Remembering Coach Kwang, the founding father in Taipei’s resurgence!

KUALA LUMPUR (Mageshwaran's AsiaScope) - The entire basketball world was shocked when Chinese Taipei bested China in the Quarter-Finals of the 27th FIBA Asia Championship. Honestly speaking, I wasn't! At the most I was only pleasantly surprised at the ability of the Taipei ballers to rise to the occasion breaking away from their shackles - most of them in the mind.

The question that ran popularly as the two teams warmed up for the eventually epochal Quarter-Final game was: "Can Taipei beat China?" And the unanimously popular answer to that question was: "Do Taipei believe (in themselves) that they can beat China?" At the end of what transpired to be one of the most remarkable 40 minutes in FIBA Asia history was a firm answer in the affirmative to both those questions.

Coach Hsu Ching-Tse had indeed found the magical potion that brought his team back from almost death - a 10-point deficit against a team that carried as much fame as the Chinese would have been a killer for many teams - to create history!

Coach Hsu surely deserves the credit for instilling in his team the ability to deliver the sucker punch, but the credit for making Taipei a force to reckon with in FIBA Asia competitions must go to a man, who unfortunately is no longer with us.

Turn the clock back a few years - to 2007 precisely. Following the disastrous results at the 23rd FIBA Asia Championship in Doha, Qatar when Chinese Taipei failed to make the Quarter-Finals for the second successive time, the Chinese Taipei Basketball Association brought in a coach high on reputation to helm the national team.

Korean Chung Kwang-Suk - who lost his battle with kidney cancer last year - was given the task of rebuilding the Taipei team and the results that followed in the next two FIBA Asia Championships are good enough to speak for the contribution made by this venerable coach.

Coach Chung was a favorite of mine, for the mildest of manners and softest of speeches he carried. But on the bench, coach Chung was a strict disciplinarian and a hard task master. Very often, I'd find coach Chung livid for a play gone astray despite the team winning and with a beaming smile if something had clicked even if the team had lost!

That Taipei, against all pre-event predictions, went on to finish sixth in the 24th FIBA Asia Championship in Tokushima, Japan in 2007, an event which, according to experts, was the most competitive FIBA Asia Championship at that time spoke for coach Chung's ability to inspire the underdogs.

Two years later, Taipei failed to come through the East Asian qualification for the 25th FIBA Asia Championship in Tianjin, China but when awarded a wild card, coach Chung grabbed it with both hands and took the team to finish as high as the fifth - the highest Taipei had ranked in almost a decade then.

The high point of Taipei's campaign in the 2009 event came when coach Chung helmed the team to a superb win against his home country Korea, whom he had coached to a gold medal at the 1997 edition of the FIBA Asia Championship in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - the previous occasion the Koreans qualified for the FIBA World Championship before their bronze medal finish at the 27th FIBA Asia Championship earned them a ticket to the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup to be played in Spain from 30 August to 14 September next year.

Listen to what Chris Wang, a passionate, objective and sharp follower of Taipei basketball has to say about coach Chung.

"CTBA hired Chung to lead the national team at arguably the most difficult time. The first thing Chung instilled his team was the Korean-style discipline and tough-as-nails defensive effort. While the national team under his tutelage was unable to gather the best talents possible due to injury, Chung's team had one of the best defenses I have ever seen in Taipei basketball history, in particular on zone defense.

"Chung also deserved credit for developing the potential of Lin Chih-chieh (an All Star at the 27th FIBA Asia Championship), after first coaching the flamboyant small forward on the junior NT and later on the senior NT. Chung was the first one to recognize Lin's massive potential when Lin was an overweight and out-of-focus young man.

"Too bad a large part of Chung's instruction perhaps was lost in translation and prevented the NT from playing a lot better than it should have had, since Chung, who only spoke Korean and a little bit English, had to communicate with his players through an interpreter."

Wonder what would have happened if coach Chung had actually picked up some Chinese! Surely coach Hsu wouldn't have had to worry about answering the Doubting Thomases before the China game!

My thoughts certainly did revolve around coach Chung when Taipei bested China for the first time in 11 meetings! We really missed you coach Chung!

So long...

S Mageshwaran

FIBA Asia

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