99 Cone and his triangle offense had been with the team for more than fifteen years, and many of the players had spent the bulk of their PBA careers with Alaska.
100 I was twelve years old, playing at the tiny Carmine Street Recreation Center gym in Greenwich Village. The referee called a travel after my shot fell through the hoop, and fifty-some parents watching on the sideline groaned in unison. After the game the ref apologized. He just wasn’t expecting a kid shaped like me (I was a chubby one) to make a move like that.
101 When I spoke privately with Uytengsu, he was adamant about his desire to field teams that didn’t need any incentive aside from competitive glory. “You can’t just throw money at a situation,” he told me. “If you wave more money in front of a player, that’s not going to make him win. Sure, you might get a good game out of him, but that’s really not going to make the difference in the long term. I tell these guys, especially as we approach big games: ‘The papers are going to write this about you tomorrow. This is the clip that you’re going to put in your diary, that you’re going to show your grandchild, together with your championship ring. That’s the stuff that’s golden.’”
102 The Quezon City arena had been booked for the weekend summit of an international Evangelist group.
103 One such girlie bar was the Firehouse, reportedly a favored haunt of Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who brought his bomb-building, lady-loving act to the Philippines in 1994 before being captured, the following year, in Pakistan.
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