When Are You Being Wise, When Are You Being A Jerk?
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010I'll try to be succinct here, as given the emotions brought about by recent national events, it's hard to concentrate on basketball. Nevertheless, a situation happened the other day which I feel I must, I MUST write about. Unfortunately it's one of those situations which cause a hundred thoughts to run in your head, and that hostage drama didn't help, so it took me awhile to get to it. Anyway, here is my attempt:
NU beat UP the other week, with the Bulldogs handing over to the Maroons their 10th consecutive loss to 0 wins in the UAAP. It was the previous game to the ADMU-DLSU 2nd round matchup but I watched with interest just the same, knowing how UP is bleeding for a win and besides it was getting interesting at the end.
With NU ahead by a point with 2 seconds remaining, NU's Jewel Ponferada was shooting FTs. He scored the first and intentionally missed the second. Now here's the amazing and sickening, despicable, horrible, stunning part: Coach Fernandez was instructing his players to intentionally cause successive lane violations in order to 'force' Ponferada to sink his 2nd freethrow, a ploy to neutralize the missed freethrows. After an unbelievable 5 intentional lane violations, and when it looked like UP would keep at it ad infinitum, the refs didn't call the last violation. Ponferada missed, UP lost time on the inbound, NU won the game, Fernandez went ape-shit and to add to the hilarity and as if he didn't embarrass himself enough, UP protested the game.
