Freedom of the Four: We Tracked a Radical Experiment in Basketball Nirvana
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What is the radical basketball experiment discussed?
With the Galaxy Watch 7 or the Galaxy Ring and the Samsung Health app.
What does your dad think of your expertise in Philippine basketball?
I think he's used to it now. He was pretty surprised. He came over early, end of 2006, so after I'd been there for a year. And he got a huge kick out of it because he just was like, what is going on here?
Well, he played ball.
Yeah.
So, like, that part, I think he understood.
He loved that. But I had just been on a telenovela after a terrible role.
We have to explain the fact that you are, in fact, a soap... You're a soap opera star, Rafe.
I was Brad, the illegitimate father of... an important character in a show that came out in 2007.
Titled?
Ba Ke Kang.
Which means?
It was her name. The main character's name, it is an extremely offensive premise for a soap opera about a woman who, by local beauty standards, is not attractive and resolves to improve her lot in life and have rich kids by finding foreign men. Such as Brad. Unfortunately, yeah. I was Brad, the almost prototypical ugly American. Do you remember any of your lines? Get away from me with this baby. I will kill you.
Now get out of here and don't ever come back. If you do, I'll kill you.
I was speaking... I was ugly American. I was speaking English. Oh, you weren't even... They didn't even use your superpower. Well, back then, it wasn't that super. After a year, I was okay, but still learning, still studying. But, like, that was a thing. So my dad visited about a week after my episode where I slapped the lead character came out. Oh, my God. I love this. And children were running up to me and him in the street and being like... You are the husband of... And, like... Why did you slap her? You're so mean. And my dad is like, why do all these people know you? Who are you here? So he came at an opportune time to witness it.
I should explain. You are more than the novelty white guy who speaks Tagalog. You're the foremost expert on Philippine basketball in America. And that is hard for me to bestow you with because it's just not close. But you wrote the book, Pacific Rims. You hosted the docuseries on at Geo. You've written and talked about this for so long that it's just good to have you in studio, man. Thank you for being here.
I mean, thank you. I love talking about this. It is, for 20 years, kind of the subject that has most animated me. I've never gotten tired of it, never gotten sick of it, never wanted to move on from it. So any chance I get.
I was talking to Daryl Morey, GM of the Rockets, Sixers, and he pointed out to me that there are two countries in the world where basketball is the most popular sport. It is the Philippines, and it is Lithuania. And in Lithuania, Rafe, the average Lithuanian is kind of built like you, Average six feet tall, at least over 5'11", is the statistic. The average Filipino man, I'm here to inform our listeners, is about 5'4 and change, statistically speaking. But the fact that this is the place where basketball means this much, what's the way that you explain to people how this obsession actually looks?
The way that I think most people, if they happen to visit the country, encounter first when they get off the plane, they're riding in a cab or whatever. They see people playing basketball everywhere in the streets. People dressed in basketball jerseys as almost the standard wear for any man walking around casually on the street. Yes. but you see people playing in these really quite nice covered courts municipal courts that are put up by local governments where they have nice backboards full courts people playing in bare feet in flip-flops as much as sneakers are a key part of basketball culture you go to the philippines you don't need some things to be a thriving basketball nirvana which is to say that when it comes to the philippine basketball association
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