Sports Weekly Magazine
November 30-December 7, 1979
Peter N. Acosta
He got in the Crispa lineup via a majority vote of all the players of the Pasig ballclub, winning handily over Norm Kelly of the Honda Wildcats, and in his first game with his new team, Bernard Harris, formerly of Tanduay, repaid his new teammates’ vote of confidence with a performance that showed he just might be what the doctor ordered as the replacement for the discredited Cyrus Mann.
“I’m happy tonight,” said the Crispa Walk Tall Jeansmakers’ end-of-the-season acquisition whose first stint in the PBA was with the defunct Seven-Up ballclub in 1976 before he made the switch the following year to the Esquires.
If Harris was happy, there was no doubt that the Crispa front office men – owner Danny Floro and Coach Baby Dalupan – were doubly more so.
For in his first time with the Walk Tall team, Harris proved his awesome potential as Irv Chatman’s partner when he anchored Crispa to a 116-88 romp over the second conference champion, Royal Tru Orange.
Aside from banging a game-high 31 points, Harris hauled down 22 rebounds and came through with three assists.
But what made Harris’ debut with Crispa all the more remarkable was that he outrebounded the indomitable Otto Moore – 22 to 20 – and played so smoothly with a team whose play patterns he was unfamiliar with.
And Harris admits that despite his crackerjack showing for Crispa against Royal, he felt he had not completely gotten into the swing of the Walk Tall Jeansmakers’ game.
“I’m still trying to blend with the team,” he said, while all around him, his new teammates exulted on the way he had more than ably filled in for Mann, whose contract was rescinded by the Crispa management towards the end of the last PBA conference when it realized it could not get him – despite earnest efforts – to kick his old drug habit.
Harris went on: “It takes a while to blend with a new team. Crispa has an entirely different style from Tanduay. Although both are running teams, I believe Crispa has a little more depth and a little more sock.”
Asked if before Crispa’s game with Royal he received any specific instructions from Coach Dalupan, Harris smiled. “None really. No specific instructions.”
So how was he able to perform so well against Otto Moore, Royal’s dominating slotman?
“Oh that,” he said. “Well, I’ve always felt that to cut down Moore’s effectiveness in the rebounds, you’ve got to box him out. I think I did that tonight.”
On the observation that he appeared to have improved on his field goal performance with Crispa, Harris attributed this to his being able “to take more outside shots with confidence…feeling more at ease taking such shots with Crispa.”
Along with the veteran Gene Moore, Harris played for the first time with Tanduay in the 1977 second conference but he never finished the season when he suffered an arm injury when the Esquires took on the Toyota Tamaraws in an out of town game in Bacolod.
Last year, it was David Payne who teamed up with Moore for Tanduay, thus Harris was not with the Esquires when they made the finals of the 1978 third conference.
But this time around, things may be different for Harris.
He figures to play in a title playoff – with Crispa.
“I think that if we continue playing the way we did against Royal, we have a pretty good chance of making the finals,” he said.
Asked if his joining Crispa came after long-drawn negotiations, Harris said, “it was not hard reaching a decision to play with Crispa.”
“I understand the whole team voted for me,” he continued. “I can only hope I can keep up the kind of game I played tonight.”
As to his future plans or specifically, if he’d consider to continue playing for Crispa, Harris said, “that depends, but first, we’ve got to talk.”
In his 29-game stint with Tanduay in 1977, Harris averaged 24 points a game, hauled down 282 rebounds, had 22 shot blocks, averaged 47.14% from the field and 66.67% from the free throw line.
In this year’s second conference, he raised his average to 26.62 points per game, was 11th in the list of rebound leaders with an average of 12.4 rebounds per game, seventh in the list of shot block leaders with 2.4 blocks per game and logged 32 minutes and 26 seconds per game in playing time.
Because Tanduay didn’t make the round of four, Harris sat out the homestretch part of the second conference race. But this time around, he figures to be there and not only there, but at the forefront of Crispa’s vaunted bid to regain a PBA conference championship it last won in 1976.
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