THE Philippines has just lost its greatest basketball player.
Carlos “Caloy” Loyzaga died from a cardiac arrest on Wednesday at the Cardinal Santos Hospital in San Juan, where he was brought following the seizure.
He was 85.
Loyzaga, who dominated Philippine basketball in the 1950s and 1960s, playing for San Beda College in the NCAA and the YCO Painters in the MICAA, powered the Philippines to its best-ever finish in the international basketball scene with a third-place feat in the 1954 World Basketball Championships, where he also made it to the Mythical Five.
In the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Loyzaga powered the Philippine squad to a seventh-place finish, the highest-ever reached by the country in the quadrennial games. Four years earlier in Helsinki, the Loyzaga-led team finished ninth.
In four consecutive Asian Games (1951, 1954, 1958, and 1962), Loyzaga led the team to gold-medal finishes.
He turned to coaching and was at the helm of U-Tex and Tanduay in the early years of the Philippine Basketball Association. His two sons, Chito and Joey, followed in their father’s footsteps and also played basketball, both making it to the national team and in the PBA.
Upon his retirement from work, Caloy and wife Vicky migrated to Australia and settled down in the Gold Coast, until a stroke at a golf course forced the couple to eventually go back to the Philippines for good a few years ago.
A book on Loyzaga, who was known as The Big Difference, was published two -years ago, with son Chito spearheading the effort with the San Beda community as a tribute to his father’s accomplishments on and off the court.
The family has yet to finalize the wake arrangements as of this writing, according to Chito.