It was a match against Puerto Rico. Up on the bleachers, on the aisle seat, a scrawny, 70-ish Filipino in blue shirt and faded jeans yelled his lungs out: “Gilaaaaaas!” A young Puerto Rican seated on the opposite aisle saw him, heard him, planted himself across the old man, and yelled: “Vamoooos!”
The banter went on until the game ended. When Puerto Rico won (77-73), both men looked at each other, nodded, and that was it. Game over.
Filipinos trooped to Seville, Spain, to cheer on Gilas Pilipinas in the Fiba World Cup games. The Palacio Municipal de Deportes San Pablo, where the games in Seville were played, can hold up to 10,200 people, though we’ve seen it filled to just over 50 percent at most. But the Pinoys in the crowd never allowed the Gilas team to feel they were away from home.
“We were constantly reminded we were not playing for ourselves. We were playing for the Filipinos watching in the arena, and especially for Filipinos back home who had to stay up at 2 a.m. just to watch us play,” said Jean Marc Pingris Jr., 6’6” power forward of Gilas Pilipinas.
Crushing loss
Pingris, who is also the brand ambassador of Master Philippines, the facial care brand for men, was in a jovial mood, which was quite unexpected since it was just minutes ago that the team suffered a crushing four-point loss to the world’s No. 3, Argentina. Prior to that, Gilas Pilipinas bowed to Croatia on a three-point overtime, and then to Greece where it never managed to close the 7- to 12-point gap.
“Before I sleep, before each game, I pray to God. I pray to God that He spares my team—and the opposing team —from injuries. ’Yun lang naman ang sa akin… Sa taas lang talaga. Dumidiretso ako sa kanya. Wala akong anting-anting na sapatos,” he said, laughing.
However, if you’ve seen Pingris play at the Fiba, bodying up with 7-footer players to steal the ball, you would think he just might have an amulet on him.
“We haven’t been here for the past 40 years. It would be too hard to ask us to be on top right away. We have to go through all these painful steps. It’s good to have some moral victories and all that, but sometimes it’s better to have a victory,” said Gilas head coach Vincent “Chot” Reyes.
Pingris, however, said that if the team had more time to practice, it might have done better than its 1-5 record at the preliminary round. The team had only a month to practice, he said.
“But we gave it our all. Even if we were up against the world’s No. 3 ‘kailangan durugin natin,’ our coach would say,” Pingris said.
Wake-up call
Pingris wasn’t always interested in basketball. Growing up in Pozorrubio, Pangasinan, with his single mom and half-siblings, he was more into track and field.
He recalled going home one day with a bleeding nose. His mom, concerned about her son’s quick temper, immediately asked if he got into a fistfight.
Turned out, he got hit in the face by a basketball. For Pingris, it felt like a wake-up call. He was 16, a tad too old, he said, to start playing a new sport, but “I saw how hard my mom worked as a fruit vendor in the market just to send us to school and give us a decent life. I couldn’t let her down,” he said.
That he grew up with anger in his heart wasn’t a surprise. He grew up without a father, and his mestizo features set him apart from every other kid in the neighborhood. The taunting and teasing of children chanting “ampon, ampon!” as he walked by haunted him.
“Nakikipagsuntukan ako. Kaya siguro mainitin ang ulo ko,” he said.
He recounted how, as a young boy, he would carry a sack of watermelon, his hands bleeding from the sheer weight and size of it, always careful not to let it slip from his hands.
His mother could not afford to lose income should a single fruit fall and break. They were so poor, he said, that they slept on the floor in the market, with only sacks wrapped around their bodies to keep them warm at night.
“Batang palengke ako. Pinagmamalaki ko ’yun, kung saan ako nanggaling. Hindi ko kinahihiya ’yun. But I would not be here without my mother. Nakita ko kung gaano siya kasipag. She wakes up at dawn to go to Urdaneta to get fruits, and then go back to the market in Pozorrubio, Pangasinan, to sell them,” he said.
Father’s disappearance
He had no desire to meet his father until he met his wife, Danica Sotto-Pingris. Unknown to Pingris, a few months before their wedding, Danica had contacted the French embassy in search of his father.
Pingris had always thought his dad, Jean Marc Sr., had abandoned his mother, Erlinda. She was pregnant with Pingris when his dad, who worked with a government waterworks system, “disappeared.” His mother, he said, wrote his dad letters but never got a reply.
Letters, pre-Internet age, had to be mailed through the post office. At that time, his mother, he said, had asked her girl friend to mail the letters in Manila to his dad, who was in Morocco. But the letters were never mailed. As it turned out, his mother’s friend had a thing for his dad, and blocked all outgoing and incoming letters.
This friend has since expressed her apologies to the family of Pingris. She confessed, he said, after Pingris bought his mom a bungalow house in Las Piñas from his first PBA paycheck.
“It was my mother’s birthday. I took my mom out, told her we were just driving around, and we walked into this empty house. Then I handed her the keys: ‘Happy birthday!’ We both started hugging and crying. Then pumunta yung girl dun,” he said.
Quiet ride
Two days before his wedding he received a letter from his dad’s brother. Three weeks after his wedding, in 2008, upon the urgings of his wife, he agreed to see his dad.
“I was very angry. I didn’t feel any love for him at all. But he called my name. Then he said, ‘My son. My son. My son!’ Niyakap niya ako. Dun na ako naiyak. Napa-daddy din ako,” he said, laughing.
It was a quiet ride on the drive back to Normandy, Pingris said, with only Danica and his stepmom occasionally breaking the silence. Father and son finally had a heart-to-heart talk over bottles of wine. “We really started talking when we got drunk. Para maibuhos ko rin. I wanted to know his story, so he told me he had been writing my mom and had gotten no reply.”
Today, Pingris’ family goes to Normandy every August, while his dad visits the Philippines every March.
“Hindi ko akalaing mararanasan ko ang ganito. I thought this happens only in the movies. I have been through a lot, but this fame and fortune will never change me. I will never forget my roots. Balang araw mawawala rin ang fame, pero yung samahan namin hindi mawawala,” he said.
Master Facial Care flew five lucky winners of its scratch-and-win promo to Spain to watch all five of Gilas Pilipinas games.