Dear casual NBA fans…

MANILA, Philippines - It was that time of year again when we worshipped our heroes and celebrated bravery in the face of great challenges. Our allegiances were intensified, our hearts were filled with pride, and our work stopped. It was a national holiday, a storied June tradition as Filipino as buko pie; it was the NBA finals.

Basketball has long been the country’s national sport, despite constant elementary school reintroductions of sepak takraw and arnis. It is the default sport for young boys of any social class and sometimes even young girls. It is far more mainstream than you may think, as these past couple of weeks have showed us. Various aspects of Pinoy life have been paralyzed by the recently-concluded epic NBA finals match-up between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs — lunches, meetings, and even government press conferences. This madness, however, did not start in game 1 just like it did not end in game 7 and will not for a long time.

We officially became a basketball-crazy country when the sport gained currency in the 1980s. Back then, PBA games were still the primetime dramas of the era, capturing the imagination of not only the barako and erpats crowd, but also of little kids and housewives shouting at Robert Jaworski through their TV sets, either out of praise or disgust. Back then, the NBA was more of an underground attraction; images of Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, and Larry Bird came in much the same way as Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant did — via betamax tapes and weekend afternoon TV specials. I even remember hearing about Michael Jordan’s free-throw line dunk like it was some sort of a mythical urban legend.

Cable and satellite

Now, thanks to cable and satellite technology, the NBA has become our new popified version of basketball, with mothers becoming more familiar with LeBron James and Kevin Durant than with Gary David and Calvin Abueva. And thanks to social media, the NBA finals can now take over the world for a couple of hours at a time.

But what makes Pinoy NBA Finals fever really possible is that curious creature every hardcore NBA fan has a love/hate relationship with — the casual NBA fan. On the one hand, NBA diehards enjoy seeing random, heretofore uninterested people suddenly care about the game; on the other, there’s really nothing more annoying than a casual fan over-celebrating a win at your expense, or worse, even taunting you about it. I personally go by one full-proof rule of thumb: If you can’t name your supposed team’s sixth man and identify what position he plays, then you really need to just shut up. Go play with the kids outside and shut the door.

The NBA finals is every hoop geek’s wet dream; it’s the league’s two best teams of the season going head-to-head. A lot of variables are in play like offensive strategy, defensive match-ups, strengths versus weaknesses, and other hard basketball stuff. So watching these games under the glare of “NBA finals fever” is like sipping fine wine at an obnoxious children’s party. You try to bask in the rich flavors of rebounding battles, pick-and-roll executions, and defensive rotations only for conversations to be dominated by annoying non-sequiturs such as Mike Miller’s hair or Manu Ginobili’s lack thereof or ignorant pseudo-fan talk like “LeBron James is nervous again” or “those Spurs guys are old and they play slow.”

Baskteball geek

The basketball geek in me wishes everyone else would just find the NBA finals as uncompelling as every other regular season game so I can just enjoy the X’s and O’s with fellow basketball geeks. But that would actually be selling the game short. The NBA finals is at its most exciting when X’s and O’s are thrown out of the window and the game starts to look less strategic and more insane. Case in point: game 6 between the Heat and the Spurs.

Now that was a game made even more fun by the presence of casual (non)fans. When LeBron James discards his headband and his over-thinking and starts playing on pure instinct, when Tim Duncan inexplicably plays like the 2003 version of himself, when Tony Parker hits an improbable (and not to mention, ill-advised) fade-away three-pointer over James, only to be answered by a desperation Ray Allen 3 that came as a result of a chaotic sequence that I am still unable to piece together as of this writing — that’s the time you stop watching the game with your brain and start embracing it with all the ridiculousness in your heart.

In games like that, the line between hardcore fan and casual fan is blurred and everyone just morphs into a kid again. Grown men jump, scream, and cry. Those who don’t follow the sport finally get what the fuss is all about.

Nationalistic rooting interest

While our moments spent watching Manny Pacquiao fights together are numbered, the NBA finals will always be here to stay, uniting us, not in a common nationalistic rooting interest (or schadenfreude, as it’s increasingly becoming the more common case), but in a common love for a sport we have embraced as our own, played by its greatest athletes.

“Bilog ang bola” (the ball is round) is one of the most commonly-used Pinoy truisms because it appeals to both our sense of fatalism and our stubborn dependence on chance as our last real hope against the machine of Philippine society. When we witness a game as crazy as game 6, we are reminded that highly-controlled, complex things such as basketball strategy and skill are still subject to randomness like everything else in this world. It is a hopeful realization and it is why we will always love basketball; not because we seriously think it can happen in our actual lives, but because it makes us forget about our actual lives. When chaos steps up off the bench and plays a bigger role than all of the future hall-of-famers on the court combined, everything becomes possible, including the best sporting event that not even fiction can dream up.

See you again, same time next year, casual NBA fans.

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Tweet the author @colonialmental.