Rafe Bartholomew
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Rafe Bartholomew’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Wait, who is this woman? She was the leader of the Crispanatics, the fan group that went not only to every game for this team, but to practices. I mean, this is one of the really endearing and beautiful things about the PBA and Philippine basketball, where it's a professional league that also has this really personal touch. Players know their fans. They know them.
people would come and bring spaghetti and pancit noodles for players on their birthdays. And then players would give their fans gifts on their birthdays. It's this really, there's this closeness that still exists to this day between players and fans in the PBA that is, you'll never see anything like it in the NBA. And it's really, it's beautiful.
I mean, it is a story of American colonialism at the beginning. The United States bought the Philippines as a prize after winning the Spanish-American War. The people of the Philippines did not immediately accept that, and they fought another war of basically conquest that the Americans eventually won, a brutal war of attrition, truly ugly history.
Then from 1902 until the beginning of World War II, America administered the Philippines as a colonial territory. there was an American governor of the Philippines. Many of the streets in Metro Manila and around the country, you will notice, are still named after people like McKinley, which may or may not be the name of a mountain these days. I don't even know.
Yes. So if you think about this, the first half of the 20th century, the United States is coming in after Spain running the Philippines.
The American government... decided we're going to be different by being the soft, gentle colonialists. We're still going to take all the wealth out of the country, but we're the good guys. The basketball side of this story is that the colonial government viewed sports as part of this civilizing mission. So the Philippines wound up getting a very early head start in basketball.
Basketball invented in 1891 by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts. It arrives in the Philippine public education curriculum in 1912. Filipinos wound up learning how to play basketball sort of before the rest of the world, other than the United States, maybe Canada.
There was this early culture and real skill and ability in the sport that didn't exist in countries that have since risen and because of greater height, greater wealth, kind of... left over the Philippines in terms of international basketball status.
I agree, unfortunately. But unsurprisingly. So the first Olympics to feature basketball as an event in 1936, the Philippines only lost one game in that to the United States. And due to the weird way they structured the tournament at that time, they lost right before the medal round. But they'd beaten Mexico, which won the bronze. There's always this sense that, man, we could have had a bronze.
And then later on in 1954, the Philippines actually did go on to win a bronze at the World Championships in Brazil. They're still the only East Asian country to medal at that level in international competition in basketball. And it all builds this real pride and history in the Philippines. People grow up and are raised with this knowledge that basketball is your sport.
Even in the 70s, Filipino fans are aware of the NBA, but they consume it through magazines. They hear of it secondhand. Maybe a game will make it onto TV on tape delay a week after it was played. And that's part of the reason that the Philippines decided, the founders of the PBA got together and said, let's make the leap and play.
create the first all-professional league after the NBA, so we have our own. And the PBA was that, a way to plant the Philippines flag in the sport and say, we are a great basketball nation too.
San Miguel Beermen, one of the legacy teams that is still around from that era and plays today. A name like the Beermen tips off the way that the PBA was organized as a business, which is a marketing vehicle for many of the biggest companies in the country. They, instead of having teams based in different parts of the country, it was a way also to save a little bit of money on travel.
The entire league is based in Manila in the capital. and the teams are owned by the owners of San Miguel Beer, or we're looking at the Crispa Redmanizers. Crispa was a t-shirt company, a textile company, and Redmanizing was this word they had come up with for basically making non-shrink t-shirts. So we're the CRISPA non-shrink t-shirt champions. I mean, and so many names like this.
Right. And the owner of Pure Foods at the time probably liked that every time you went to the supermarket or went to the Sorry Sorry store, you would see Pure Foods, the tender, juicy hot dogs you saw last night, you know, with Alvin Patrimonio dropping 30 on beautiful little turnarounds in the lane is now, I'll take the Pure Foods, right? That bright red hot dog.
With the gray insides, it's nothing better. Their history of the names in the Pure Foods franchise is great because they would change it every few years to sell a different product. They were, at one point in time, the Carne Norte Corned Beef Cowboys.
And I don't need to tell you this, but some of your listeners might like to know as well. Philippine culture is very, very swagged out and stylish and free-flowing. And there's an improvisational and performative nature that you can sort of track through great performers, great singers, great through pop culture, but also in basketball.
Basically, there are styles that are completely unique to the country and to individual players, shots and moves that you don't see anywhere else and that are kind of mind-blowing for American basketball players and fans to see because it's like we kind of walk in thinking we invented this or it was invented in our country. We know everything. You can't teach us anything about this game.
Then you see guys doing things you couldn't imagine ever doing.
So my personal favorite, partly because of the nickname, partly because of the way that he could really, some of his finishes still blow my mind. Vergel Meneses. The Aerial Voyager played for the Swift Mighty Meatys at points in time in his career, as well as the Sunkissed Soda team. He was one of these players that could just, he really did float.
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