Jimmy Mariano died on Sunday, December 6. The announcement does not say how he died. In any case, living to 84, he beat life expectancy for Filipino males by 15-17 years. Not to mention, he beat a family curse.
He survived his father and three uncles by about 25 years on the average. And if you had asked him how he did that, he might have told you he did it by sticking with basketball — he in fact made the Olympics.
He’d have taken up tennis, seeing how one could keep playing it into old age, being a noncontact sport and less strenuous—younger than Jimmy by only four years, I am myself at it three times a week, at least. But tennis was not so kind to his father, Momoy, and Momoy’s brothers Platon, Doc Peping (a dentist), and Ruben. Apparently congenital coronary cases all, they died at tennis or coming from tennis.
The last time I saw Jimmy he was coaching in the commercial league. He looked fit still. In fact, having put on some meat—bones seemed all he was during his playing days—he definitely looked better. And the trimmed mustache, new to me, suited him. He still shot baskets for exercise and felt good for some half-court dashes, he said. I told him that, being a heritor by vertical, rather than collateral, descent, with neutralizing genes from his mother, he could well escape the curse. Still, he never so much as gripped a racket.
My father, a tennis mate of the two older Mariano brothers, witnessed their tragedy—the three of them played together most weekends on our neighborhood tennis court, in Malabon, one of earth topped by crushed shells, a type unique to the Philippines. Momoy slumped in his chair after stepping off the court in mid-game, complaining of feeling faint. He was taken to the hospital but probably had died where he sat. Feeling the same, Platon suddenly abandoned his partner on the court, my father, as it happened, climbed into his car and drove off. He was actually dying.
Platon suddenly abandoned his partner on the court, climbed into his car and drove off. He was actually dying
On another court a few years later, Doc Peping, according to the tennis news that made the rounds that very same day, collapsed even before he could even begin to swing at the ball he had tossed serving. In Ruben’s case, the news, from the same court, was not as detailed and definite: he collapsed either as he set himself to receive or in the thick of a rally.
Only two weeks before, Ruben had come brought as a guest to my club then, in Quezon City. I had not seen him in years, and one of the first things I brought up with him was the curse.
“I’m past the age—I’m 62,” he told me, sounding not only sanguine but confident, even triumphant. His three brothers did not reach 60.
The Mariano brothers’ story being a running curiosity between us, I had told my father about the chance, no, fateful, encounter as soon as I got home, and it was he who phoned me the news, just as promptly, of Ruben’s on-court passing. My father by then had been himself sidelined from tennis by emphysema. Stealing away even then for an occasional smoke, still he not only outlived all four Mariano brothers but beat Jimmy’s 84 years by one year. He himself had come from basketball. He had been on the varsity team of San Beda, before dropping out, of college altogether, after a mere year.
For Jimmy actually, even basketball, although he was obviously made for it, was not a first choice of sport. He went to the University of the East to try out for swimming. Baby Dalupan, the basketball coach, heard of this long boy, already close to six-foot-four, crawling in the pool. He got him out of the water and put him on the hardcourt.
I had often chanced upon Jimmy when I went myself to swim at the Bureau of Fisheries station in the next barrio, and later played some basketball with him, already a big-leaguer, on our chapel’s front-yard court Sunday mornings—Botyok de los Santos and Mario Marasigan were among the other notables I remember playing with. Jimmy even brought along his son Jonas, then maybe 10, who would himself play for La Salle.
Jimmy was born with two fingers that wouldn’t fully straighten out on his left hand, his shooting hand—the pinky and the ring finger, if I’m not mistaken. He refused repair by surgery, as Dalupan had suggested. I used to joke with him about that—partida, I said. Handicapped as such, he went on to become, I’d say, one of the Philippine basketball’s two best long-shooters—the other would be Jun Papa, a national and commercial-league teammate—he played guard, Jimmy forward and occasional center. Jun died at 60, in 2005.
