critics of Coach Silverio didn’t lose any opportunity to condole with him. Silverio himself conceded that things really looked bleak for his ballclub at that stage, although he made it clear that he was not about ready to throw in a towel or to put in a call ot the nearest undertaker.
As he grittily put it: “We may be in trouble, but we’re not dead.”
Brave words these, coming from a man whose team had its back against the wall and its left foot in the grave, but it probably indicates – more than anything else – Silverio’s confidence in the resiliency of his outfit.
And true enough, the Tams staved off outright elimination by bouncing back against Filmanbank in the second round, 143-124, and then making it two wins over Tanduay in the semis, 166-147.
In the meantime, while Toyota was snapping out of its first round death wish, Crispa was plunging towards what eventually would lead to the Redmanizers’ inglorious exit as a shoo-in finalist with two successive losses – first to Tanduay, 105-102, and then to Filmanbank, 103-101.
For its part, Filmanbank went 1-1 for the second round and a 3-2 overall to move only a win away from qualifying in the finals. To make it, the Bankers had only to get past Tanduay. This, they did to hurl the other game between Crispa and Toyota into a sudden death, it’s-you-or-I matchup.
In the end, it was Toyota which survived, winning by eight points, 116-108, to move into the finals against Filmanbank and write finish to the dynastic reign of the Redmanizers in the All-Filipino series of the PBA.
Stretching the momentum of the winning stride that it picked up in the second half of the semis into the pennant playoffs, Toyota quickly threatened to take the title on a sweep when it hammered out decisive but hard-played wins in the first two games of the best of five playoffs. But in the third game, just when it seemed as if all that was left for the Tams was to order the bubbly to whoop up its ascendancy as the best All-Filipino ballclub in the PBA, the Bankers threw a damper on the proceedings with a turnaround, 124-117 win.
The upset, deftly executed by Coach Lauro Mumar with his effective utilization of the slow break to unhinge Toyota’s swirling fastbreak, set back New Year’s Eve for the Tams and quickly brought back the ghost of their 1975 season when they led 2-0 only to blow the whole thing by losing three straight against Crispa.
It was not to be this time around, however, because late in the third quarter of the pressure-packed fourth game, seen by the biggest crowd ever to turn out in the playoffs, just when it appeared as if they would be going through the agony of a monumental fold-up, the Tams sprang back to life to take a seven-point lead at the end of the period and go on from there to bust the game wide open midway in the homestretch. To win looking back on the Bankers, 132-113.
It was a crackling comeback by a team which had earlier taken a 17-point lead and then blown it, had once been down by as much as six points, and the Tams who touched it off was Danny Florencio, the sneaky hit man from the old Tanduay Fire Station basketball court who rampaged for 38 pointsa against his former teammates, and, would you believe, Quirino (Rino) Salazar, the one-game wonder of the old YCO Redshirts in the old MICAA who played one of the most stirring walk-on acts in the finals of the series by putting the cuffs on Larry Mumar and knocked in three clutch hits.
Earlier, Ramon Fernandez got off 30 points in a centerstage one-on-one battle with Billy Robinson, and Sonny Jaworski ran rings around all his guards to set up the Tams’ dazzling finish.
The way the Tams pulled away by as much as 20 points going into the last four minutes of the game it would seem as if Toyota had a picnic Saturday evening. But the victory, despite its indecisiveness, was a hard-earned effort.
“It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that,” said Silverio afterwards, and the way he looked and sounded – with his back drenched in sweat and his voice raspy from yelling and ranting on the sidelines – one knew that Dante really worked himself into a frazzle as he finally got for Toyota’s fans what they’ve been asking over the past three years.
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