Six names were released on Thursday night from where the new ‘game’ commissioner of the Philippine Basketball Association would come from.
Mark Fisher, a 54-year-old American who graduated from Harvard, played professional basketball in Chinese Taipei, was the managing director of NBA Asia for more than 10 years and is a current consultant of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was the only candidate that the press didn’t know.
He was ‘headhunted’ by Global Executive Solutions in Singapore, was interviewed via Skype and seemed very interested in taking on a new challenge to head Asia’s first play-for-pay league.
Fisher’s qualifications are beyond reproach.
For someone who helped the NBA establish the awareness it is enjoying in the Asia-Pacific region these days, it should be a no-brainer that he gets the job. That is, if the PBA really wants parity in the league.
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All of the other candidates have been around the local basketball scene for decades.
Jay Adalem’s biggest claim to fame is that he helped organize and is running the Naascu, a collegiate league featuring schools and universities not playing in the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The headhunting firm said it was impressed at Adalem for having been able to run the Naascu for more than 10 years now, and because of that, he has the technical ability and the understanding of basketball to become a candidate.
One sportswriter, whom we will not name, who was present during the press conference later on said that if organizing tournaments is one of the main qualifications, then the candidates should be a dime a dozen because of the so many league in the country.
Another thing going against Adalem is that he is a member of the board of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, the National Sports Association of basketball in the country, which is being funded by tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan.
Pangilinan, incidentally, has three teams in the PBA – Talk ‘N Text, Meralco and NLEX, and Adalem’s ties with the telecommunications magnate could greatly affect the outcome of the voting among members of the board.
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Arab News learned a couple of interesting facts about the list of candidates very late on Thursday as to how the final list came about.
One of them is that there should have been just five candidates for the post, with the sixth – the name of whom we will withhold – just added at the last minute as a sort of consolation for having been in the league for quite some time now.
This corner learned that the “Sixth Man” is being resented by one of the powerful blocks in the board and his name was mentioned just before the meeting on Wednesday night was about to end.
“From what we heard from some of the members of the board, the name of the sixth candidate was included for consolation,” said a highly-placed Arab News source who requested that he not be identified.
One other thing was that a prominent candidate who used to coach Shell in the PBA in the 1990s and early 2000s was also a strong candidate, only that he backed out at the last minute after learning of the compensation package that is being offered.
Chito Salud, the outgoing commissioner, chairman Patrick Gregorio of PLDT, and headhunting firm Global Executive Solutions president Ray Canilao announced the names of the candidates on Thursday night and said that all six have something in common: “The genuine love for basketball and the PBA.”
One reporter, after hearing this, went on to ask the three if Fisher would be getting a more attractive package, considering that he is coming from overseas and would be settling down here, compared to the remuneration pact that the other candidate supposedly turned down.
Salud said that the offer to all of them was the same.
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Salud, Gregorio and Canilao pointed out to four qualities that the candidates share – the love for basketball, the willingness to work extended hours, the technical capability, etc., etc.
One character that they could not obviously find and one which made for such great commissioners in the late Leo Prieto and Rudy Salud, is the social and financial standings that they had while they were in control of the PBA in its early years.
Prieto, the founding commissioner, owned a lot of businesses ranging from horseracing to a famous pizza chain and a household donut brand, making him as rich, if not richer than most of the league’s team owners.
He also was most respected in society as a gentleman and a sportsman, having coached a couple of Philippine teams in basketball while also playing as a member of the national team in football.
Prieto did not take crap from any of the team owners and ran the league with an iron fist. He called a spade and spade and decided on the best interests of the association.
Rudy Salud was his understudy, a great tax lawyer who was also enamored with boxing, horse racing, cockfighting and of course, basketball.
He wasn’t as rich as Prieto, but he wasn’t poor either. He was a self-made man who made his fortune by using his brain to the fullest. He was very clean and clean was the way he ran the PBA in a five-year tenure that to this day stands as the league’s most glorious years.
Prieto and Rudy Salud’s main weapons in being able to run the league the way it should was that they both didn’t cared if they were fired by the team owners.
If the PBA board could find someone with an attitude like that from among the six, then the league will be in good hands.
Six names released for new commissioner
