The Making of a Leader
Rice, front row, second from left
To us freshmen at UP Prep, and even to some teachers, he was just “Tany”—short for Cavestany. But the name carried weight. It was the kind of name that made you straighten your back when you heard it, a mix of awe, fear, and grudging respect that clung to him like a shadow.
You never saw Tany before you heard him. First came the boom of his voice ricocheting up the school’s broad staircase. Then the heavy, unhurried thud of his footfalls in the dark corridor—more shuffle than stride, but no less commanding. His voice alone could make shy freshman girls fold into themselves like paper.
One afternoon, a strange thud pulled my attention away from the blackboard. Then again. And again—each one louder, sharper. My eyes tracked the sound to a chair in the front row, shaking with every blow. The girl in it whipped around, her face a mask of irritation, then glanced down. I followed her gaze to a polished black shoe, the toe aimed squarely at her chair leg. Tany’s shoe. And in that moment, I realized the girl he was tormenting was, in fact, the apple of his eye.And from the look in his eyes, I understood—she wasn’t just a target. She was the girl.
Other boys tried the usual routes: moon-eyed stares, roses wrapped in cellophane, carrying a girl’s school bag like it was a badge of honor. Tany—Rico, as I call him now—played a different game. He was never alone, but his circle wasn’t just anyone. He moved with a pack of older boys, half-jocks, half-rockstars—guys who could sing the latest hits, pick up a guitar and make it sing back, score a winning basket, and walk away from a fight without looking back.
He was friendly when he wanted to be, but he stayed on the edges of school life. No clubs. No dances. No proms. And with teachers, his relationships were… let’s just say, practical.
When I reunited with him thirty years later, the transformation was striking. He had just completed a two-year stint as president of a transnational petrochemical company. His voice, once booming through the stairwells of UP Prep, was now measured and deliberate, softened by years of boardroom diplomacy. His demeanor bore the quiet authority of someone who had commanded not just attention, but influence.
We met in the lobby of a five-star hotel in Makati. He took his place at the head of the table—not by insistence, but as if the chair had been waiting for him. Conversation moved easily, flowing from polite updates to shared memories, then spilling into the warmth of old jokes. But when the talk drifted toward gossip about one of our own, he lifted a hand—not sharply, but with calm finality—and urged us to refrain. The room fell silent for a beat, and in that pause, I saw it: the same presence that once made hallways fall quiet, now tempered by the discipline of leadership.
Back in high school, he was hardly the sharpest tool in the shed, and by his own accounts, he teetered on the edge of being a menace in college. If we were to vote back then, he might well have been tagged “least likely to succeed.” Yet even in those early years, his instinct to lead was undeniable—a quiet undercurrent that, in the end, carried him further than anyone could have imagined.
