CONSIDERING that about 110 million people live in the Philippines, it’s not feasible to expect that they all would be basketball fans. “But it’s close,” said Tim Cone, the country’s top professional coach in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA). And that might not be an understatement, either. Basketball’s World Cup starts…
There are about 25,000 indoor courts in the Philippines, countless outdoor courts—they’re everywhere, with rims even fashioned out of barbed wire in some places.CONSIDERING that about 110 million people live in the Philippines, it’s not feasible to expect that they all would be basketball fans.
“It’s so for big players to come here, unlike China. Everyone comes there,” said Inigo Herrera, 25, who works in sales for his family’s Manila business. “For us, it’s like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If this is your first time in the Philippines and you go around, you will see kids playing basketball everywhere. Everywhere.”
While there is little chance of a magical run by the Philippines to win the tournament, there is an effort to get at least 32,617 fans to the Philippines’ first game in the tournament and break the World Cup attendance record set at Toronto in 1994 when the US rolled past Russia in the gold-medal game.
“It is the No. 1 sport in the country and you can’t definitively say that about basketball in the United States or anywhere else,” said Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, an assistant coach on the US team this summer and a national hero in the Philippines—his mother is Filipina. “There’s such great passion for the sport.
Unlike other parts of Asia, where baseball or soccer can reign supreme, basketball stands alone in the Philippines. Its only real challenger in recent years has been boxing, simply because of Manny Pacquiao—who won 12 world championships in eight weight divisions. Pacquiao’s popularity is such that he even served 12 years in politics in his homeland.
Unlike politics, basketball seems to be the thing that everyone can agree on. The NBA has been airing games there for nearly a half-century, and staged one of its first ever international exhibition games in the Philippines—sending the then-Washington Bullets over to play a team of Philippine All-Stars.
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