UNLESS you're from the nineties or a basketball purist or a diehard fan of the University of Santo Tomas basketball program, or all of the above, the name Henry Ong probably won't ring a bell when it pops up in casual basketball conversations.
But those who remember him swear they've never seen a better spot-up shooter in the college game. To this day.
For those who don't know him, Ong is a two guard generously listed at 5-11 (closer to 5-foot-9 actually) who looked anything but a basketball player, yet made three-pointers with eerie regularity. From all over the floor. From an unbelievable range.
Take it from Jong Uichico.
"Hindi pa uso ang Steph Curry three-point range, si Henry Ong na 'yon," the multi-titled coach tells SPIN.ph matter of factly.
Uichico should know. He was La Salle coach when Ong hit that cold-blooded trey infront of him and the entire Green Archers bench that helped wrap up a UST sweep of the finals in 1996 and the final jewel in the Tigers' historic UAAP four-peat.
A check with top UAAP stats guy Pong Docanes and the Ateneo archives unfortunately failed to yield Ong's numbers during his UST career.
But people who saw him play knew this: Ong made a lot more threes than he missed; made them with an awkward shooting motion uniquely his own; he made them from way, way out; and made the shots exactly when UST needed them.
Horacio Lim, the coach who took Ong from Grace Christian School to Mapua where they won two NCAA juniors championships together, said looks were completely deceiving in Ong's case. "Hindi nga mukhang player eh," he says chuckling.
"Ang hirap i-compare si Henry Ong sa ibang players kasi kakaiba talaga mga ginagawa n'ya sa court," says his longtime UST teammate Gerard Francisco. "Bigla na lang titira malapit sa half court, pati kami nagugulat."
"At walang backspin ang tira n'ya," Francisco added laughing.
But the shots just kept falling, There was one season that Francisco distinctly remembered when almost all the players in the UAAP struggled with their shots because of a change in the league's official game ball. Not Ong.
"May isang UAAP season, kakaiba 'yung Molten ball na maraming guhit [ang pinagamit sa games]," Francisco said. "[Si Henry] lang ang nakaka-shoot."
Ong was media-shy during his career and harder to track down after his retirement. But when we finally did, the first thing he was asked about was that distinct shooting motion and a phenomenal range he displayed at a time when Curry was still in grade school.
"Natural lang yata," the lefty says from the US, where he and his family are now based.
That seemed hard to believe, until Ong sends in a couple of raw clips of his mid-forties self hitting three-pointers while seated on the floor and on the bench of a New Jersey gym, verifying one story about him that all along I had dismissed as urban legend.
He indeed can make a shot. While sitting on the bench.
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Asked why he ever thought about attempting shots from such range, at a time when it was considered unthinkable, even absurd, Ong said: "People will not expect you to shoot from there, di ba? 'Yun ang mentalidad ko, additional weapon ko."
Ong was a member of three UST teams in that epic four-peat in the nineties and he left a big imprint in the last two with some of the biggest shots in UAAP Finals lore. Yet he is hardly in any conversation about the league's best gunners ever.
Why?
For one, those UST glory years came well before the age of social media, and therefore left very little digital trace. In fact a YouTube search of Henry Ong's best games yielded only this short clip from the old GMA Sunday morning sports magazine show Game Plan.
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Second, Ong was so underrated he easily got lost in a UST batch filled with future PBA players in Bal David, Chris Cantonjos, Edmond Reyes, Dale Singson, Richard Yee, Estong Ballesteros and Francisco himself.
Third, Ong quietly slipped away at the end of his college career. He played briefly in the defunct MBA under fellow UST alum Bingky Favis then left for the US while Bal David and his other teammates became household names in the PBA.
The man was elusive when asked why he decided to migrate with his entire family at the peak of his basketball career and gave only a vague response when asked why he never entered his name in the PBA Rookie Draft.
"Di ko feel that time. May nagsabi sa akin magpa-draft kaso nag-MBA ako, okay na yata 'yun," came his terse reply.
But does he really belong among the best shooters in the league? Francisco definitely thinks so, saying, "Para sa akin, after Henry Ong si Renren Ritualo na sumunod sa kanya na upgraded version."
"He could be [among the best] as a spot-up shooter," says Uichico.
As for Ong, he hardly seemed concerned about his place in UAAP history, living a laid-back life in New Jersey where he says he spends some of his free time coaching a girls basketball team where one of his three daughters belong.
He brought some of his trophies and medals to the US and sometimes get visits from former teammates like Yee and Francisco - the only connections to his past as a key component in the success of one of the best UAAP teams in history.
But there are days, when he feels like it and the body is still willing, when the old Henry Ong re-emerges in a gym somewhere in Jersey. The dad bod is slow and the knees sure are creaky, yet that unconventional shooting motion is still vintage.
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