By Henry L. Liao
Your Honor, I rest my case with these pieces of evidence.
On October 17, 1974, a Thursday, De La Salle meal ticket Lim Eng Beng racked up 55 points in an 83-81 victory over Colegio de San Juan de Letran for a 10th-straight victory in the NCAA tournament competitions.
Lim’s double nickel broke the old NCAA Seniors’ scoring mark of 52 set by the Letran Knights’ Ricardo (Ricky) Pineda in 1969 against Ateneo. Pineda, in turn, had broken the record earlier held by San Beda’s Loreto (Bonnie) Carbonell, who chalked up 46 points in 1955.
(Robert Bolick would later shatter Carbonell’s school record when he drilled in 50 points in a 98-79 rout of Arellano University in NCAA Season 94 on August 24, 2018.)
The 55-pointer by Lim, a 5-foot-11 shooting guard from Tondo, Manila, remains the all-time NCAA single-game scoring record in the Seniors division to this day, lasting for 50.5 years so far.
Lim had been held to just 11 points in La Salle’s 100-88 triumph over Letran in first-round action on August 6 but stormed to net 41 points in his team’s 74-67 victory over Jose Rizal College to complete the first round on September 15.
As if it was not enough, Eng Beng also racked up 54 points against lightweight Trinity College on November 12, 1974, as La Salle, which captured the first-round flag with an immaculate 7-0 record, wrapped up the second round in a three-way logjam with Jose Rizal College and Ateneo de Manila at 6-1, necessitating a playoff.
The Green Archers, who had lost to the Heavy Bombers, 72-71, on a last-second jumper by Angelito Ladores off Virgil Villavicencio just three days after Lim’s 55-point feast, subsequently also romped away with the second-round flag after beating the Heavy Bombers, 90-82, and Ateneo, 90-80, in the playoffs to automatically snare their second championship in four years and wind up with a 15-1 record.
Lim, a college rookie when champion De La Salle beat Fortunato (Atoy) Co Jr. and the Mapua Tech Cardinals during the 1971 NCAA finals, averaged 30.9 points in 16 games during the 1974 season—another all-time NCAA Seniors mark that remains unchallenged to date.
Beng and Co were the only products from the Chi-Fil Tiong Lian High School league to be recently named to the list of the 50 greatest players in PBA history. This was simply an affirmation of their greatness, having already made it to the list of the 25 greatest in 2000 during the pro league’s 25th anniversary.
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