PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 24 September 2008 Issue (Page E-3)
Last Sunday, while everyone was out watching the Ateneo-La Salle game in Araneta, I was over at a blockmate’s house with a couple of friends doing some academic work. This, however, did not change the fact that by four in the afternoon, all of us were seated around the big-screen TV, watching the game intently, sharing its highs and lows with all the other fans in the Big Dome. We had ceased being productive.
The game was a bit of a mess. The game was excruciatingly slow in the first half, and there were too many fouls and turnovers throughout. About the only thing that was amazing in this game was the defense, and even if you’re a fan of the sport, this is usually quite hard to appreciate.
But the game wasn’t completely devoid of good points. One of these good points was Ateneo’s 6”7 center Rabeh Al-Hussaini, who had 31 of Ateneo’s 69 points to go along with 9 rebounds. The MVP candidate’s play showed why Ateneo has been on top all season.
During the post-game analysis, my blockmates and I were talking about him in particular. “Ano bang height niyan?” one of them asked. “six-foot-seven,” another of my blockmates answered. “Mga kasing-height ni Michael Jordan.”
That remark, I think, illustrates why the Philippines and basketball don’t fit each other very well.
In our country, basketball is something of a national fixation. We play it on the streets, buy the jerseys, and have an entire channel dedicated to it on cable. This obsession tends to be both utilized and fueled by media. For example, basketball players are treated as celebrities, performing various other functions ranging from TV host to commercial model. When you think about it, these people aren’t just selling products or TV shows. In effect, they are also selling basketball, being “ambassadors of the game”. Maybe this is why every teenage boy, at some point in his life, must have wanted to be a basketball superstar.
While I myself also subscribe to the basketball culture, I don’t understand how things came to be this way, or indeed, why they should be.
For one thing, we put in so much money and effort into basketball when it’s something we can’t be competitive at internationally. Height, of course, is the big issue here. In other countries, the height range for big men would be around six-foot-ten to over seven feet. For smaller players like guards, the average height would be at around six-foot-four to six-foot-seven. Here, Rabeh Al-Hussaini, who stands six-foot-seven inches tall, is already a big man. Our big men are about as big as the small guards of other countries.
For another thing, we pay so much attention to basketball that we’ve come to ignore other sports. In this country, there’s not much room for a career in a sport that’s not basketball, aside from billiards, boxing, and bowling. Besides being unfair to all our talented and dedicated swimmers, martial artists, and other “–ball” players, it also makes you wonder if we have a strange, irrational preference for sports starting with the letter ‘B’.
That aside, I think the worse effect is that some of the sports we’re ignoring, we can actually be competitive at internationally, if we aren’t already. It seems to me that we pay much more attention to how our basketball teams fare in the UAAP than we do about our Olympic bets in taekwondo or archery. While it might be true that we’d give them support when they finally win, let’s face it: any endeavor that aims to win at international sporting leagues requires state support, in terms of both of funding and fan base. Basketball has a lot of this, while our other sports don’t appear to have much, if at all.
Perhaps the funniest thing about all of what I’ve mentioned above is that these aren’t things we haven’t heard before. Despite this, though, we continue to hold on to basketball as our national sport, for better or worse.
But I guess you could also look at it this way: if a sport is just as much about enjoyment as it is about competition, then the fact that we enjoy basketball is what matters.
The The big deal about basketball by james.soriano, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines License.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 9:12 pm and is filed under iThink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
ATENEO FTW!!! WHOOOOOOOO
Oye, one big fight!
Congratulations! Ateneo champs.
haha.
I think your final statement encapsulates my idea entirely- I’m a little flabbergasted as to why people are so obsessed with explaining why Filipinos enjoy Basketball so much. Is it really such a deep psychological neurosis why we like it?
C’mon, so Filipinos like it, take it as it is. And, inasmuch as other sports deserve their own spot in the spotlight, we can’t fault the people if they just enjoy one sport more than the next. There are a whole lot of reasons why basketball is so deeprooted in our psyche, and its next to impossible to try and erase them in favor of other sports. That’s also a big fault in sports commentaries against basketball- sometimes, in their bid to enhance awarement for another sport, there seems to be a tendency to make liking basketball seem like a bad thing. It’s not.
I, for one, do not enjoy basketball, but I don’t mind the Filipino fixation of it. I can understand why someone would like it, in the same way that i empathize with those who don’t, but are otherwise flung into the basketball culture anyway. And the fact that we are not internationally viable for basketball championships, or that our heights do not compare to those of other nationals do not, in any way, detract our validity of love for basketball. Filipinos love it, its in our culture- to explain it would be to try to explain why we have a fixation with eating pig’s blood, or such.
I think it’s a general case of overanalysis by people who wish it weren’t so, or who are so un-proud of their Filipinoness that the “folly” of small people playing basketball gets so under their skin
and this defense is coming from a short guy who doesn’t particularly enjoy basketball
Cheers, Myron! Great to hear from you again. Maybe college basketball over there will get you all hyped about it?
oh please, james! haha! hindi mo ba ako kilala? even constant in your facing of the grade school and highschool couldn’t get me interested.
and apparently, football’s the shiz here. What with all those big burly men crashing into each other while chasing after a brown, leather peanut. HAHA!
oh boy, i have much to learn
keep up the writing, by the way!