Review: Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."

Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."  Sport in Society, 15:10, 1396-1412.

The Philippines at the turn of the last century presents an interesting case study in the cultural diffusion of sport.  Occupied for nearly half a century following the Spanish American war, US troops, businessmen, educators and missionaries introduced both baseball and basketball.  One thrived, the other did not.

What might account for this?

Girls school ca1910, from https://goo.gl/op7y10

Antolihao identifies a number of issues for the decline of baseball, chief among them the absence of national events or heroes around which commercial, state, and citizen interest could coalesce.  The game seems to have been centered largely around US military bases, which had plenty of space for fields and a ready pool of talent in American soldiers.  Of the Filipino teams, the strongest contenders were typically plantation teams made up of farm workers.  In this way the game was most closely associated in the Filipino mind with occupiers, the provinces, and people of agrarian backgrounds.  The rural character of the game was reinforced through the introduction into towns and villages across the archipelago of a new public education system that included ball fields and the teaching of baseball as part of the curriculum.

Girls school ca1910, from https://goo.gl/op7y10

Basketball was also introduced and dominated in its early years by Americans.  Its popularity among Filipinos is traced to its mid-1920s introduction into a collegiate level sporting association, where it was quickly adopted by the country’s young, educated elite.  In contrast to baseball, which was largely rural and played by peasants, basketball was urban, played by the bourgeoisie, and had about it an air of modernity.  A major turning point in the popularity of the the game was the participation at the 1936 Berlin Olympics of a Filipino team that placed fifth behind the US, Canada, Mexico and Poland.  This cemented the game in the Filipino mind as a sport at which their countrymen could excel and in which they might find expressions of pride.

These circumstances compare remarkably to Cuba, where baseball was introduced by Cubans themselves, mostly students returning from the US, as a modern sport and a tool for contesting Spanish hegemony, or to Japan, where the game was introduced by American educators, merchants, and sailors, but not by an occupation army, allowing Japanese the space to make baseball their own and use it to contest Western hegemony in Asia.  The seminal event in Japan’s baseball history is the resounding 29-4 victory in 1896 of a Japanese college team over the Yokohama Athletic Club, composed largely of American sailors.

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