Playing with the Big Boys: Basketball, American Imperialism, and Subaltern Discourse in the Philippines by Lou Antolihao (review)

In 2005, shortly before the Southeast Asian Games commenced in Manila, a survey among Filipinos revealed that 44 percent of the respondents expected a Philippine victory in the basketball events. The respondents, who had been questioned about which disciplines the Philippine team would most likely win, thus heavily focused on an event that was not even scheduled to take place at the Games (11). This anecdote attests to the strong interest basketball enjoys in the archipelago, despite the fact that the average body size of Filipinos can be seen as disadvantageous for scoring points.

Lou Antolihao, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, addresses the role of basketball in Philippine society from the sport’s introduction during American colonialism (1899–1946) to the present. His study is separated into five independent thematic chapters, which, as the author states (28), do not constitute a narrative, but are connected by his conceptual framework and his research question: how and why a sport seemingly tailor-made for tall people attracts so much popular interest among Filipinos. In terms of sources, several archives have been consulted, but few newspapers were used. His central argument is that basketball turned into the Philippine “national sport,” defeating baseball, since it was and is associated with modernity, in the sense that it spread from the urban-based, educated class to the rest of the population. In contrast, baseball, also introduced by Americans (but needing a lot of space), remained a sport of rural areas and thus increasingly diminished in importance.

In the introduction, Antolihao positions his work in postcolonial and subaltern studies, but desires to overcome a fixation on colonizers and colonized by also briefly covering transnational entanglements with other countries such as China and Japan. In terms of his conceptual framework, he draws on Vincente L. Rafael’s interpretation of Philippine nationalism, Arjun Appadurai’s research on Indian cricket and its translation or vernacularization, and Homi Bhabha’s work on mimicry and hybridization. The author thus addresses how Filipinos translated basketball from an “American” sport into an extremely popular “Philippine” one.

The first chapter situates basketball in the American colonial “civilizing mission,” arguing that sports were an important tool in the attempted social transformation of the colony according to the standards of different, though often collaborating, groups of Americans. Members of the colonial administration and central figures of missionary organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) promoted sports to improve public fitness, to fight against “native indolence,” and to encourage democratization, which included emancipation of girls and women. For example, Antolihao shows that basketball enjoyed a short-lived success among school girls after 1910, until public debates about what defined feminine clothing and behavior, in which the influential Catholic Church was very involved, led educators to drop the sport (51–54). According to the author, one of the legacies of this episode was that basketball later could rely on a base of female fans, which contributed to its popularization.

The second chapter concerns the transition from colonialism to independence. The author here argues that during the mid-1930s baseball was already in a state of decay, since its earlier popularity had been based on colonial power relations instead of the creation of a more stable local foundation of supporters. When large numbers of U.S. teachers, coaches, and soldiers, who had been major supporters of the sport, left the Philippines after the Philippine Commonwealth was formed, the sport lost much of its grassroots base. The Japanese focus on baseball also made it difficult for Philippine teams to win regional events (while hardly any global events featured baseball), which negatively affected popular interest. Basketball, in contrast, which became culturally integrated and acquired a distinct Philippine touch, experienced a rise in popularity. The author explains in detail how urbanization and private educational institutions contributed to the...