The Final Score: Pacific Rims is an ode to our game

The writer is Joe, not Juan. Should it matter? I approached Pacific Rims not wanting to ride the early Bartholomew bandwagon simply because I dislike hopping on bandwagons to begin with (the mad dash to embrace badminton, mountain biking or running comes to mind). Rafe Bartholomew, an American, wrote about our game. I wondered what people were more ecstatic about: that there was a hardbound book about Philippine hoops or the fact that the hardbound book on Pinoy hoops was authored by a jeepney-riding, balut-eating, slam-dunking New Yawker. It’s quite tragic that for all the love we’ve professed for basketball, sports literature in the Philippines remains as vibrant as the 2010-2011 Cleveland Cavaliers. It’s not an appraisal of the scribes who have followed basketball for the last century. It’s more of discontent over our structural lack of faith in the literary power of sports. Hopefully, Pacific Rims sparks a revolution in the local sports literary scene. Seconds after this column is posted, however, someone will probably lecture me about our systematic national lack of faith in the very power of literature itself. Perhaps it takes one myth-maker, born and raised in a country that documents sporting events and lionizes sporting greats with the intensity of Hemingway and the sincerity of Twain, to compress our passion for a game in 384 pages. Free from the cultural burden of delicadeza and utang-na-loob, free from possible retribution by the very characters he wishes to immortalize, Bartholomew speaks his mind. If he’s guilty of cheering from the press box, I take no offense. By highlighting a profanity-peppered spat between one clean-cut PBA coach and his crafty import for instance, the author emboldens a kind of sports journalism that need not worry about hurting anyone’s feelings or stinging someone’s ego. I recently devoured the autobiography of American baseball legend Roberto Clemente written by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss. Surely, Caloy Loyzaga, Robert Jaworski, Alvin Patrimonio and many other Filipino legends deserve similar tributes. After all, as far as myth-making goes, I believe we Filipinos, masters of the kwentong-barbero, are one of the best. Bartholomew wrote that David Halberstam’s iconic “Breaks of the Game" inspired him to dig deep into the essence of basketball. Our love for hoops, however, is more comparable to the Americans’ connection with baseball. I think about Roger Kahn’s “Boys of Summer" or “Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella and I’m viscerally reminded of how our hearts beat for one sport. Ebbets Field is the Rizal Memorial Coliseum. Yankee Stadium is the Araneta Coliseum. Yankees-Dodgers is Toyota-Crispa. Babe Ruth is King Caloy. Pacific Rims ably reminds me that the hardcourt, more than any other playing surface, for better or worse, is our field of dreams. When I reached the end of Pacific Rims, Joe and Juan became one and the same. Bartholomew was no longer just an American evaluating a country’s sport with icy objectivity. He was a talented writer transformed into a believer in the often inexplicable magic of our game. -- GMANews.TV