Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball by Rafe Bartholomew

Author:Rafe Bartholomew [Bartholomew, Rafe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Philippine Basketball Association possesses the unenviable duty of deciding who qualifies as Filipino and therefore is allowed to play. This sounds like a simple classification task, but history and geography have contrived to make determining Filipino identity utterly baffling. Even before the Spanish arrived and drew the Philippine archipelago’s national—some might say arbitrary—borders, the country was a melting pot. Although much of the population shared some Malay heritage, rough seas, imposing mountains, and impenetrable jungles ensured that groups who settled in different areas developed distinct languages and cultures. Arab merchants arrived in the South and spread Islam. Chinese traders lived alongside the local population in major ports like Cebu and Manila. Three-hundred-plus years of Spanish colonialism were followed by American control, which gave way to a short, violent period of Japanese occupation before the Philippines finally became independent. Each foreign power left behind not just a colonial legacy, but also a sizable gene pool. By the time the PBA played its first games in 1975, the Filipino “race” was a mix of Malay, Chinese, American, Spanish, and Japanese backgrounds, among others; the country was not just a melting pot, but a blender.

Ethnic tensions had always strained relationships between different groups, especially between the darker-skinned masses of Malay background and the Caucasian and Chinese mestizo elites who controlled a disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth. In the early days of the PBA, however, ethnic rivalries were not an overriding concern. Two of the league’s greatest shooters, Fortunato “Atoy” Co and Lim Eng Beng, were Chinese citizens who became naturalized Filipinos and were welcomed by the PBA. Divergent ethnic backgrounds mixed harmoniously in the seventies and eighties because players and fans alike shared a Filipino cultural heritage. Co and Lim may have looked more Chinese than their teammates, but they were both raised in the Philippines, spoke Tagalog, ate rice at almost every meal, and loved basketball for as long as they could remember.

Not counting imports, the first player raised outside of the Philippines to play as a local in the PBA was Ricardo Brown, a half-Filipino guard who starred at Pepperdine and came to the Philippines in 1983. Before Brown ever played a quarter, observers of the Philippine game worried that he could set a dangerous precedent. In Champ magazine, Butch Maniego warned that Brown could be “some sort of test case before a whole horde of players with similar lineage come in and take over roster spots which would have gone to our homegrown cagers.” Brown’s heritage was confirmed, he was naturalized, and he joined the Great Taste Coffee franchise and led the team to two Finals appearances in the 1983 season, where they lost twice to Billy Ray Bates and the Crispa Redmanizers. Brown was scrutinized and picked apart by sports writers in his first season; they expected more from the heralded American, who was chosen by the Houston Rockets in the third round of the 1979 NBA draft. Over time, however, he won them over with his low-key manner and by letting his remarkably steady play speak for itself.

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