History of the Track & Field team

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To: peterpan@pacific. net.ph; LSGH78@yahoogroups. com
From: alturaam@netscape. net
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:58:14 -0500
Subject: Re: LSGH 1978 NCAA 2nd to the last Update... and Some History from over 30 yrs ago

Fellow bastards,

A little bit more color and detail on that 4x400m a nd that afternoon:

1) The 4x400m is the last event of the meet and effectively the last sports event of any kind for the athletic season. While everyone at the time thought that the T&F championship and more importantly, the General championship, was going to be decided by that relay race alone, we had already beaten Ateneo at that point because a silver medal in the Shot Put, courtesy of our own Pol De Leon, had not been tallied or counted until the event was over. That was worth a huge 5 points, and it had somehow fallen thru the cracks. Ask Ji Reyes (another shot putter) or Johnny Gomez, our Recorder at the time. So in reality, it was already in the bag, even before the 4x400m was run. Anyway, it made for great drama.

2) Ateneo should have won the T&F championship that year and were favored to do so. Most of their medals the previous year in '77, which we also won, were scored by their juniors or their own class of '78. On paper, it should have been theirs. What happened was that LSGH had to many unknown people who just came out of the woodwork whom Ateneo simply couldn't account for. People like Art Ogtong, Andy Lee, Butch Valdez, Topher Ancien, etc. Credit us, LSGH '78, for seeking out and harnessing this talent.

3) I spoke to John Lacson, their ace pole vaulter (a DLSC grade schooler, and perennial meet heart throb) about this event years later in '89, at a chance meeting at Habo Cardenas' bachelor party=2 0in SF. They took it hard and were bitter about it. The Ateneo T&F captain, a sprinter by the name of Juaning Cabanero, who I think had run for Ateneo from the time he was a freshman, said he would run all the way home to Merville, Paranaque from Rizal Memorial-if they lost. They lost, he kept his word and ran home to Merville, straight from the meet. Jason Lim (one of our own sprinters, as Minggoy notes), taga Merville ka, hindi ba? If you know him, ask him about it.

4) In that same chance meeting, John Lacson opined at the time that if one of their own guys, a stud 400m runner/hurdler by the name of Jimmy Hofilena was there, they would have won. This guy didn't run for Ateneo his senior year so he could do drama/theater. He was really good and had medaled the year prior. Would they have won? Who knows. I raised this with Andy Lee years later. He thinks that's bullshit.

5) Art Ogtong's high jump of 5'8" was a PR (personal record) for him. On that day, the planets and stars lined up and he cleared 5'8 to win it all. A gold medal and a huge 7 points. I don't think he ever cleared 5'4' in practice or any of the previous meets. I also believe he never cleared or even jumped competitively afterwards. Mike Aquino would do 5'6" consistently and I think he had a 5'8" jump at an earlier meet. Mike was heavily favored for that evetn. He got20the silver and still talks about that to this day. I'm not even sure Art was supposed to be one of the 4 LSGH jumpers for that event. I think it was a last minute decision by Tatang to take Art over Bong Manese, a consistent 5'4" jumper. As many of you might know, Art took that medal to the great Coach Evangelista of UP, he himself a former national-class high and triple jumper. Art talked the coach into taking him in and got into UP, with that piece of hardware alone.

6) 4x400m lineup: Lito Santos ('78), Jovy Sacro ('78), Paul Zuluaga ('79) and Andy Lee ('78). Jovy was inserted into the relay at the last minute. Game time decision by Coach Tatang Mendoza. That was Gen. Ignacio's spot. Alex is still semi-disppointed about it and should be. Over beer and vodka, he told me about it in Feb '08 at our 30th. Jovy was more involved with basketball at that point and had trained very little. Running 400m flat out with little training is not something to be taken lightly, but great athletes with great lungs can do it. Jovy did and actually put an additional 5-10 m into Ateneo's runner. Ateneo was smoked in that race. By the time Andy got the baton, he already had a 20-25m lead.

7) That relay race was the last high school athletic encounter of any kind, between La Salle Greenhills and Ateneo in the NCAA. Ateneo withdrew from the league the next year. DLSU would follow around 1980, on account=2 0of the La Salle-Letran incidents at the time. Then of cour se, which I found out later from Henry, LSGH was ruled out of the UAAP in favor of De La Salle Zobel because of volleyball game foibles earlier in the year.

So there you have it. It was our fault, bastards.

cheers,
Sambo

Sambo,

Reading your Mail was like being back in Rizal Memorial in '78 again. Brings back good memories.

About Ateneo being sour and all, we were just better, faster, higher and stronger; If I remember right all the golds in the track event were split between us and Letran. Ateneo had to settle for a handful of bronze and silvers. They were just DOMINATED. John Lacson mentioned a lot of "ifs" but hey, history is full of ifs. Jimmy Hofileña my balls. The guy from Letran (Blanco, or Reyes, I think) would've beaten him anyway.

As for Art Ogtong being in a zone that day, it was more of Mike being out of it. Was Jovy Sacro a hero? All of you were. I remember Tatang deciding to put in Jovy at the third leg saying he had sseniority over Alex since he was with the team since his sophomore year(?) But wasn't Alex as well? Paul Zuluaga, Andy Lee and Lito Santos were no-brainers. The toss up was hard, since Alex practiced more than Jovy and I didn't think it was fair. Anyway, let's not forget the exploits of Topher Ancien, who NEVER practiced, Jojo Figueroa who was just unbeatable that year, Noel , Paul , Joe Jacky and Banzon, our reliable juniors.

Thanks for the memories, guys

Johnny G


Original Message-----
From: Jose Roy <jmroy111@hotmail.com>
To: sambo altura <alturaam@netscape.net>; henry atayde <peterpan@pacific.net.ph>; LSGH <lsgh78@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 5:01 am
Subject: RE: LSGH 1978 NCAA 2nd to the last Update... and Some History from over 30 yrs ago

Dear Sambo,

What a dramatic account. Great memories, great feelings of being a La Sallite. Tears welling in my eyes when you mentioned the golden contribution of Jason Lim.

-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Atayde
To: jm_padua@yahoo. com; lsgh78@yahoogroups. com
Sent: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 7:07 am
Subject: RE: LSGH 1978 NCAA 2nd to the last Update


Pare! What a memory you have. I felt bad that I missed all the celebration after the 4 X 4 team captured the gold which was needed to win the Track and Field over-all championship and the General Championship because I had to go to Taft and call Br. Gabe Cannon who arrived for the awarding. Atleast I saw us win! Animo 78! Henry From: LSGH78@yahoogroups. com [mailto:LSGH78@ yahoogroups. com] On Behalf Of Miguel Padua
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2009 8:33 AM
To: lsgh78@yahoogroups. com
Subject: Re: LSGH 1978 NCAA 2nd to the last Update

We also won the NCAA General championship trophy in 1978! This was the year that Art Ogtong became the gold medalist and luckily for us, Jason Lim was a member of the track team. This was also the year that Henry Atayde dashed all the way to De La Salle through the back entrance of Rizal Memorial in order to rouse the Brother President and happily inform him that the 1978 Bastards and Bullies captured the;NCAA General Championship trophy. Padua --- On Thu, 2/26/09, Henry Atayde wrote: From: Henry Atayde Subject: LSGH 1978 NCAA 2nd to the last Update To: onelasalle@yahoogro ups.com, "Manos" , LSGH78@yahoogroups. com, dlsaamancomm@ yahoogroups. com, "'alumni'" , spdo@lsgh.edu. ph, "Br. Felipe Belleza" , "Br. Vic Franco" , "Br. Dodo Fernandez" , "Br. Bobby Casingal" , "Bacay, Ma. Socorro C." , "SONNY ALVAREZ" , "'Br. Bernie Oca'" <ocab@dlsu.edu. ph>, LSGH78@yahoogroups. com, combatch82@yahoogro ups.com, "regina barrenechea" , "Cindy Banaria" Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 6:39 AM Dear Lasallian Community, La Salle Green Hills is celebrating it’s 50th year with the NCAA General Championship already in it’s grasp. And what better way to20close the 84th NCAA Season then by winning the Track and Field Over-All Championship! During the past two days, the LSGH Track & Field Team started with strong finishes in all the heats, having 3 or 4 participants in every Finals running event, aquiring numerous gold , silver ad bronze medals. Not to mention the 4th and 5th finishers which also contributed points to the team. Numerous records were broken. The highlight of the running events was the 4 X 100 meter relay. We won this event with just fractions of a second. I will announce the record breakers in a later date. And to think, we were seeded below San Sebastian and Letran. The another surprise was the success of our athletes in the field events which was always dominated by San Sebastian. To highlight the occasion, our Pole Vaulter broke the NCAA record that stood for 5 years! =0 A As of today, in Track &a mp; Field, LSGH is ahead by 149 points. The events for Friday (tomorrow) are the finals for triple jump, the high jump, the steeple chase, javelin, 2000 meters, 800 meters , 200 meters and the 4 X 400 meters. We are confident of winning the gold in the 800 and 200 meters plus the 4 X 4. We would probably sneak in a couple of silvers and bronze plus finishers in the rest of the day’s events because our boys had qualified in all. So I guess, the title is ours. This will give LSGH a total of 5 Championship Trophies out of 9 events. Beach Volleyball is still a demonstration sport for the Juniors. The last Track and Field Championship of LSGH was in 2006. We also won the General Championship at that time. Awarding of medals will take place tomorrow starting at 2 pm . While the awarding of the20 over-all trophy and the general championship trophy will be at around 4:30 to 5 pm. As for the senior division, Mapua is dominating the field with Letran and CSB fighting for 2nd. This is very important because a second place finish may also give the CSB Senior Team the General Championship. By the way, CSB was the General Champion in Season ’83. At that time, LSGH lost to San Sebastian by just 3 points. Let us pray that both schools will be victorious tomorrow. I invite all of you to go to Rizal Memorial and support our teams. ANIMO LA SALLE! Henry

Photos from Henry Atayde

Feb 7, 2009 50th anniversary

Quite a big turnout.

Contributed Article by RJ Ledesma, LSGH 1991

Dear fellow La Sallians,

I hope this article stirs fond memories of our high school alma mater and provides you with some motivation to attend the homecoming this coming Saturday, February 7. Please pass this on to your fellow LSGH alumni.

Animo La Salle!
Rj Ledesma, HS'91

JADED

I have been green-minded for half my life. I’ve been unwittingly green since I set foot in La Salle Green Hills (LSGH), a khaki shorts-wearing brat with my hair pomaded to one side, kamiseta tucked snugly into my Voltes V underwear, and a tear-drenched face smeared with uhog, because I didn’t want my Yaya to leave me alone at school.

I became comfortably green during high school, a black pants-wearing lad with my hair drenched with spray net, undershirt tucked snugly into my Rick Astley underwear, and an acne-ridden face smeared with pimple cream. I demanded that Yaya drop me off 50 feet before the school gate so my classmates would know that I was now independent.

And I stayed irrevocably green when I made my way to the Taft campus, a maong-wearing young man with his collared shirt un-tucked (I could no longer tuck my shirt into my Backstreet Boys underwear because the discipline officer, said that this was a disciplinary offense). Yaya could not enter the campus because she lacked a school ID.

I was in the same institution for 17 years of my life because, much like our receding hairlines, studying in La Salle was a family legacy. Green had been hard-wired into my DNA. I am a La Sallian three generations deep, and proud of it. In fact, right after college graduation, the university was foolhardy enough to let me teach for all of one semester (my students have since finished with therapy, thank you very much). If I were any more green, I’d be arrested for public indecency.

If you were to ask me what part of my education cemented my love for a school founded by a French priest 300 years ago, I would say that it was the time in my life that hair began to sprout in unfamiliar places: high school.

As LSGH celebrates its Golden Anniversary, I can’t help but wax nostalgic over my high school days. Unfortunately, I can only recall snippets of the academic portion of my high school education. I still remember what circle of hell I belong to in Dante’s Inferno. I barely remember the theorems from my geometry class. And I can only remember the relevant parts of the male and female anatomy. But I don’t think you can blame my teachers — God bless them all — for lack of trying

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” That being the case, my high school life was probably as interesting as a car accident on EDSA. Our freshman year exploded with a bloodless revolution — that was only a few hundred meters from our school, I might add. Our sophomore and junior years were riddled with failed kudetas and punctuated by power shortages. And what did we have to cap off our senior year? An earthquake.

Although my batch mates and I did have a rather idiosyncratic high school career, it was probably no less idiosyncratic than the other generations who grew armpit hair while studying at LSGH. They’ve had their own share of interesting times — from the First Quarter Storm to Martial Law to the Aquino Assassination to the Estrada dog and pony show to the iterations of People Power to the Arroyo shadow play to the Jun Lozada telenovela. But despite the spectrum of political melodramas that framed our high school years, there are “extracurricular activities” that have been shared across many generations of LSGH graduates. Even as curriculums change, fashions change, and waistlines change, some things remain incorrigibly constant.

We had our Search-Ins and Covenants. We learned how to smoke hit-hit buga style during lunch break. We had our Kundirana. We formed our own self-made profane-sounding fraternities. We had our visits to Golden Acres Retirement home. We were engrossed in a brisk trade of pornographic material. We had our Kabihasnan fairs. We skipped class to enjoy a meal at Le Ching Tea House in Virra mall. We had our school dances. We accepted violation reports like they were badges of honor. We had our RIFA and NCAA tournaments. We enjoyed the fringe benefits of an unsupervised soiree. We had our Namfrel Quick Counts. We blew up our toilet bowls with firecrackers. We had our high school Mass. We were embroiled sapakans on the field after class. We thanked God for our adolescent reward that was the Girls Athletic League (GALs). And we always tried to sneak a peek at our teacher’s underwear. (Sorry about that, Mr. Espino.) All these stories are retold in a perpetual loop
among our barkadas, and just seem to grow bigger and more unwieldy with each retelling.
On top of these experiences, the one thing we will definitely never forget is our stratification in the high school totem pole. You were the coño boy or the kanto boy. You were the teacher’s pet or the teacher’s enemy. You were the sosyal or you were the sociopath. You were the nerd or you were the repeater. You were the pala-biro or the pala-away. You were the chick boy or the boy who wanted to be a chick. Ah, the saccharine-sweet memories of high school life. Some of us want to relive it while some of us will never live it down.

And because of (or some might say, in spite of) our La Sallian upbringing, our Green Hills campus has sprung forth alumni who have contributed to the grand production number that is Philippine society. Until now, I find it hard to believe that I have shared the same set of teachers, smelly lockers and expired canteen food with these esteemed gentlemen who have inspired me by their example (or by their shenanigans) .

If only the campus walls could make tsismis, we could uncover what exactly were the turning points in their secondary school lives that made them the upright Christian gentleman of today. Did Paeng Nepumuceno score his first perfect rack at Coronado Lanes after playing hooky from school? What type of gayuma Ralph Recto and Kiko Pangilinan concocted during chemistry class to make them irresistible to heavenly bodies? Which teacher pressed the “fast forward” button on Mike Enriquez’s mouth and neglected to press “stop”? Where was the elusive electrical socket that Gary Valenciano stuck his finger into before his song and dance audition with the Kundirana? For the sake of our nation, some of these questions must remain unanswered.

However, what inspires me the most about La Salle is the Christian Brothers themselves, particularly during these interesting times. Because, as the Brothers are wont to remind me when this column gets a bit too green-minded, my Christian education did not end when they handed me the diploma.

Over a series of public statements that the Brothers have shared with the country, they have called on our nation’s (ahem) leaders to be accountable to the truth — not because it’s the popular thing to do, not because it’s the unpopular thing to do, but simply because it’s the right thing to do. After all, as Catholic educators charged with shaping the moral fortitude of the next generations of Christian gentlemen, the Brothers were not only holding our (elected?) officials accountable for the Christian values that were expected of them, but the Brothers were also holding themselves accountable for the values they taught to their students.

The sentiments that the Brothers have shared through their public statements are no different from the sentiments they have shared with their students in the classrooms — the responsibility of putting our faith into action. And, with the actions that the Brothers have taken to stand for the truth amid an atmosphere of fearful silence, La Salle continues to teach me about my faith. About courage. About responsibility. About compassion. About generosity. Because that is what my La Sallian education is all about. That, and some geometry, too.
Man, I didn’t know what Yaya Cora was getting me into when she first dragged me to school.

Nowadays, maybe not all of us alumni cheer as insanely as a contestant on Wowowee during a La Salle-Ateneo basketball game. Or recall the school cheers from stock memory. Or even attend homecomings. But if there’s anything that the Brothers want all alumni to remember about their La Sallian education, it is this: to keep a rosary stashed in your pocket and to treasure four lines of prayer that should be skewered like an arrow into their hearts.

Let us remember that we are in the Holy Presence of the Lord.
I will continue, O my God, to do all my actions for the love of you.
St. John Baptist de La Salle, Pray for Us.
Live, Jesus, in our hearts, forever.

This is what Animo La Salle is all about.
* * *
For comments, suggestions or if you want corporal punishment in the school curriculum, please text PM POGI to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail. com or visit my blog at www.rjledesma. net.

Silver jubilarians La Salle Green Hills (LSGH) Batch 1984 will concurrently host the annual homecoming and 50th anniversary of LSGH entitled, “ORO, PLATA, VERDE… Never Shall We Fail!” on Saturday (Feb. 7).