If the yearly furor over the Ateneo-La Salle clashes at the UAAP basketball games aren’t enough proof of how basketball-crazy Filipinos are, then one simply has to look at the long and storied history of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).

Established in 1975, the PBA is the oldest professional basketball league in Asia and the world’s second oldest next to the National Basketball Association (NBA). Then and now, PBA teams are sponsored by multinational companies who see prime advertising space in being viewed by the millions of Pinoy basketball lovers.

Some of its stars have even made the leap into different fields such as politics (former Senators Robert Jaworski and Freddie Webb) and entertainment (Benjie Paras, Joey Marquez, and Alvin Patrimonio).

The fact that nobody has written about how deeply ingrained basketball is into the fabric of our culture was something that Rafe Bartholomew, a self-confessed basketball addict, decided to remedy. In 2005, armed with a Fulbright scholarship and a general knowledge that basketball had a wide influence in the country, Bartholomew went out to discover just how much influence the sport really had.

“I didn’t know the specifics but I got the sense that basketball was extremely widespread in Philippine society, that it has worked itself into different corners of life that you don’t see as much in the States,” Bartholomew says. “It was in politics, religion, entertainment, like a web and my goal was to unwind the string and see basketball in the different arenas that it affected.”

Five years later – three of which were spent here in the country – Bartholomew has returned with “Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippine’s Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball”. The book, which was launched over the weekend at National Bookstore Cubao, is a fun and entertaining exploration of the influence that the game exerts over our island nation.

Intrigued

Bartholomew grew up in New York City loving basketball. His love for writing, however, would come much later as a student at Northwestern University in Illinois. He had only been writing humor columns in high school before taking up writing in Northwestern. But writing about sports was not the first thing in his mind.

“I didn’t want to be a daily sports writer. You couldn’t start with basketball, you had to start with a smaller sport. I didn’t want to pay my dues following bowling, so I figured, forget it,” he recalls with a laugh.

However, David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game” and Alexander Wolff’s “Big Game, Small World”, would provide glimpses into the world of Philippine basketball, and Bartholomew was intrigued enough to pitch Philippine basketball to the Fulbright board as a research topic.

He writes in the book’s introduction: “Supposedly, basketball fever in the Philippines ran so hot that the government once reschedule a voter registration drive after learning that it conflicted with the telecast of an NBA final’s game. According to roundball legend, Filipinos were so dedicated to basketball that the wealthy alumni of a Manila university bought the floor used in a past NBA All-Star game, shipped it to Manila in pieces, and installed it in the school gym...Here was a nation full of basketball freaks just like me! So somehow I managed to convince the Fulbright board to give me their blessing (and the American taxpayers’ money) to fund a year in Manila to document the phenomenon.”

Bartholomew would soon find out that it would take more than just a year in the Philippines to fully explore basketball’s influence in the country. What had been supposed to be a year’s stay turned to three!

“I just kept extending piece by piece, six months or one year at a time. I realized that if I wanted to accomplish any of the things I said I would, I had to stay much longer,” he explains. “The first year I was here I got to do a lot of research, but I consider it more learning my way around and getting comfortable and figuring out getting from point A to point B.”

Learning Philippine history through basketball

The three-year exploration of Philippine hoops would take Bartholomew to some pretty interesting detours, enabling him to learn about the country’s complex social and political history through the entry point of basketball.

Not only was Bartholomew able to follow the Alaska Aces’ championship year, he was able to be confounded by Cebu’s unusual “Unano-Bading” basketball games. He even acted in a primetime teleserye!

“I played the character ‘Brad’ in ‘Bakekang’. How in the world would I end up on TV? I was doing crazy scenes, bed scenes, slapping, fighting, cursing on TV. And it came through basketball!” he says with a laugh. “A friend of mine working with GMA told me they needed American guys, and as far out there as ‘unano-bading’ was, being on primetime network television was something that I never thought I would do.”

He was also able to write about the touchy subject of Fil-Am imports in the PBA, which became controversial in the ‘90s. During the three years of his stay here, he had become close to a lot of local players, and became aware of the complexity of the import issue.

“It was fascinating because out of all the places, it was basketball that became the area used to sort out Filipino identity. How Filipino do you have to be a PBA player? It was so hard to write about it because everyone felt really strongly about it,” he says. “I had to wade through the different sides and opinions to come at what was my best shot at a balanced opinion. I wanted to do justice to both experiences because they were both important and complicated.”

Loving the country

Now that the book is out in the country – and receiving positive reactions from local hoops aficionados – Bartholomew is thankful for the opportunity to spend time in the country and write extensively about the sport that he loves and the country he has grown to love.

“I got lucky because I got an opportunity to come here and do a story that was the perfect combination of everything I love. Basketball, which I always loved, and writing, which was my second love,” he says. “The subject was also something that was bigger than sports. It’s about culture, passion, and then it turned into living in the Philippines, which is something I love on par with writing and basketball. It was the best time of my life.”

Bartholomew also hopes that his own effort in writing about basketball’s importance in Philippine society would also inspire other local writers to explore the many other ways that basketball is a part of everyday Filipino life.

“One of my goals is to have local writers write about basketball more, and not just from the classic sports writing point of view. I hope it shakes something loose in people, and make them want to uncover the connections between basketball and Philippine culture more and write more about it,” he says.

He reveals that he had his own apprehensions about being a foreigner writing about a culture not his own, but says that he did his best to write about the country as respectfully as he could.

“I was self-conscious writing about a country or culture not my own, and I wondered do I really have the right to do it?” he explains. “But it’s not a question of the right, but doing a respectful and honest and complete job. I told myself that if I did that, I would have earned the right.”

Bartholomew hopes that Filipino readers, more than anything, find a little bit of themselves reflected in “Pacific Rims.”

“I really wrote the book with Filipino readers in mind. The mark of success for the book for me is by the people who really understand this topic and for whom basketball is almost in their bones. Are they going to read it and think this guy is a joker, or will I do their experiences justice? I hope that Filipino readers think it is true-to-life, that it reflects their experiences, their memories, the basketball games they’ve watched and played. I hope it represents them to some extent,” he ends.