The Philippines has always been basketball country – it literally has become a part of every Filipino’s lives. You can tell just how popular the game here is just by going around Metro Manila and you’ll see basketball being played on every street corner 24/7. I’m one of those that played ball here almost every day. Friends would drop by my house just to invite me for a game of hoops. Never mind that we didn’t wear the best pair of kicks to ball on – our rubber slippers got us covered.
In 2005, an American from New York came over to the Philippines to do some research about the popularity of the sport. Rafe Bartholomew witnessed first-hand how big it (basketball) was here. He not only learned the history of Philippine hoops but also the Filipino language: Tagalog. Having spent 3 years in the country, he's now just as fluent as the locals with the language (I send him tweets on his Twitter account in Tagalog and he replies to me just the same – how cool is that?). His passion for basketball was no different from us Filipinos. Upon returning to the US, the great memories he brought home from a hoops-loving country was the main inspiration he penned the book now known all over the world as Pacific Rims.
