Not your father’s game

Basketball is due for another upheaval, after half a century of constant change. The game is far from what your father (my generation) knew and grew up with. There has been so much evolution, that we need a list to keep track of what has been going on.

The game has always drawn passionate, determined commitment from Filipinos, who originally thought it was an effeminate game that only women should play. It was introduced into our educational system by the Americans, then became part of the Far Eastern Games (which became the Asian Games). Then came the Berlin Olympics in 1936, where the Philippine Islands deserved to win the gold medal, but were cheated twice. Come the 1960’s, the evolution of the sport accelerated.

First came the birth of the Philippine Basketball Association, a rebellion of the MICAA team owners against the Basketball Association of the Philippines, which constantly “borrowed” their best players and returned them injured or exhausted while they were still receiving salaries and other benefits. That changed the dynamic of the sport, at least in the Philippines. Now, athletes did not need to become employees to earn while playing basketball. They had value. They could negotiate. More significantly, the national team became a mere stepping stone to a career.

When basketball was declared an open sport in 1989, that catapulted it into a different dimension altogether. First, pros could be declared amateur again whenever they were needed for an international competition, like the Soviets and other European entities did for ice hockey and other sports. Second, and most impactful, it inevitably eliminated the need for full-time national teams. You had to entice the players to stay with the national squad instead of turning pro. Why would anyone pay them that much for sporadic play, when it would be more economical to just borrow pros when needed? This is what the US did, and we followed.

It became a seller’s market. Players could now dictate their terms, and decide when to play or not. In 1988, when the US varsity athletes were steamrolled in the Seoul Olympics, NBA players volunteered to represent the flag and country. Inevitably, they started to pass on the invitation, and it was like the MICAA all over again, but on a larger scale. In the FIBA World Cup, we’ve heard of NBA team owners asking that their star players not be played unless absolutely necessary, to keep them away from potential injury.

After Thirdy Ravena made young ballers aware of the earning potential of playing abroad, players had even more leverage against the national team and even the PBA, though it may not necessarily be a good thing. Rugby went through a similar challenge in the early 2000’s, when the Volcanoes started rising in Asia. Japan would hire our players for their pro league, then hold them to contract when the country needed them.

The next stage of basketball’s evolution is more dependent on scouting. After several migrations of Filipinos (mostly nurses) to the US and other territories in the 1920’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, we have benefitted – sporting-wise – from their mixed-race offspring, which in itself was controversial for a while. Now, the task is to find taller Filipino-whatever kids at an earlier age, and convince them to favor their Filipinos roots.

This is not your father’s basketball.