Manila Vanilla

What it's like to be a U.S. Fulbright scholar, basketball player, journalist, and the whitest man in Metro Manila.

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Location: Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

New Yorker by birth, shipped across the globe to the world of malls, shanty-towns, patronage, corruption, basketball and a curious burnt-toast smell that wafts around at dusk

Thursday, February 23, 2006


San Miguel Beerman Andre Spencer must have been drinking some of the company product, because he's throwing a wrap-around pass to his teammate. That's not his job! Is he afraid of Ronnie Thompkins? You're an import, Spencer. Act like it and put the ball in the hole. In the immortal words of my high school basketball coach, Campbelle Austin, "Score, boy, score!"

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I remember Coach Austin from the late 90s. He had 4 or 5 good years of good teams, which was always surprising because of the small pool of players at Hunter H.S. It had approximately 350 boys maximum to draw from in 4 grades. They played teams with student populations of 3000 (Brandeis, Morris, Al Smith), which meant they had 1500 kids to draw from.
Those were pretty good teams back then, with no "big" men over 6/4.
What happened to Coach Austin?

5:22 AM  
Blogger RafeBoogs said...

Coach Austin goes way back before the late '90s. He was Hunter's first boys basketball coach after the school started admitting guys in the late 1960s.

As one of the not quite big men on those Hunter teams, I can tell you where most of the players are, but Campbelle Austin's location is a mystery. I've thought of looking him up, but haven't gotten to that point.

We made fun of him a lot back then, because he was a pretty crazy coach with a knack for driving players crazy and starting at least one completely talentless player over better guys in every game, but a lot of Coach's "life lessons" turned out pretty much right. He was big on responsibility and what it meant to be a man, which sounds kind of goofy, but some of it actually stuck.

12:13 PM  

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