“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small.”– Azim Premji
It has been a great year for basketball. Filipino talent has exploded across the globe, with over a dozen youngsters now playing professionally in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Lithuania, not to mention coaches who’ve been enriching the sport elsewhere. The NBA is widening its audience with stellar international players. The PBA has successfully incorporated a foreign guest team, and Gilas Pilipinas continues to advance inexorably towards the Olympics. It’s all overwhelming when you think about how the game initially started as a winter diversion 131 years ago.
James Naismith was a Canadian physical education instructor at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was his job to keep all the young men under his stewardship busy year-round. Most of the time, it was easy, as everyone could go outside to run, play baseball and tackle football. In snowy winter, it was a different story. Confined indoors, all they could do was calisthenics and a game called “drop the handkerchief,” which is about as boring as it sounds. Naismith racked his brains to come up with an alternative.
One evening, as he feverishly drew up possible solutions, he recalled a game he played as a child called “Duck on a Rock.” It is a distant cousin of the Filipino kids’ pastimes tumbang preso and patintero. One player guards a stone placed on top of a larger rock or a tree stump, as other players circle around throwing their own stones to dislodge the stone from its perch. Naismith took the concept of having a stone (the ball) and a goal (the basket). He decided to elevate the goal to lessen physical contact. The YMCA ballroom became his laboratory. Naismith asked the custodian to nail a peach basket up the wall at each end of the room, and basketball was born. Of course, the game had to be stopped as they needed to get a leader to retrieve the ball each time a basket was scored, but that was part of the learning curve.
The Americans introduced this newfangled sport into the educational system in the Philippines, but it took a while to take hold. Men found it too soft a game. The first major tournament was the national girls high school championship. Players wore long skirts and heeled shoes and played outdoors. Boys dangled from tree branches to watch. One of only two actual courts in what is now Metro Manila stood in the Manila YMCA (site of SM Manila today). In the US, high school, collegiate and commercial tournaments were organized from the late 1920’s onward.
In 1936, the Berlin Olympic Games introduced men’s basketball. The Philippine Islands team spent an entire month at sea and in train cars to participate. The squad, led by Ambrosio Padilla and Jacinto Ciria Cruz, should have won the gold medal. But the German organizers, fearing a US boycott over racism issues, allowed the Americans to violate the height limit of 6’3” and even field two teams playing alternately. They then shortened the tournament after realizing that they had miscalculated the length of the tournament. Still, the Philippines’ fifth-place standing then still stands as the highest finish of any Asian team in Olympic basketball history. Naismith himself handed out the medals at the end of the tournament.
Ten years later, two commercial leagues merged to form the National Basketball Association, spurring the growth of the sport across America and spring-boarding to the rest of the world. In 1975, member of the amateur MICAA formed the Philippine Basketball Association. In the 1980’s, China opened its doors to Western sports, and the Atlanta Hawks become the league’s ambassadors to the largest market in the world. In 1989, basketball followed tennis and became an open sport, allowing pros to join amateur competitions. At the end of 1990, the Philippines became the first all-professional team to play in an international amateur competition, the Asian Games. Seven months later, 11 NBA players and NCAA standout Christian Laettner followed suit, sweeping the Tournament of the Americas to qualify for the Barcelona Olympics. Since then, basketball has been such a great gift to the Filipino people.
A blessed Christmas to you all!