Football is nothing. Basketball is king.
That is the case in the Philippines, where basketball is the most famous game around. Just to illustrate this, practically every street in the cities has its own basketball court. Basketball tournaments in barangays during feasts are also very common. I just don't see any other sport eclipsing this one when it comes to popularity in the foreseeable future. One should not stay in the country for a very long time just to see my point.
I am not a fan of this sport, though. That is something I must admit, but there is one league that I continue to monitor, and that is the University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP), in which basketball is the primary sport for the first semester.
The UAAP is the country's biggest and most popular collegiate league. Attendance-wise and sponsorship-wise, no other league even comes close, owing to the fact that the league is composed of some of the country's biggest and most influential educational institutions. It has been the home for some of the collegiate scene's most storied rivalries, like the Ateneo de Manila (ADMU) - De La Salle Univerity (DLSU) rivalry and the cheerdance rivalry between the University of Santo Tomas (UST) and the University of the Philippines (UP).
What makes the league more exciting to watch is its unpredictability. Bilog ang bola (the ball is round), to put in a Filipino idiomatic expression. Anything can just happen. No team is invincible. This was just proven just yesterday between the game between the erstwhile unbeaten defending champion ADMU and winless cellar-dweller UP. Odds were in favor of ADMU. After all, the last time UP won this Battle of Katipunan (both universities lie along that road called Katipunan Avenue) was in 2004. ADMU had also breezed through other title contenders prior to the match. How could it lose to a team that just had its first winless season two years ago?
Lo and behold, UP won by 10 points, 68-58, to the surprise of UP fans themselves. The embarrassing loss of Ateneo must be really something--it peaked as a #2 Twitter trend topic before it dropped out of the list 5 hours after. Now that is Philippine basketball for you.
