Cheering for the 2015 #GilasPilipinas team - Why I cannot do the Same

This week the Philippine social-media scene has been abuzz with the seemingly endless string of victories of the #GilasPilipinas team. My own FB news feed is peppered with various comments about its victories and what nots. It seems that every minute, someone from my friend list is commenting, posting, sharing or liking anything related to or is connected with the #GilasPilipinas team. Rightly so, the #GilasPilipinas team has on its backs a record of amazing wins in the on-going 2015 FIBA World Cup.

Unfortunately, I am not cheering for #GilasPilipinas team! For sure though, I am a passionate Filipinist and patriot. And precisely because of such self-classification that I can never really appreciate the #GilasPilipinas team. For one, it is populated by "produced Filipinos" in the sense that they are foreign -  albeit granted with Philippine passports. I suspect that they have been "Filipinized" for solely commercial reasons - winning the FIBA matches. I am not a racist, but I cannot cheer for a team that is basically foreign constituted. I cannot accept that as of date, there are more than a hundred million Filipinos, not to mention that this country is agog and passionate to a fault about playing basketball. In fact, basketball is probably the only team sport that Filipinos as a people know how to play. With that said, isn't there any qualified, skillful, physically capable basketball athlete in the whole of the archipelago that can play the game? Did the organizing committee even try to look for Filipino-born athletes without immediately jumping on importing foreigners?

Geez, this is what is irritating about ourselves. We cannot trust in our own people's capacity to play something that is by the way, common across the archipelago. So common in fact, as has been previously stated in this article, that it is played everywhere, anywhere in the Philippines. Is there one barangay in the Philippines that does not have a basketball court - no matter how dilapidated or basic it may seem? Has anyone found one? I have not - except perhaps in highly urbanized areas. In fact, basketball courts are ubiquitous in this country. Probably the only sporting venue that is de rigueur in each barangay, school, company, etc.

I cannot accept that in order to win, or in order to guarantee winning in the FIBA matches, the only resort is to import "manufactured Filipinos" to represent a hundred million Filipinos! This is colonial mentality at its height and speaks of our own lack of a sense of nationhood.

So yes, I will not cheer the #GilasPilipinas team for its wins because they do not represent the Philippines - if anything, its mostly foreign born corps of athletes represent the veritable fact that up until now, this country is still very much in the clutch of its foreign past. WE ARE STILL SLAVES TO OUR brutal colonial history.

I would rather cheer a losing team made up of real Filipinos - those born, lived and suffered what an average Filipino would experience rather than a bunch of highly skilled athletes who are "nationals of convenience" of the Philippines, not least because we are overflowing with people whose passion in basketball, nay, books have been written of the same, is almost synonymous with the fanaticism of religionists.

So I reject with vehemence the employment of transplanted pseudo-Filipinos to represent a game in which my countrymen are so passionate about anyway. It is ironic that most of my countrymen cheer with utmost glee the wins of #GilasPilipinas, failing to see what is so patently obvious, most of them are not even fighting for the Philippines, only playing the game, no surprise there, as they are not Filipinos by heart and experience, by soul and temperament, by mindset and orientation.

If anything, whoever constituted the #GilasPilipinas team was merely looking for a win (and the commercial success it will bring) - and definitely not a representation of the soul and passion of Filipinos in the game of basketball.

I don't want to be a killjoy, but even if #GilasPilipinas wins the FIBA World Cup this year, I would still feel a great loss, that is because I cannot accept that of the 100 million Filipinos living today, none seemed to be good enough to make up ALL of its ranks!

Then again, AKIN LANG ITO. Ikaw kabayan, anong 'say mo, 'ika nga.