Pacific Rim and the Love of Basketball

Filipino Girls Playing Basketball (Early 1900s) University of Michigan Philippine Photographs Digital Archive http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg/x-1855/phld038

I’ve been meaning to blog about sports for a while. It seems a more fitting time than any to do it now. The olympic games are well under way and I think coming across this photo (see left) of early Filipina basketball is a welcome sign.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that I too played basketball back in the day. I, like most Filipina girls in the North and West Ends, played the game in high school. However, unlike most Filipina girls, I was considered among my peers the ‘taller’ Filipina at five-foot-seven. I cannot say I ever became a basketball fanatic (given my supposed fate), but I’ve always remained curious about its connection to my heritage.

Basketball was invented by a Canadian (James Naismith) at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusettes in the 1890s. It would be within this same decade, US troops (and later administrators) would enter the Philippines to affirm its presence as colonist on the islands. Somehow, during this process, a love of basketball was implanted across the country. A culture investigated by scholar Rafe Bartholomew in Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’ Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball (2010).


Bartholomew, a self-confessed ‘basketball freak’ and former Fullbright scholar, travelled to Manila in 2005 to document basketball in the Philippines. The book reads like a diary with the author’s detailed accounts of ‘Air Tsinelas’ (p.15), the sweltering heat, and the hustle and bustle of Manila life. Thumbing through the first few pages, I wondered whether I’d be reading merely through a tourist’s observations of supposed Filipino excentricities – there’s a humourous note on the Filipino pronounciation of p’s, b’s, and v’s which converts his name from ‘Rafe’ to ‘Rape’ (p.114). Yet, looking past this, one can appreciate his journalistic account less of the history of basketball in the Philippines, but of the Philippines’ interaction with America through the various parallels he outlines. He repeatedly recounts an admiration for his six-foot-something build:

“My young fans were tiny, not only because Filipinos tend to be short, but because years of poor nutrition had stunted their growth. When I asked their age, kids who looked six said they were ten. (p.23)”

He also contrasts the elite Manila basketball world of the PBL (Philippine Basketball League)  and the PBA (Philippine Basketball Association) with the incomprable NBA. In an effort to emulate basketball’s ideal through foreign recruitment, Bartholomew has this to say:

“There was no reasonable boundary to the responsibilities heaped on PBA imports; anything short of Michael Jordan was not quite good enough. Of course, the PBA had neither the money nor the prestige to lure a player like His Airness, or even most NBA twelfth men, to Manila, so they settled for lesser talents and poorer pedigrees (p.90).”

Pacific Rim is a fun read for basketballistas or Filipinianists. It is a commentary on a sport much loved like hockey is to Canada.  Although I would have liked to learn more of the origins of Philippine basketball in the book, Bartholomew provides an interesting perspective – one that I`m not sure he realizes. He is more than an American in Manila, but also a figurative giant in the history he embodies through his unfamiliar physical stature, his US exoticness, and his `street cred` as an American basketballista. The Filipino love of basketball is the legacy of a colonial past where whiteness and the west is revered. He won`t come out and say it, but I can see why a pick-up game with him in the barrio would seem so special to his `little fans`.

I wonder how a Filipina-Canadian basketballista would be received?

See Rafe Bartholomew. Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’ Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball. London: Penguin Books Ltd. 2010.