The nation’s new favorite
There is a moment when a Filipino athlete stops being a promising competitor and becomes a national event. It usually begins with a victory, especially an unexpected one, and proceeds at a speed that would put the most frenetic fastbreak in basketball to shame.
The electric car meets the Filipino road
The electric vehicle has arrived in the Philippines with a promise familiar to anyone who has spent an afternoon crawling along EDSA: less dependence on gasoline, quieter motoring, and a little less money disappearing into the fuel tank. It’s an appealing proposition. The only complication is that the Filipino road has never been particularly interested in making life easy for anyone.
Everybody is a scout
There is a particular moment in every Filipino basketball game when somebody on the sidelines becomes a coach. It does not matter if the game is in the PBA, UAAP, NBA, or a barangay court with one hoop, a cracked backboard, and a dog wandering underneath it. Somebody always knows what the team should be doing. “Pass!” “Box out!” “Take the shot!” “Why is he still playing?” It is not necessarily criticism. It is participation.
The most expensive thing in your car is time
A car can tell you many things. It can tell you that a door is open, a tire needs air, a passenger has forgotten to buckle up, or that you are getting dangerously close to the vehicle in front of you. What it cannot tell you is why you have been sitting in the same spot for 23 minutes. This is the peculiar economics of driving in the Philippines. We fork over a great deal of money buying cars that can go very fast, and then spend a considerable portion of our lives making sure they do not.
We have basketball at home
Filipinos have never really needed an invitation to love basketball. Give us a hoop, a ball, and approximately four square meters of concrete and we will figure out the rest. There is no requirement for proper flooring, air-conditioning, seating, parking, or even a complete understanding of the rules. Someone will keep score. Someone will call a phantom foul. Someone will bend the rules to ridiculous proportions in plain sight. So when the National Basketball Association brought basketball to the Philippines once again, nobody complained. After all, Filipinos have been quite willing to make room for basketball for decades. We simply cleared a little more space.
