There’s this saying that goes: “Stay away from people who pull you down while you are drowning.”

Michael Jordan does not know how to swim.  

Charles Barkley does not know how to swim.

Jordan had traumatic experiences with water. He almost drowned when he was 12, and his childhood friend drowned and died while they were swimming together.

Jordan, Barkley, and Dennis Rodman were the reasons I watched National Basketball Association (NBA) games in the 1990s. When Jordan and Rodman were both with the Chicago Bulls, the team won a three-peat from 1996 to 1998.

Good thing Jordan and Barkley didn’t have to go through the Ateneo Blue Eagles’ elimination-style tryout. Otherwise, the NBA would have lost two of the world’s greatest basketball players of all time.

Rene Baterbonia did know how to swim. He grew up near the Agusan River.

Had the drowning happened in another school, Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) students would be protesting against it by now, demanding justice.

That’s why its cold, detached, and indifferent response to the drowning of its very own basketball players, Baterbonia and Divine Adili, has shocked the Pinoy. Oh, so ADMU only protests and marches on the streets if it did not cause the injustice. But once it’s the reason behind the injustice, it shuts up and becomes as silent as the Three Monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And somehow forgets the fourth monkey: do no evil.

On Friday, two days after Baterbonia’s burial, the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) released its findings on the drowning. Just watching and listening to it was enough to break one’s heart: How could ADMU do this? Why did ADMU allow this to happen? Where’s the “persons for and with others” in this?

Who will believe ADMU once it reverts back to its compassionate self, fighting for human rights? Who will now fight for the less fortunate if ADMU could not even take care of its own basketball players? And this was not the only incident. There was Lenny Villa who died in 1991 after injuries sustained at a frat hazing. That frat was not accredited by ADMU, though, so it was easier then to do a “hugas-kamay” over his death.

But this time, ADMU’s approval is written all over the Ateneo Blue Eagles’ team-building at Dipaculao, Aurora.

I had written about this in previous columns. That it was a “team-killing,” not a team-building. And the CIDG findings are starting to prove that it was indeed meant not to build the team but to eliminate those deemed not worthy to play in the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) games. To choose 17 out of the 20 basketball players who were there.

17 happened to be my favorite number. But not anymore after that CIDG report. I realized that 17 became my favorite because it was associated with the most painful challenges I went through from 2015 to 2016. And ten years later, here’s this news about the Blue Eagles’ magic number.

So two players were not only eliminated, they died. The third one is obviously alive, and the question is, does he know he’s eliminated too?