The real national sport

It's been a while since I cared about basketball (or any team sport for that matter). The last basketball game I played was during a dorm sports fest in college (rough and painful as only about three players knew the rules). The last live basketball game I saw was one where my son played (I was there as a nervous parent and not as a basketball fan). I only check the results of NBA games so that I'll know if my father and my son are in a good mood. They are hardcore Lakers fans.

Reading my husband's copy of Rafe Bartholomew's "Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball" made me remember the times when the outcome of a basketball game determined whether I was going to have a good day or not. I thought of the Sunday afternoons I joined my family to cheer for the UV Green Lancers during the school year and for our Cebu Sports Summit basketball team during the summer. I no longer remember what our team was called (we always joked that it was "Master Cutters") but I do remember how happy I felt when Manoy Jun, then the shop's "master cutter," cut the net from the rim with his own scissors and draped it on the huge trophy.

When my husband requested me to call the bookstore to reserve a copy of the book, I thought that the book was another basketball book that only a basketball scholar like him would appreciate. I have browsed through some and found that a lot of them are actually very well written. I just never liked one enough to want to finish reading the whole book. Until "Pacific Rims." I stayed up very late to finish reading it so its owner could have it back. It was impossible to stop reading a book with lines like this: "Forty million short men obsessed with basketball-they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians."

Bartholomew came to the Philippine in 2005 as a Fulbright scholar to research on why the country is crazy about basketball. His book is the only one that I'm aware of that tries to explain why Filipinos love the game. He manages to give plausible reasons. He also does a great job researching its history in the Philippines, peppering the book with facts that seem weird now-like how the 1911 Athletic Handbook for Philippine Public Schools included a section on how to modify basketball rules to make the game easier for female players. His observations and conclusions about the role of basketball in shaping Filipino identity in the post-World War II era make a good starting point for studying that part of Philippine history.

 Some foreigners who wrote about Philippine culture in the past incurred the ire of Filipinos because of their negative observations about us (calling our culture "a damaged culture," for example). Some of these conclusions are unwarranted and could have been the result of the author using his own culture as the standard for "correct" behavior. Bartholomew was smart enough to get the opinions of Filipino anthropologists, historians, and activists to have a better grasp of the things we take for granted but which foreigners find bizarre (an Unano vs. Bading game in Lapu-lapu City, for instance).

That Bartholomew is not a Filipino (or a foreigner who needs to make a living in the basketball community in the Philippines) allows him to write about the seedier side of basketball-how PBA teams cheated the height ceiling for imports, for example. His perspective also makes it possible for him to notice and explain the differences between Filipino PBA players who grew up abroad and those who were raised in the Philippines, such as their concepts of personal space and being macho.

It's been three days since I finished reading "Pacific Rims." It continues to make me smile and reminisce about the time my relatives and neighbors got NBA and PBA monikers when they played in a barangay summer league and my sister was named "Face of the Night" during one game.

* * *

Email: [email protected]