WITH the enormity of the mission on his shoulders, coach Chot Reyes should be excused if he wouldn’t want to “belabor the little things.”
That was why he refused to delve deeper into the dynamics of Gary David’s struggles in the Fiba Asia Championship and the obvious efforts of Gilas Pilipinas to get the hotshot gunner into whatever sort of groove during the tailend of a 90-71 rout of Japan Monday night at Mall of Asia Arena.
Besides, “it would only put more pressure on Gary,” Reyes said.
To Reyes, there was no blueprint constructed specifically to get David to find his shot. Jimmy Alapag’s drive and then obvious attempt to pass off at the last minute to David for a layup and LA Tenorio’s drive-and-pass to an open David for a corner three wasn’t a coaching strategy.
It was, as Reyes described it, a Band of Brothers kind of thing.
“It just mirrored what this team is all about,” said Reyes. “One comrade was struggling and the rest tried to help him out.”
“In fact, it was Jimmy who asked me for the chance to play with Gary in the end, so he can set him up,” added Reyes.
Even David put little weight on his last five points.
As the tournament rolls on, David said he wants to focus more on doing “the little things. Defense, hustle, that’s what I want to focus on. My offense will come and I won’t try to look for it.”
“But I’m thankful for the support of my teammates and the support of the crowd,” he added. “It’s a thrill to know they hadn’t given up on me.”
And this “little thing” meant a whole lot bigger to other people. For David’s wife Jen and daughter Maxene, watching David make those two shots and hearing the crowd react to it later by chanting the Globalport star’s name meant all the world to them.
In fact, when David rushed to hug them at the end of the game, it was a tearful embrace the family shared.
“He had been feeling a lot of pressure,” said Jen David, 30, in Filipino.
Daughter Maxene was the most affected. She asked her dad, a scoring champ in the PBA, why he had been struggling in the Fiba Asia.
“Gary explained patiently that this is not like the PBA,” Jen said.
When the crowd chanted her dad’s name at the end of the match against Japan, Maxene could only sob uncontrollably.
“She cries easily,” Jen said. “Me, I’m just happy. People have been hitting us on social media. Right now, I’m just happy.”
“If I could come up to them one by one,” Jen said of the crowd, “I would say thank you to each of them.” /Francis Ochoa of the inquirer