Hoops-mad Philippines bursting with pride at World Cup's arrival

Basketball is a passion in the Philippines. There are about 25,000 indoor courts in the country, countless outdoor courts — they're everywhere, with rims even fashioned out of barbed wire in some places. Data collected by the NBA shows that the league's online store can send deliveries to 215 cities and provinces in the Philippines; there isn't one place on that list where the league hasn't had someone buy a jersey or some other official merchandise.

"It is the No 1 sport in the country and you can't definitively say that about basketball in the United States or anywhere else," said Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, an assistant coach on the US team this summer and a national hero in the Philippines — his mother is Filipina.

"There's such great passion for the sport. I've flown into Manila with my staff and some of my friends, and on the ride from the airport, anywhere you look you can see groups of kids playing on a makeshift basket on a telephone pole, on the side of a building, in 3 feet of rainwater.

"It's a powerful visual of seeing what you would think would be extreme poverty, which it is, and the juxtaposition of seeing great joyfulness of people coming together and playing basketball in a way that doesn't exist anyplace else."

Legend says that American teachers brought basketball to the Philippines for the first time around the turn of the 20th century, and it immediately took off. Unlike other parts of Asia, where baseball or soccer can reign supreme, basketball stands alone in the Philippines. Its only real challenger in recent years has been boxing, simply because of Manny Pacquiao — who won 12 world championships in eight weight divisions. Pacquiao's popularity is such that he even served 12 years in politics in his homeland.

The basketball bug even found him: Pacquiao has played and coached in the Philippines Basketball Association, the nation's top pro league.

"People are raised on basketball from the age of 2 or 3," said Cone, whose teams have won more than two dozen league titles.

"All they do is play one sport and it's played throughout the year. We have three seasons: rainy season, wet season and basketball season, and we play basketball through it all. That's the passion. We always say we have three things in the Philippines: sport, basketball and politics."

Unlike politics, basketball seems to be the thing that everyone can agree on. The NBA has been airing games there for nearly a half-century, and staged one of its first ever international exhibition games in the Philippines — sending the then-Washington Bullets over to play a team of Philippine All-Stars.

If New York's heartbeat of outdoor basketball is Rucker Park, then Manila's is Tenement Court. That spot, with a court painted in the World Cup colors and with the logo, was where podcaster and former NBA TV personality Leigh Ellis picked for a pickup game a few days ago. Ellis is touring the world, throwing out invites on social media and telling fans to join him for games as he pursues a mission to play pickup in all corners of the globe and spin it into a docu-series.

Manila did not disappoint.

"Because of my experiences of traveling across several continents and countries playing pickup, I've encountered people everywhere who love and cherish basketball," Ellis said. "But in the Philippines, I could have been convinced that the game was invented there, or that they at least had some sort of ownership of it. Such was their passion for the sport."

Agencies via Xinhua