Sports Weekly Magazine
June 9-16, 1978
Fortunato (Atoy) Co, Jr., Crispa’s most crippling clutch hitter, candidly admits that he has not started the ’78 season with a bang.
Neither, he feels, has he been devastatingly consistent in defending champion Crispa’s first eight games in the double round elimination series of the PBA All-Filipino.
“Pero,” he said, “hindi naman siguro kasamaan. Okay lang, hindi ba?”
Really, it has been that kind of a performance – “okay lang,” – which the one-time Mapua ace and NCAA MVP has been showing in the current PBA series and although he has been overshadowed by Philip Cezar and Abet Guidaben in consistency, he remains the scoring machine the Redmanizer can’t do without.
In his first game of the season against the U/Tex Wranglers, a game which Crispa lost thus providing the ’78 PBA All-Filipino with an opening day shocker, Co barely made 10 points.
Against Royal Tru Orange, he came up with 18 points, the third best behind Freddie Hubalde’s 29 oints and Cezar’s 22. In Crispa’s third game against Filmanbank – Co remained unable to break the 20-point barrier as he struggled with 16, Crispa’s third best for the evening.
In Cebu, however, as the Redmanizers mangled the Great Taste Discoverers, 139-116, in one of Crispa’s two out-of-town games, it was Co who proved to be the Redmanizers’ heaviest gunner as he came up with a game-high 33 points.
In Crispa’s big game against Toyota which it won, 123-110, Co’s output was only 18, eight behind Cezar’s game high 25. But once again against Great Taste, in Crispa’s first game in the second round, Co exploded with his second 33-point performance of the season.
In eight games, Co’s average is a respectable 24.6. But the way the bleacherites from Cebu to Manila had been razzing him and hitting him with a wave of boos everytime he gets introduced, why, one would think that the once effervescent “Fortune Cookie” had seen the last of his good shooting days. Or had knocked a grandmother down while executing a fastbreak.
Compared to the “reaction” that the comebacking Bogs Adornado gets, that which greets Co seems like a local version of the Bronx cheer – a cacophony of hoots, boos and jeers.
Obviously, with his overall performance, Co doesn’t deserve such a treatment, which was why he wonders why he gets it despite his assessment that his game is “okay lang,” an assessment that is backed by statistics.
Unlike the volatile Cisco Oliver of Honda who reacts everytime he gets jeered and hissed by the bleacherites, Co has taken everything in stride, merely smiling against the cascade of boos, but deep inside, the little boy that is Co, gets stung by it all.
As he asked a sportswriter-friend once: “Bakit ano ba ang nagawa ko?”
To which he got the reply: “nothing really, but that’s the way it is in their game sometimes.” And forthwith, the sportswriter related to Co how even the “Great Difference,” the now Tanduay coach Caloy Loyzaga, used to get jeered all the way from the box section to the top of the bleachers when he was leading YCO to one of the most remarkable winning records in amateur basketball.
He was likewise told that the same thing also happened to Sonny Jaworski not too long ago, and likewise to other dominating figures in local basketball in the past.
In American sports, Co was told that when the New York Yankees were lording it over the American League, they were not only booed but damned, thus the birth of the expression, “Damn Yankees!”
“You mean, it’s part of the game?” a wide-eyed Co wanted to know.
“I guess,” said Co’s sportswriter-friend, “you can say it’s part of being popular.”
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