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I just thought I'd make a thread for the Philippines....so anything Philippine basketball here
Hey mate, welcome to the forum. I know that basketball is very popular in Philippines just like in Lithuania. Unfortunately you didn't have any big success lately.

Hopefully more people will be posting in this thread Thup
I predict one thread won't be enough Tongue Welcome aboard thadz Cool
hey rik... is this the same as interbasket?? ehehehe... you are right... one more month and there will be a flood of filipino forumers... Tongue
Quote:hey rik... is this the same as interbasket?? ehehehe... you are right... one more month and there will be a flood of filipino forumers... Tongue

Welcome here jesronne Biggrin
Quote:Welcome here jesronne Biggrin

so what do we do here? Smile
Quote:so what do we do here? Smile

We talk about Philippine basketball Smile welcome to Tb Hopefully you can give us some news from Philippines?
So when shall we see Philippines in some big tournament (Olympics or World Championship)?
I always knew the Philippines had basketball as their national sport, but why aren't they ever seen on the international basketball front????
Yeah, it seems that only wishes isn't enough if you want to success. Smile Good luck for Philippines NT and hope to see them in some internetional tournament.
I think they're a nation of playmakers, that's why Tongue Laugh
Playmaker is one of the most main player Smile Like a second coach - that's a good thing ;D
Yeah, but the game is played by five men, not just one. Plus you need a couple of those men to be well over 200 cm tall Tongue
filipinos lack height, but we love the game more than anybody else. Smile

businessmirror.com link

Quote:Pinoys in basketball: The genes count

Science

Written by Rizal Raoul Reyes / Correspondent

Saturday, 05 June 2010 18:01

The excitement of Filipino basketball fanatics is at fever pitch again what with the current US National Basketball Association (NBA) championship games between Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. Office employees are abuzz with talk on wagers. Even anchors in radio-news programs root for their favorite team.

A similar atmosphere also hit the nation during the local Philippine Basketball Association championships.

Basketball, the game invented by Canadian physical education instructor Dr. James Naismith in 1861, is one of the greatest legacies of American colonialism to the Philippines. Filipinos go gaga over basketball despite the numerous debacles experienced by Philippine teams in several international competitions.

However, the Philippines had also its golden moments in basketball. The most prominent were the fifth-place finish in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the third-place finish in the 1954 World Basketball Championship (now known as the International Basketball Federation or Fiba world championships) in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The 1936 Philippine Olympic basketball team, then widely known as the Islanders, was mentored by Dionisio Calvo. The players were Charles Borck, Jacinto “Jumping Jack” Ciria Cruz, Franco Marquicias, Primitivo Martinez, Jesus Marzan, Amador Obordo, Cebu basketball legend Bibiano Ouano, future senator Ambrosio Padilla and Fortunato Yambao. John Worell was also listed but was unable to play a single basketball match.

The Filipino cagers won the hearts of the spectators for their never-say-die attitude and the sportsmanship on and off the court, according to a Philippine magazine, which chronicled the exploits of the Olympians.

In 1954, the Philippines achieved the highest finish for an Asian country in the Fiba World basketball tournaments by placing third behind the United States and host Brazil.

Coached by the famous Herminio Silva, the legendary team was composed of Carlos Loyzaga, Lauro Mumar, Mariano Tolentino, Florentino Bautista, Antonio Genato, Ponciano Saldaña, Rafael Barredo, Benjamin Francisco, Francisco Rabat, Bayani Amador, Ramon Manulat and Napoleon Flores.

Francis Wilson and Fred Sagarbarria were the alternates in the team that had an average age of 23 years and about 6 feet in height, puny compared to the Americans, Brazilians and the Europeans.

Despite his short ceiling compared to other players, Loyzaga, the “King Lion” of San Beda and the Philippines’ greatest basketeer, finished as one of the tournament’s leading scorer with 16.4 points-per-game average and was named in the tournament’s All-Star selection.

Loyzaga was also a member of the victorious Philippine teams in the 1951, 1954, 1958 and 1962 Asian Games, as well as in the 1960 and 1963 Asian championships.

The post-Loyzaga era

After Loyzaga and company retired, the Philippines consistently suffered reversals in international competitions. On the Asian level, the last time the Philippines became champion was in 1962.

For Dr. Perry Ong, professor and director of the Institute of Biology, College of Science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, the reason was simple. “When we hit the wall, we will not grow and we’re not going to become a champion,” said Ong in an interview with the BusinessMirror at UP Diliman.

“It dooms our ambition to become a competitive player in international basketball,” he said.

Although the Philippines has produced taller players compared to Loyzaga and his contemporaries, other countries produced much taller players than the Philippines.

One example is China. If the Philippines was able to produce skyscrapers, such as Bonnel Balingit, Marlou Aquino and Edward Joseph Fiehl, China managed to produce taller if not better players in Wang Zhi Zhi, Yi Jianlian and Yao Ming, the tallest among the group at 7 ft. 5 (2.286 meters). All three have played in the NBA. So far, no Filipino player has made it to the NBA.

The height problem becomes more complicated when Filipinos are compared with Americans and the Europeans. Even if the country has produced players standing 6 ft. 6, they have to play center, while their foreign counterparts just play guard or forward. Just think of Argentinean Manu Ginobili, who at 6 ft 7 can drive court-to-court with ease.

To offset the shortage in height, Ong said the Philippines has resorted to recruiting from overseas Filipinos with foreign lineage such as the Filipino-Americans who are taller and better built as a result of the abundance of food, protein and other nutritional elements.

However, the country has still fallen short of the expectations.

According to Ong, things perhaps will change in the future when some people will alter the rules of basketball to help Filipinos and other vertically challenged people.

“For instance, if the future game will require the players to race to a 12-inch pipe long with 2.5 meters in diameter, naturally the smaller players will have an advantage because they will have an easier time crossing the pipe,” said Ong.

If this is going to be the rule of the game, Ong said the selection pressure will be on the short people because they’re the best qualified for the game.

At present, the selection pressure is on tall people standing six feet above because basketball is a game of height.

Interestingly, the development of a selection pressure is also affected by genes and nutrition. Having genes for tall height and proper nutrition, the Caucasians have taller and superior players.

Interestingly, Ong said Filipino players who have dominated Philippine basketball, such as Loyzaga, Borck, Mumar, Campos, Genato, Kurt Bachmann, Ramon Fernandez and Robert Jaworski, among others, have foreign blood.

“The facts speak for themselves. During the 1950s when we won the bronze, our main player, Loyzaga, was obviously of European origin. Since then, we failed to win any championships,” he said.

At the end of the day, Ong said the Filipinos must realize they have reached the maximum of their height potential.

“The genes carry both the potential of human beings to become what they want to be and the limitation on what humans cannot do,” said Ong.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Image: science01.jpg]

In Photo: Carlos Loyzaga, called the “King Lion” of San Beda, is considered one of the best, if not the best, Filipino basketeer.
more on the pinoy's love story with basketball. Smile

Quote:June 1, 2010 8:00 am

The State of Philippine Basketball

A country celebrates 100 years of hoops worship.

by Rafe Bartholomew

If you believe the sports pages of Manila’s daily newspapers, then you’ll know that Philippine basketball has been in a state of emergency for the past half century. As far back as 1949, FV Tutay opened his column in the Philippines Free Press with the question, “What is wrong with amateur sports in the Philippines today?” His answer: basketball. The hoops-obsessed nation, Tutay complained, was ignoring other athletic pursuits like baseball, swimming and track and field.

The same columns, in more or less the same words, still appear on what seems like a quarterly schedule in Philippine broadsheets, only now the tone is more alarmist. In Tutay’s day, the Philippines’ greatest hoops achievement – a bronze medal in the 1954 World Championships – still lay in the future; now, basketball glory, at least on the international stage, is firmly situated in the past. Roughly half of the country’s 92 million people weren’t alive in 1972, the last time the national team competed in the Olympics. When the Philippines failed to medal in the 2002 Asian Games, pundits adopted an End-of-Days tone more suited to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo than a 2-point loss to Kazakhstan. In recent years, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Manolo Iñigo has become the poet laureate of basketball naysayers, with columns like “Basketball is not for Filipinos,” where he urges “sports officials to encourage the development of non-basketball sports where height is not an advantage.”

While he’s at it, Manolo might as well ask his countrymen to stop eating rice. For millions of Filipinos, basketball is as much a part of their daily routine as the white mound of grains that accompanies breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every morning, not long after backyard roosters herald the sun’s appearance on the horizon, you can hear the steady thud of dribbling balls as players head to neighborhood courts. The sound returns just before nightfall, dawn and dusk being the times of day when the tropical humidity is least stifling. The evidence that the state of Philippine hoops is indeed strong is this daily communion with the sport. Whether they’re sweating through pickup games, watching the NBA or local professional league on television, or just gazing at the progression of jerry-built hoops dotting the countryside on a provincial bus ride, people can’t avoid the sport.

The problems Iñigo and his cohort decry are sins of basketball excess. The sport hogs the spotlight like Ol’ Dirty Bastard bum-rushing the stage at the Grammy Awards. Stories abound of promising youth soccer and volleyball players switching gears to play basketball because their schools invest more in hoops, or of the country’s amateur boxers being forced to share the same few pairs of sweaty shorts at an international tournament because the team couldn’t afford a uniform for each fighter. If national athletics committees and wealthy patrons didn’t blow a disproportionate amount of their sports budgets on basketball, then these problems wouldn’t be so severe. But they do, thanks to the game’s monolithic popularity.

Then there’s the basketball bait-and-switch that Philippine politicians have perfected over the past several decades. What’s the cheapest way to earn some votes? Build a basketball court and paint a mural announcing to your constituents that their new backboards were a “project of Mayor delos Santos.” Never mind costlier, more urgent needs like improved access to clean water and health care. In communities that have come to expect next to nothing from their elected leaders, some breakaway rims and free jerseys are often enough to buy voters’ loyalty at the polls. Maybe Philippine hoops isn’t facing a crisis. Maybe it’s too widespread and too powerful, worshipped too much by too many people.

The solution here is not to knock basketball from its perch atop the Philippine sports hierarchy; to paint over the portraits of Kobe and Magic that adorn local jeepneys; to remove the hoops references from TV sitcoms and movies; or to bulldoze every pork barrel-funded full court. Basketball doesn’t have to be erased to start giving other sports a more equal share of resources and attention, or for politicians to devote more of their largesse to medical clinics and better roads.

To suggest that “basketball is not for Filipinos” robs the country of its unique relationship with the sport. This year, basketball is 100 years old in the Philippines. It was brought to the country in 1910, when the American colonial government made it part of the P.E. curriculum in public schools. At first, the sport was intended to be an alternative activity for girls, who were deemed too fragile for baseball and track and field. That makes basketball in Manila only 19 years younger than basketball in Springfield, MA, where James Naismith invented it in 1891. Other than the United States and the Philippines, it’s hard to think of countries that have been playing the sport seriously for so long.

In parts of the world where hoops didn’t catch on until the ‘60s or ‘70s, people learned a game whose basic moves had already been cemented by American basketball. It’s a different story in the Philippines. Of course, there’s no denying the American influence on hoops in the former U.S. colony. Yankee teachers, coaches and soldiers first spread the game through the archipelago and the American game has always served as a model for aspects of Philippine ball. But American basketball itself was still evolving in the pre-WWII years, and this gave Philippine hoops breathing room to develop on its own.

When a flock of kids took the court at some Manila playground in the 1930s or ‘40s, no coach was there to show them how to follow through on their jump shots. Hell, jump shots hardly even existed back then. The game they learned, to a large extent, is based on the moves and shots they taught themselves. Over the years, that homegrown style has blended with the formal skills taught in clinics the world over to create a Philippine style unto itself.

You know the sidestep Rajon Rondo has been using throughout these Playoffs to hop around defenders on the break? I can’t think of NBA players other than him and Dwyane Wade who use it regularly, but it’s often the first one-on-one move Pinoy players learn. Certain players who are borderline staples of the Philippine game – the Barkley-built power forward whose pet move is a double clutch reverse layup released with more spin than a screwball, the six-nine center who tries to finish all his post moves with scoop shots – would be rare breeds in the NBA or Euroleague. They’re part of the Philippines’ own deep, rich basketball lore.

When you have a hundred years’ worth of hoops history, a style of play other countries couldn’t mimic if they tried, and a population bursting with people willing to wake up before dawn to get some run, you don’t need an Olympic bronze or even an Olympic berth to justify your love of the game. Basketball is for you.

Rafe Bartholomew is an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine. He lived in the Philippines from 2005 until the end of 2008 and wrote the book Pacific Rims, which comes out June 1 from Penguin/NAL.
Well the love is all good, but what about the team?

I mean you guys could perhaps look into big men that were perhaps half Philippino or something?

Maybe naturalization is an option? Smile
Quote:Well the love is all good, but what about the team?

I mean you guys could perhaps look into big men that were perhaps half Philippino or something?

Maybe naturalization is an option? Smile

these are all being done now with the smart gilas NT. we are still looking for a naturalized player as previous candidates did not click with the team.

below are some of our half-filipino big guys who are currently with smart gilas NT:

[Image: Slaughter.jpg]

7'0" Greg Slaughter (Filipino-American)

[Image: kelly-williams.JPG]

6'7" Kelly Williams (Filipino-American)

[Image: spo4hires.jpg]

6'8" Rabeh Al-Hussaini (Filipino-Kuwaiti)

and we hope this guy can also play for us in the future:

[Image: 143154_web_011510-ku-pressure-robinson-johnson.jpg]

6'8" Christian Standhardinger (Filipino-German)
hehe nice site

Guest

I though I remember reading somewhere that Nate Robinson also has Pinoy background.
wow just signed up here..I hope this forum will not be as emotional as IBN.I see some posters here are also in the IBN..rik,bats etc..
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