Over the last few months, I have heard two common arguments in the sports community. First, no matter how we argue that Filipinos will never be successful in basketball on the world stage, we will always love the sport, beyond any reason. The second question is why this writer doesn’t transpose the same tongue-in-cheek, roguish sense of humor from my weekly television program hardball onto this column?
All right, for the sake of all those making those arguments, on the occasion of my birthday, indulge this attempt at proving that basketball was destined to be a Filipino sport. It may seem illogical, irreverent or even unreasonable, and probably will be, but just for fun, let’s make the attempt to blindly justify basketball’s influence in the Filipino consciousness.
In college, one of my theology classes revolved around the book “God’s Questionable Existence.” The premise of the tiny volume is proving that God exists without using theology. It is quite a challenge particularly for Catholic Filipinos, who are used to basing our faith on the Bible and church doctrine. In the 1997 movie “Contact,” for example, Jodie Foster, whose father mysteriously disappeared when she was nine years old, asks Matthew McConaughey’s character to prove that God exists. His reply, “Do you love your father?” Similarly, how do we prove that basketball is a Filipino game even without the obvious fact that Filipinos are theoretically not built for it?
Basketball was inspired by a relative of tumbang preso. The Filipino street game wherein children knock down a discarded tin can protected by an opposing team of children with their slippers is played everywhere in the country. But when James Naismith was instructed by Dr. Luther Gulick to invent an indoor winter game for bored YMCA students, he thought of “Duck on a Rock,” a game he played while growing up in Ontario, Canada. “Duck on a Rock” is similar to tumbang preso, the only differences being stones were used instead of slippers, and the target was placed on top of a rock or some other elevated structure.
This gave Naismith the idea for placing the hoop at a height of 10 feet, which he believed would limit contact.
Basketball’s inventor was Filipino sized. Despite his formal appearance and intellectual mien, Naismith projected an aura of size in spite of his height, not because of it. Naismith was a burly 5’9” and almost 200 pounds, the same height and just a bit heftier than the average Filipino. So in his thinking, the original 13 rules of the game would also help equalize things for smaller players. Of course, at the time the game was vastly different. Originally, dribbling was prohibited, and there were no holes in the net or shot clock.
We should have been Olympic champions. The first-ever basketball competitions were held in Berlin in 1936. The Philippines was one of 22 countries participating. A 26-year-old lawyer named Ambrosio Padilla came out of retirement to captain the team. Despite all their differences in social standing and sports backgrounds (rich kids played baseball and the rest ran track), they bonded on the three grueling weeks spent at sea to Paris, and the one-week trip crammed into boxcars on the train to Berlin. According to Padilla before he died, the organizers made two serious mistakes that they never acknowledged.
First, they allowed the Americans to field players above the 6’3” height limit, including a 6’8” all-American named Joe Fortenberry.
Remember that, at the time, a jumpball was held after every made basket. Having a giant in the pivot gave the US an unfair advantage.
The next problem was that the organizers had miscalculated the length of the tournament. Realizing that they would still be playing even after the Olympics had finished, tournament officials decided that, from that point on, every country that lost would be relegated to the consolation round. Before that, the Islanders had been running roughshod over everybody they faced. As luck would have it, the Philippine Islands was scheduled to play the United States next. The Islanders suffered their only loss, yet finished in fifth place.
Filipinos accepted basketball even though they thought it was a sissy sport. When American educators and missionaries arrived at our shores, they had their books, Bibles and basketballs with them. This was mainly because Naismith invented the game in a YMCA, and every major city in the US had one, so the sport readily caught on there. Just a few years after, the Americans used basket ball (as it was spelled then) to conquer the Philippines. But the early Pinoy hoops audience was cool to the idea, since it was slow and new, and the first major basketball tournament in the country was a girls’ high school competition won by Tondo High School. It was only later that Filipinos realized that basketball was a sport men could play, too.
The Philippines was the first country to issue a basketball stamp.
In 1933, the country issued the first basketball stamps ever printed.
That may have nothing to do with the argument. Or then again, it might. I haven’t figure that part out yet.
Rule changes were made for smaller faster players. Some argue that the initial rule changes in the game benefited short players. One was punching a hole in the net to let the ball drop through. Initially, every time the ball was shot into the peach basket, someone got a nearby ladder, propped it up against the wall, climbed it, and fished out the ball. No wonder scores were low. But more than a decade later, when nets were added and some had strings, it was much easier to inbound the ball after a made basket, a boon to short players who could leak out on the fastbreak. That was if they knew what a fastbreak was back then.
Without basketball, the Philippines would have an infrastructure vacuum. Imagine if there were no “multi-purpose” halls in every barangay. If there were no need for basketball courts, then the country would lose tens of thousands of these community gathering places. Instead, we would probably be holding barangay socials at imported coffee shop franchises. Instead of burning calories, millions of Filipinos would be sucking them up even faster, with whipped cream on top.
There are probably many other quirky, unreasonable justifications for our love for the game. Ideas are welcome.