The return of Danny Florencio (March 7-14, 1980)

After Almost Two Years In ‘Cooler’

THE RETURN OF DANNY FLORENCIO

Sports Weekly Magazine

March 7-14, 1980

One year and five months after he found himself in Dante Silverio’s cooler and eventually on his way out of the Toyota line-up, Danny Florencio finally made it back Friday night last week to the Araneta Coliseum, the scene of his greatest triumphs and biggest disappointments in pro basketball.

Danny’s comeback game was Toyota’s pre-season exhibition match with no less than the Tams’ arch rivals for league supremacy, the Crispa Redmanizers, now known as the Walk Tall Jeansmakers. The game was the nightcap of a benefit twinheader staged as part of of an ongoing campaign to raise funds for the forthcoming visit to the Philippines of Pope John Paul II.

As no doubt Danny had wished it, his “homecoming” to his old ballclub bore with it touches of those days when he was the bleacher crowd’s “nino bonito” and his being placed under preventive suspension by the then Coach Silverio had not placed yet his playing career under a cloud.

A loud roar from the crowd of 15,000 that turned out at the Big Dome for the 82nd meeting between Crispa and Toyota greeted Danny when he bounded out of the Toyota bench and took his place in the center of the court alongside the four other starters for the Tams — Sonny Jaworski, Mon Fernandez, Arnie Tuadles and Francis Arnaiz.

It was as if he had not been away; it was as if he had been forgiven for whatever it was that got him in dutch in the past with Coach Silverio.

Obviously as a result of his almost two-year layoff, Danny was slightly heavy around the middle, making many of his fans wonder out loud whether he’ll still be able to move as fast and as smoothly as he did in the past.

Well, it didn’t take long for Danny to prove that despite the signs of a girth, he still has got his old hustle.

Assigned by Coach Fort Acuna to the role of assist man, Danny moved about effortlessly as he dribbled around looking for cutters and for the open man.

His shooting though, was something else.

Apparently still in the process of trying to recover his old shooting skill, Danny missed his first three field goal attempts before he finally got his first twinpointer with a jump shot from the right flank.

He followed that with another medium range hit, but then missed his next shot before scoring on a layup against Crispa’s Bernie Fabiosa.

All told, Danny took seven shots in the first half, out of which he made three for a 42.8 percentage. Not really too bad for a guy who had been away for so log, but way below Danny’s old shooting average.

In the second half, Danny missed his first shot, but then made it on a three-point play before finally missing his next six shots, one of them an embarrassing air ball.

Thus, Danny wound up his offensive stint in his comeback game with a field goal conversion percentage of 35.7 which came off a 5 for 14 effort.

With 16 seconds in the game and the score deadlocked at 110-all, he was set up by Fort Acuna in a hero’s role as the Tams played the clock in a bid to get off a shot that won’t give the Walk Tall quintet any chance to get even.

But Danny flubbed it, his last two-second jumper from his old favorite angle along the end line hitting the outer rim.

And so it ended on a dismal note, the night of Danny’s return to the Tamaraw line-up. Coach Acuna, however, is far from dejected over Danny’s showing.

“I couldn’t ask for more for a guy who’s been away as long as Danny had been,” said Acuna, who’s taking over this season as fulltime Toyota coach. “In fact, the wonder of it all is how Danny had managed to keep his game from totally going to pot with the kind of layoff that he had.”

Fort pointed out that he purposely kept Florencio in longer than any member of the team because he wanted to find out if he still has his old staying power if not really his old sting “because that can come later.”

And what was his assessment?

“He still has the legs,” Fort said. “The old hustle, too; the old desire to play.”

Actually, said Acuna, Danny’s overall performance was not really too disappointing as the stats he compiled in his first game at Araneta would show. “He scored nine points, had four rebounds and six assists, which was one-third of Toyota’s total in this department,” said Acuna.

Fort, who in his playing career played with and against Danny, said he is highly confident that as Danny gets deeper in his comeback, he’ll get to regain the feel of the game and his confidence, “he’ll be like the Danny of old.”

“Give him a little more time,” said Acuna. “Give him a little more time and it won’t be long before we finally get to see the Danny of old.”

As for Danny himself, he said he was “very happy to be back and I can only hope that I shall be able to repay with my performance those who helped me get over a difficult period of my playing career and enabled me to return to the game I love.”

“Now that I’m back,” he said, “it seems that as if the least I could repay those who helped me go back and in effect to erase the stigma that had been placed on my playing ability is to show that their faith in me has not been misplaced.”

Danny said for almost two years he has never stopped hoping that one day he’ll get his chance to show that “I’m not what I have been pictured to be.”

“Now that I’ve gotten that chance, I don’t intend to blow it,” he said, while around him, his teammates tried to show that they’re happy that he was back.