What could Pinoy sports look like?
We have a national obsession with basketball, which is an American import. Yes, it is a fun game, especially since it engages collaborative team spirit—an important value in our culture.
Basketball has become so integral in the life of the everyday Filipino that every barangay and barrio feels incomplete without a basketball court. No matter how far you go into the provincial boondocks, you will likely find a basketball court, probably overgrown with vines and a lonely, rusty hoop.
Basketball courts are not just for basketball—they are also for Zumba, foundation day performances, beauty pageants, extra parking, voting, natural disaster evacuation, and medical missions. Local basketball courts are, in a way, our third spaces.
Our mania for basketball and our deeply ingrained Christianity has also created a very strange (but also very Filipino) hybrid: the Santo Niño statue wearing a basketball jersey. We like dressing children up, and many Filipino children dream of becoming professional basketball players (or at least meeting one). The Santo Niño in a basketball jersey is as Filipino as it gets.
At the Olympics, Filipino athletes have won multiple medals in gymnastics, weightlifting, and boxing. The first Filipino who ever won us a gold medal, Teófilo Yldefonso, was a swimmer. I remember that whenever there was a highly anticipated Manny Pacquiao boxing match, all major roads that would usually have heavy traffic would be empty. We were all watching at home. Recently, the entire nation has been celebrating Alex Eala’s international wins.
Maybe it is worth looking outside the basketball court for other sports that can display the Filipinos’ athletic competence, develop our team spirit, and strengthen our physical endurance. Maybe we can even look at some of our native games.
Childhood games
I grew up with a lot of fun games that we used to play in the street: patintero, tumbang preso, langit lupa, agawan base, Chinese garter, luksong baka… these have always been fantastic ways to pass the time and develop relationships with kids our age.
Decolonial Filipino psychologist Virgilio Enriquez once pointed out that the difference between “laro” (games) and “palaro” (sports) is a defined set of rules.
Can you imagine if these games were developed into popular competitive team sports, with leagues and championships, with medals and trophies? Can you imagine big local arenas filling up for a “tumbang preso finals”? Is it even possible to imagine a kid saying, “Yes, I am a luksong baka varsity player”?
Imagine precocious children growing up wanting to be sungka grandmasters the way others become chess grandmasters.
What if, sometime far into the future, the Philippine team has to beat another nationality at the Olympics for the gold medal in patintero? After all, breakdancing is in the Olympics now, too.
Celebrating our own
If the suggestions above sound silly, it would be good to pay attention to what kind of “voice” you are hearing. Is it the same “voice” that says that only people with fairer skin are attractive? Is it the same “voice” that says that our food is stinky, or bland, or disgusting compared to foreign dishes from developed nations like France or Japan? Maybe there is some very subtle, yet still insidious colonial mentality involved there.
First of all, we need to get over our cultural cringe surrounding Filipino games. What makes these childhood games any different from basketball, volleyball, rugby, or football? At the core of all these sports is a childlike spirit of fun and healthy competition. For our games, we just need to have official rule books, regulatory bodies, and willing players. We need popular support and, maybe, institutionalization.
So, where do we start? Folklorist Mellie Leandicho Lopez conducted extensive ethnographic work to collect native games across the country into a massive anthology published by the University of the Philippines Press. In other words, we already have a sourcebook.
Support would likely be difficult. Even our celebrated athletes have had challenges related to funding. Nevertheless, any indigenous game can be a game worth playing, worth supporting, worth celebrating—worth turning into a sport. It will take some collective effort, but it is possible.
