Archival Footage!

The die-hard Manila Vanilla fans will no doubt be disappointed by this clip, which -- unlike my fabled turn in GMA 7's Bakekang -- features neither my hairy chest nor my attempts at acting. However, I managed to appear somewhat composed and intelligent for 10 minutes with local sportscasters Bill Velasco, Boyet Sison and Jinno Rufino, whose quickfire repartée can feel a little intimidating to an intruder/guest like myself. Our subject is -- what else? -- Ateneo/La Salle. I got more mileage from writing about that rivalry than any other subject in Philippine basketball, and while it is a rich and interesting story that reveals a lot about Manila society, I don't know if it deserves its preeminence over the rest of the basketball world. I know why the Green Archer/Blue Eagle rivalry gets top billing, however. The same elite alumni who pack the Araneta Coliseum each time the teams meet are the people who have the disposable income to buy Ateneo/La Salle gear, the people who drove my NY Times story to #2 on the sports page's most-E-mailed rankings and the people who control local media outlets that analyze the rivalry ad nausea.

So, without further ado, enjoy the video.



One final note on accents: My American readers, especially those who know me personally, might wonder why I'm talking with a put-on Filipino-English accent. I'm not exactly sure why. All I can say is that foreigners who end up staying here for long periods of time end up using the local English accent and some of its irregular idioms like "open the light," "go down from the bus," and "craving for rice." It just feels natural to respond to people in the same manner they talk to you. It's easy to look at this from another angle, however, and say that my adoptive accent is an ugly example of pandering racism. I would never walk into a Chinese restaurant in New York, for example, and say, 'Herrow my fwend! I would rike sum poak flied lice!" Of course, Chinese-Americans and Chinese immigrants living in America don't speak like that anyway, but I wouldn't use any voice other than my own while ordering at Hunan Pan. Yet that's exactly what I do here.

Here is the difference, as I see it, between the Chinese restaurant example and my experience in the Philippines, are these: First, the Philippines has a stronger claim on English than many other nations outside of the United States and United Kingdom. Of course, it is the same gnarled claim that other former colonies have, in which native cultures and languages have ceded ground to English, which has become lingua franca and in the Philippines' case, a second national language. The colonial experience was ugly and too complicated to unravel in this short post. Regarding the language/accent issue, I believe I'm not pandering to Filipinos' accents, but speaking a Philippine variant of English that may sound odd to American ears the same way American English sounds crude to the boys at Eton.