SWM Selection: Dante Silverio, Coach of the Year (Sports Weekly, 1978)

Sports Weekly Magazine

December 29, 1978 to January 05, 1979 issue

Peter N. Acosta

 

 

To each his own title – Dante Silverio and the All-Filipino, Tommy Manotoc the second conference and Fort Acuña the third conference. Thus, all that was left was to determine whose accomplishment carried greater weight and from there, the selection of SWM’s choice as pro basketball coach of the year ought to be easy enough.

 

There were two other candidates for this honor, Caloy Loyzaga of Tanduay and Lauro Mumar of Filmanbank, but it was the feeling of the men who sat through the whole of the last PBA season that although their feats merited their consideration, these paled in comparison with what Silverio, Manotoc and Acuña accomplished.

 

The SWM group felt though that with the way they piloted their respective teams to the finals despite the tall odds against them, Loyzaga and Mumar deserved at least honorable mention. But as to their being nominated as coach of the year is something else.

 

Thus, the race narrowed down to the coaches of the champion teams in the ’78 PBA series.

 

At the beginning, long before the third conference came around, the 29-year old Tommy Manotoc, an amateur golf standout who first made waves in the PBA last year when he coached the U/Tex Wranglers to the finals of the second conference, looked like he would be “it” for ’78 when he steered U/Tex to its first-ever PBA championship.

 

With the feat, which came as the Wranglers took on the Crispa 400s in the title playoffs of this year’s second conference, Manotoc was hailed as the man who finally brought it about – the end of the dynastic hold of Crispa and Toyota on first place in the league, which over the past three years had seen Crispa and Toyota alternating as conference champions.

 

Indeed, It was a masterful performance under pressure which Manotoc showed as he led the Wranglers to a devastating 3-0 sweep over Crispa in the second conference playoffs.

 

But then came that awful tumble which the Wranglers took in their third conference campaign, a tumble that saw them miss a finals berth by losing to the Tanduay Esquires in sudden death, and then their 3- shutout by Crispa in the third place playoffs, and all of a sudden, there was this rash of ifs and buts about the magic that Manotoc wove in winning the second conference.

 

Tommy himself added something to the downgrading of his chances to make coach of the year honors when he admitted, when asked why the Wranglers missed the finals, that what had been their advantage in the second conference became their “disadvantage” in the third, where U/Tex limped home fourth in a field of five.

 

 

 

Manotoc was referring to the way his two imports, Snake Jones and Glenn McDonald, whom he was able to use simultaneously in the second conference came up short of expectations in a league where the other ballclubs also had the option to field their imports at the same time.

 

Manotoc thus inferred that more than anything else, what enabled the Wranglers to reign supreme in the second conference, was their advantage in having two devastating imports in Jones and McDonald and their being blessed with the option to use both simultaneously against the semifinalists who could only field one import at a time.

 

When both flunked the test in a situation where all teams were even, that was it – pfft went the glamour previously attached to Manotoc’s second conference coup.

 

As for rookie coach Fort Acuña, who, from the time he took over the coaching chores from Silverio, led the Tamaraws to a 7-1 won-loss record that culminated in the Tams’ retention of their third conference title, the feeling was that by the time Acuña took over, he already had a team on the go.

 

“The feat,” said a SWM writer, “made Acuña as a coach of the future but one wonders whether Acuña could have made it without the support of Dante and if he had the team from the start of the season.”

 

Set against the accomplishments of Manotoc and Acuña, Silverio’s sparkled more because he pulled it off in a league often called the PBA’s “most prestigious” and where the competition is generally tougher and keener.

 

It was Mumar who made it as the most outstanding coach of the all-Filipino and not Silverio. But many of the boys who covered that tournament felt this could easily have been Silverio if Dante had not figured in that incident with taunting spectators behind the Toyota bench and which cost him a one-day suspension.

 

But that suspension, SWM feels, hardly detracts from the fact that Silverio did the more notable work from the sidelines in leading the Tamaraws to their first title in the ’78 season and thus makes him the rightful claimant of local pro basketball’s “coach of the year” honors for ’78, the Year of the Tamaraws.