A Late Night Conversation with Coach Jong Uichico

In last Saturday's test broadcast of Pinoyliga TV, our founder, Benny Benitez got to share the floor with a legendary coach in Coach Jong Uichico, nine-time Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) champion coach and is considered by many as one of the pillars of Philippine basketball. And that night's podcast was more than just about basketball as Mr. Benitez gave viewers the opportunity to know Coach Jong on a personal level.

While we all know that Jong Uichico played his collegiate career for the De La Salle University Green Archers and this was a time when the green and white squad was still a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), what most people don't know is how he actually started as a basketball player.

It all started out when he and his three elder brothers, all basketball fanatics, were casually playing, and would you believe that Jong Uichico was once a ball boy as well as a towel boy? Eventually, he was able to play for the grade school varsity team of  La Salle and that trend followed him in high school and eventually, in college where he made his mark in La Salle basketball history. 

La Salle decided to be commercialized and played in the now-defunct Philippine Amateur Basketball League (PABL) after the NCAA got suspended due to violence in games, Around that time, the Philippines was actually set to host the 1982 Asian Basketball Championship (ABC) Under-18 and that was the time when our national youth team lost to an up and coming Chinese squad in the 1978 edition. For the 1982 edition, the Northern Cement (NCC) basketball team held a tryout for those who wished to play for the national youth team and Uichico was among those who tried out for the team. For those who don't know, the NCC program was assigned to put together a basketball team who would train together as the Basketball Association of the Philippines (BAP) was figured in a series of disputes against nine teams under its jurisdiction and those nine teams went on to found what became as the PBA. And that was the reason for the creation of the NCC program which had Ron Jacobs as the coach of the men's team. Incidentally, the NCC program is similar to what the Gilas Pilipinas program is doing: having a team that is unaffiliated with any PBA team.

Then, the legendary Ron Jacobs became the coach of the youth team in 1982 and that was when the path of both Uichico and Jacobs crossed for the first time. Uichico also mentioned the likes of Derek Pumaren, Franz Pumaren, and Hecto Calma among others as his teammates in the '82 team. In his stint with the men's national team, he had the opportunity to play alongside Samboy Lim and AllanCaidic- two players who became great players throughout their PBA careers. 

One of the talking points that Jong Uichico tackled in the podcast was the fact that not everybody knows that our national team had a golden chance to play in the 1984 Summer Olympics that was held in Los Angeles in the United States. Instead, the Filipinos got disqualified after forfeiting their games during the 1983 Asian Championship which was brought about by the misunderstanding of the caused the team to play more than one naturalized player on the floor at the same time. Just imagine this: Uichico and company were supposed to play against the likes of Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and the rest of the United States basketball team. 

Before wrapping things up, Benitez and Uichico also tackled about the importance of staying relevant in the digital age as they call it. According to the former national team coach who now serves as the head of the Samaahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) Academy, he pointed out that he wanted to remain relevant in spite of the continuous evolution of technology as today's technology can now make people easily access him virtually. While he insisted that meeting people physically is still a better way of interacting, digitalizing himself gives him another purpose in life and that is to share his knowledge about coaching and about basketball in general. 

Screenshot is from the Facebook page of Pinoyliga.com