Oh, The Joy of Winning

Oh, The Joy of Winning



Oh, the joy of winning.

The sweet taste of victory can do so much. It can make little injuries suddenly disappear faster than Keyser Söze in Usual Suspects. Little feud between players vanish into thin air like David Blaine is messing with you. The love for playing the game returns to a player or a coach in a instant.

That is the power of the big W. It is like an elixir that brings a team back to life. It is what drives the players to excel. A win can fill up a player’s tank to put in an extra 15 minutes of practice. It makes coaches that much more excited to break down teams in the tape viewing rooms.

For Barangay Ginebra San Miguel, they are hoping that all of that has just happened.

With the win against the Barako Bull Energy Cola, the Gin Kings are (in the words of Mike D’Antoni) “starting their season” now. And, it wasn’t just any win against any team. This was a huge W. A victory that could not be looked at as a fluke. Ginebra beat the up and coming Barako Bull squad. Badly.

Mark Caguioa and the rest of his boys were clicking on all cylinders. LA Tenorio was making his presence felt in the way that we all knew he could. Everything was working, except maybe Vernon Macklin’s free throw shooting. It was sweet Ginebra music once again.

Oh, the joy of winning.

Winning can do a lot for a player, but it can do even more for the fans. The Ginebra faithful were feeling the pain as much as the players were when the Gin Kings were in their funk. They felt it every time one of their players missed a shot. That pain returned even stronger each time a BGSM member committed a turnover. It was as if the fans were the ones on the court.

And just like the players, when the Kings finally got that W, the fans felt that pressure taken off their shoulders. You could just see it in their eyes that they could finally breathe a sigh of relief as much as the dudes in uniforms. It was if the entire barangay changed their “haaay” of disappointment to a “haaay” of salamat sa Diyos.

Now, let’s not get too carried away here. This win was big, but it doesn’t entirely fix all of the problems that this team had before the last game. It doesn’t solve everything on and off the court that this team is going through. It merely takes a little pressure off of both the team and the fans. And Ginebra knows that.

They know that this is just the first step. It is a big step, but just the first of many to get back on track.

Maybe, that is why we didn’t see the ponytail of Coach Alfrancis Chua come off because he knows that this is only the beginning. Maybe, that is why we saw the team hug each other in celebration after the game because they finally have a beginning.

This team was on the ropes, dangling and swaying, looking like they were going to be knocked out so early in the conference. But, in true Ginebra fashion, they displayed that “Never Say Die” attitude once again. Both the team and the fans are ready to move forward in this conference with a little more hop in their step.

Oh, the joy of winning.

Source: Slamonlineph.com