The Day Toyota Died (March 4, 1984)

Al Mendoza looked back at the stunning decision of the Toyota management to sell its franchise to Beer Hausen prior to the start of the 1984 season in a lengthy feature published by the Philippine Panorama.

The Day Toyota Died

By Al S. Mendoza

Philippine Panorama

Published Sunday March 4, 1984

THE ANNOUNCEMENT came minutes before noon of February 15.

“Management has been grateful to all you guys,” Jack Rodriguez started. Ten men of all sizes didn’t know it was coming. They were all in a happy mood. They have no inkling that anybody, least of all Jack, would be so nasty as to break their hearts. Just the day before they had celebrated Valentine’s Day. One of the boys didn’t make it to Jack’s office because he had overslept.

“Your achievements brought honor to the company,” Jack continued. “The feats that made Toyota one of the great basketball teams in the land made us all very happy and proud of you all.” Pause. The boys started to sense something eerie.

“Hey, what’s this?” one of them asked.

And he got the answer — swift, complete, cutting.

“The team has just been sold,” Jack said, “to Beer Hausen.”

With that, all hell seemed to break loose.

“How come?” asked Robert Jaworski. “Jack, how can you do this? Where’s decency here? I’ve worked this company for 12 years and now you tell me I have been sold. Twelve years, twelve years.”

Jack said: “Weren’t you paid?”

“Yes,” Jaworski said. “But we’re not talking of money here. We’re talking of decency, of respect, of dignity. You just can’t do that.”

“But you have all been sold,” Jack said. “This afternoon, the new owners of your contracts want to meet you.”

Jaworski and the rest did not report to their new boss at the scheduled 4 p.m. press conference. Before he left Jack’s office, he told Jack: “You can’t do this to me.” Jaworski also said that if anybody was going to sell him to a new team, it should be he. “No one else.” The Big “J” of Philippine professional basketball was joined in the mourning by Chito Loyzaga, Emer Legaspi, Pol Herrera, Ed Cordero, Nick Bulaong, Ricky Relosa, Ramon Fernandez, Tim Coloso, and Arnie Tuadles. The team’s eleventh man, Francis Arnaiz, learned of Toyota’s death only the following morning, through the papers.

“I was shocked,” said Arnaiz. “Why, I thought everything was fine with the team. But here it was. I woke up in the morning and saw the papers screaming with headlines that I had been sold. Hell! I can’t believe it.”

On reading the papers, Arnaiz fairly flew out of bed, jumped into his black Toyota Sedan and rushed to Jack’s office at the Sterling-Life Building in Makati.

“Is it true, Jack?” Arnaiz asked Rodriguez. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

Jack was even a bit sarcastic.

Or he must have been indulging in black humor when he told the fuming Arnaiz: “Why, have you not been reading the papers?”

Arnaiz had been reading the papers. And the papers had said that Toyota was on the brink of disbandment. It was Beth Celis, the spunky Tempo columnist, who first broke the news in print. The day came after Beth’s item came out, Arnaiz read Jack Rodriguez’s denial. In short, each time Beth wrote about Toyota’s impending death, Rodriguez came up with statements disputing Beth’s story. Arnaiz had even read that Jack had said: “I don’t know where they got that news (about Toyota’s disbandment). In fact, the team is very much intact. They’re now in training.”

Indeed, the team had been training — even the day before the announcement of the team’s disbandment and subsequent sale to Beer Hausen.

Said Jaworski: “The night before Jack broke the sad news to us, I got this call that the team would have a luncheon meeting at Jack’s office. I had no inkling whatsoever that Jack would announce Toyota’s death. Akala ko trip sa Guam ang pag-uusapan. Iyon pala, kinatay na kami.”

They were murdered, all right. One sports columnist called it a “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

Charges and countercharges were hurled by both sides, giving the papers some grand time on the streets. Jaworski and Arnaiz articulated the players’ stand, accusing Rodriguez of acting in bad faith when he sold the team to Beer Hausen “without our knowledge.” Jack countered that majority of the players knew all along that negotiations for their sale were going on, a stand many people considered lame because of Jaworski’s persistent denials that Toyota was on the verge of disbandment.

The last time the team had a meeting with Jack before he dropped the bombshell was on January 26. In that meeting, Jack said the team would not disband as Mr. Ricardo C. Silverio, owner of Toyota, had pledged P1 million for the team’s continued operation. Bill Warne, a millionaire supporter of the team, was reported to have pledged P1 million more, and both amounts were considered more than enough to keep the team going for the year 1984. So, when the January 26 meeting was adjourned, everybody in the team went home thinking that Toyota would still be around at the start of the Philippine Basketball Association’s new conference on March 25. Unknown to them, however, Jack was making negotiations with some prospective buyers. On the eve of Valentines’ Day, he managed to swing a deal  with Shareholdings, Inc., owner of Beer Hausen. When Jack finally divulged the sale to the players, he told the boys: “I was given instructions by Mr. Silverio last Feb. 3 to negotiate for the sale of your contracts.” He also told sportswriters: “I’m sorry for having lied to you. I apologize. I lied because I believed that if I made public the plan to sell Toyota, the negotiations might be jeopardized.”

But Jaworski, Arnaiz, Loyzaga and Tuadles, the most vocal of the 11 players, refused to buy Jack’s alibi. Said Jaworski and Arnaiz: “If it’s true that Jack got an order from RCS (Silverio) to sell the team, he should have been gentleman enough to inform us about it. It was a clear case of deception.”

Ramon Fernandez never participated in the war of words. And that was expected because he had been known to be anti-Jaworski. Before and after the sale, Fernandez had repeatedly told People’s Journal editor, Gus Villanueva, that he would play only for San Miguel. But four days after Toyota was sold to Beer Hausen, Fernandez said he was honoring the deal — and he called on his teammates to do the same. Before Fernandez’s press statement, Beer Hausen people had issued statements that the Beer Hausen team would be “built around Fernandez. Irked by Fernandez’s sudden turnabout, Mr. Villanueva ran a blazing frontpage story, entitled, “It’s Got To Be Money,” with a blown-up photo of Fernandez beside it. In the picture, Fernandez’s head was replaced with a ball, with a peso sign inscribed on it.

People are indeed perplexed at the way Toyota made its exit. Some say Toyota was not disbanding, that it was, in fact, murdered. Cage buffs mourn no end Toyota’s untimely demise, the way they grieved when Dante Silverio — the flamboyant coach who had given Toyota five of its nine titles — resigned after management overruled his attempt to discipline some players whom he reportedly caught, red-handed, dealing with game fixers.

From the day it was born in 1972 up to its death last February 14, Toyota, it seemed, had often been in turbulent weather. Nilo Verona, the first coach of the team, had made Toyota a Cinderella when he piloted the squad to victory its maiden stint in the 1972 MICAA, then basketball’s Big Time. But Verona later lost his job  to Dante Silverio, for unclear reasons. Then, Fort Acuna, one of the original players of Toyota, succeeded Silverio. In 1981, Acuna (a former University of the Philippines standout) committed suicide by drinking insecticide, weeks after he was fired in the middle of a game by then team manager Pablo Carlos. Ed Ocampo, still considered the best basketball guard Asia has ever produced, replaced Acuna, but, after a relatively successful two-year stint with the team, his coaching career took a sharp dive: Toyota finished the 1983 PBA season dismally, winning not a single crown and faring badly even in the eliminations.

Players, it is said, win games while coaches lose games. Ocampo lost the games. But fans understood the predicament he had in 1983. Player intramurals, notably the Jaworski-Fernandez feud, wracked the team. Toyota had been terribly hurt by the handicapping law wherein the team had to make do with short imports (6-1) for finishing brightly in 1982, while other teams could hire American imports as tall as 6-foot-11. Today, Ocampo has no team to coach in the PBA. And today, Ocampo loves to tell people, “1-2-3-4.” And what does that mean? “The first three Toyota coaches were fired,” Ocampo explains. “The fourth one, and that’s me, wasn’t fired. Instead, management fired all the players.”

The Toyota management did not just fire the players. Management kicked them in the ass before selling them like “candies,” underscoring the fact, once more, that in the asphalt jungle that is the PBA, the players it seems, are not human beings but, to quote Jaworski, “a herd of cattle.” Arnaiz scowls: “What has become of our morals?”

Morals are nothing where money is concerned. Or so it seems. In pro basketball, the nation’s No. 1 entertainment factory as far as sports is concerned, money is everything. Toyota died, and a legend is gone. But in the cruel world of PBA showbiz, the show must go on.

Notes: The article mentioned that Toyota was formed in 1972. The team made its debut in 1973, winning the MICAA championship that same year.

Fort Acuna died months after being fired in Game 3 of the 1980 PBA All-Filipino Conference title series against Crispa. The article mentioned that he passed away weeks after his firing.