‘That voice is silenced now
– too soon, indeed – but the
memories will remain alive.’
LAST Wednesday, November 13, Frederick “Ricky” Dandan, a good friend, passed away after almost a year of battling renal cancer.
He passed away despite all the heroic efforts of the doctors and nurses at the Philippine General Hospital. Throughout his two-week confinement, his loving wife Annielu stood guard in a private room on the seventh floor of the central block, alternating between hope and surrender, greeting arriving visitors as cheerfully as possible within his earshot, before collapsing into the arms of the arrival, sobbing quietly.
She would whisper words of encouragement as he lay seemingly asleep, IV tubes pumping life-saving fluids into his system as it battled the cancer cells. On a good day she would text me and many others about his Fighting Maroon spirit as critical markers improved and hopes rose.
And then there were the bad days.
As I landed in Manila on the evening of Nov 12, a message from Annielu was the first to register on my phone: his BP was dropping, she said, but he is still with us. Please pray for Ricky.
I got to know Ricky when he was a UP Maroon under Joe Lipa, one year before UP won its first UAAP championship. He was part of the era I have been most proud of as a lifelong UP student, the era when we didn’t buy players, when we didn’t need to dangle lucrative monetary and non-monetary benefits for them to don the State U jersey. Yes, we didn’t win often, but we always did our best playing with the cards we were dealt with.
Our paths crossed infrequently after our UP days until the early 2000s when I was thrust into the world of the Philippine Basketball Association as a member of the league’s board of governors representing the Coca-Cola PBA franchise. When we brought in Bo Perasol to be our head coach (upon the recommendation of playing coach Kenneth Duremdes), Ricky was Bo’s trusted second in command.
Together with coach Alex Compton and the very young Charles Tiu, Ricky backstopped Bo during that 2011 wild ride to the All-Filipino finals which remains the stuff of legends to this day.
During our PBA days and after, golf provided additional opportunities for us to bond. Whether it was at Davao’s Apo Golf Club or Calatagan, Ricky was always a fun member of the pack, not always doing well, to be honest, but always full of hilarious stories told in his booming voice.
That voice is silenced now – too soon, indeed – but the memories will remain alive.
What saddens me more is that I would be unable to make it home in time to join the three-day wake that will surely reunite all of us who in one way or another were benefited by the athlete, coach and friend that Ricky Dandan was.
He was my kind of Fighting Maroon – one who played for his university for the love of the game, one who tried his best to mold NextGen players with a tough love sense of purpose, and one who loved his family with all his heart and with no reservations.
And that’s how I’d like to remember him. I wish that just as I smile as I remember all the times shared (the good as well as the not-so-good), he too is smiling for the very same reasons about the very same memories.
Till we meet again, coach Ricky!
