BY now, the world knows the Philippines is a basketball-crazy nation - its love affair for the game going back to the early 1900s.
There was a lot of history made along the way, too.
For example, a Filipino basketball player actually owns the record for most points scored in an international game - a milestone that still stands to this day.
Lou Salvador, known as the patriarch of a famous showbiz clan, scored 116 points at the 1923 Far Eastern Games in Osaka as the 19-year-old single-handedly carried the Philippines in the gold-medal game against China.
Also part of the Philippine team then were Mariano Filomeno, Vicente Avena, Augusto Bautista, Jovito Gonzales, Emiterio Montelibano, Alberet Morrow, Constantino Rabaya, Pedro Robles, and Mariano Sangle.
A column by Eddie Alinea of The Manila Times in 2017 said: "Salvador’s 116-point production, most of them coming from mid-court, has remained in the record books up to this present day, 94 years after, gifted the Philippines back the basketball gonfalon the Filipinos lost to China two years prior."

Thanks to Salvador's scoring explosion, the Filipinos avenged their defeat to the Chinese in the gold-medal game in basketball at the 1921 Far Eastern Games in Shanghai.
That also marked the only time the Philippines was not the champion in the cage competitions throughout the 10 editions of the biennial multi-sport event between the Republic, China and the Japanese Empire.
Details of the feat have been lost in history as the archives were "either destroyed or burned during the Pacific War while those that were spared and subsequently stored at the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex were either misplaced or lost during the floods which devastated the aging RMSC grounds," according to the late Philippine Daily Inquirer sports editor and columnist Manolo R. Inigo.
But in Legends and Heroes of Philippine Basketball written by Christian Bocobo and the late Beth Celis, the Tacloban-born Salvador attributed the feat to his impeccable conditioning as he substituted a medicine ball for a basketball in his daily training at the YMCA compound in Manila.
Salvador's outburst was one for the books.
He had another tour of duty two years later - his third with the national team - as Salvador, now playing for the Jose Rizal College in the NCAA, led the Philippines to a successful title defense in the 1925 Far Eastern Games held in Manila.
In a trend that he apparently started, the basketball star transitioned to show business, first as a stage actor in 'bodabil' using the stage names Chipipoy and Van Ludor.

Salvador soon became a talent manager after World War II, discovering talents such as Chiquito, Pepe Pimentel, and Eddie Peregrina, while also working as a director and forming his own company Master Films.
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Curiously, he also sired a reported 102 children among 48 women, among them Philip, Lou Jr. and Leroy Salvador and Alona Alegre, both following his footsteps in entertainment. Maja Salvador is also part of the clan.
He died at the age of 67 on March 1, 1973.
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