The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, August 11, 2024

9:00 AM | Why I Hated Basketball: On Carlos Yulo’s Olympic Wins and Gendered Sports

[Originally published on Rappler, and based on this short post.]

“Sports is beautiful but it’s also brutal.”
~ E.J. OBIENA, pole vaulter, Paris Olympics 2024

In the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics in Paris [and in remembrance of Hidilyn Diaz’s watershed win in weightlifting in Tokyo in 2021], there was a burst of online chatter about the state of competitive sports in the Philippines. About the hardships our athletes have to go through to train and to participate in competitions, often with the most measly and most grudging of government support. About how ironic it is that our Olympic wins have come from sports not usually seen as “appropriate” for the gender of the athlete that won them. And about how support for these sports always seem to pale in comparison to certain other sports that enjoy not just widespread appeal but also consistent corporate largess.

And then people began side-eyeing basketball.

To quote improv comedian and comics artist Jay Ignacio: “Eh, kung i-modify natin ang gymnastics na kailangan ma-syut sila sa loob ng basketbol ring tuwing di-dismount, makakaakit kaya iyon ng mas maraming sponsorship?” And then from screenwriter and poet Jerry Gracio: “Pagkatapos nating manalo sa Olympics sa mga sports na hindi basketball, tiyak, magtatayo tayo ng maraming maraming basketball courts.” Mostly played for laughs, of course—but the undertone of many of these posts was serious. Other social media posts were more upfront: “Hindi lang [sana] puro basketball,” wrote historian Kristoffer Pasion, echoing many others who wrote the same sentiment in a variety of ways. Like the actress Agot Isidro, who posted: So pwede na ba natin bawasan ang sponsorship at funding ng basketball at idagdag na lang sa gymnastics, boxing, and weightlifting?”

Why single out basketball? I think there’s an unspoken reason why, and I proceeded to share my thoughts, and my story, on X [formerly Twitter] in a long thread. Within mere hours, the post blew up.

* * *

This is a slightly extended version of what I posted on August 5 on X:

For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sport that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to. As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no real interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.

I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?” and gave up on liking basketball altogether.

There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.

And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.

Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.

End post.

* * *

I was soon bombarded with an avalanche of responses. As of August 6, that X thread has had 602K views, 8.7K likes, 1.9K reposts, and God knows how many responses. I hit a nerve. I knew my experience was not exactly unique, but I had no idea it would resonate so hard among many people. The responses were variations of these: “I feel seen!” or “This is my childhood!” or “Somebody finally said it!”

The number of responses of course are directly proportional to the acknowledged popularity of the sport—the feeling that in our culture, we are surrounded by this great and unquestioned worship of basketball (“It’s part of our Filipino culture!” some of the indignant responses went), that for me to write this post, I have articulated what so many people have felt but could not say—perhaps for fear of backlash, and perhaps for fear of confirming for others what they wanted hidden.

I will not deny the massive popularity of basketball, and why so many people love it. My TV screen—with its endless seasons of NBA or PBA games—confirms it. Going around any neighborhood and seeing basketball courts everywhere, built well or improvised, confirms it. The fact that I can utter a mononym—“Jaworski”—and be understood by many confirms it. The fact that Coke abandoned Coke-Go-for-Goal in its singular advocacy for nurturing football in the country in favor of forming the Coca-Cola/Powerade Tigers PBA team starting in 2002 confirms it.

Basketball is like an inevitability for life in this country—somehow, one way or another, you will be touched by it. There’s also this that can be taken as a reason for its popularity: it’s sheer accessibility. One response went: “Basketball is the sport that will always resonate to Filipinos. It is like a moth to a lamp. Basketball is so accessible: may 15x15 [feet] na open space ka, good to go ka na, isang bola, sampung katao agad ang mag-eenjoy. At the same time, [it’s] fast paced. It is one of the most social contact sports out there.” So true.

I am not a sports historian or a cultural anthropologist or a psychologist, but I can also understand why basketball became very popular for many Filipinos. The sport was introduced to us by the Americans, and made popular by them by spreading it via the public school system they set in place. That American imprimatur probably helped, and in a sense they thoroughly ingrained the sport in us. The things is, basketball as a game is truly a marvel to behold and beautiful to see when one begins to analyze its strategies and possibilities of execution—and many basketball fans would attest to this as the very reason for their abiding love for it. And then with the PBA becoming the only sports televised for widespread consumption in the Philippines for many decades, one can see why basketball has only grown in popularity over the years. That popularity could only beget more popularity, a bandwagon effect that is about conformity aside from also being about being sports-minded and being entertained.

Here is the turn: it has also been mostly basketball with male athletes we have seen popularized. And because these male athletes are on TV, they have become the equivalent of gods. We worship at the altar of the sport, and consequently we have also begun worshipping—and reflecting—the gods that play it. And then it happened: the sport somehow became closely connected, semiotically speaking, with an idea of Filipino manhood. To ascribe fandom to the game or to play the game itself—no matter our personal limitations—somehow became prerequisite for defining manhood for many Filipino boys. Not all, but many.

My father was a basketball coach for a school in Northern Mindanao where he taught as a young man, and the brood that he eventually raised with my mother was six boys total, and no girls. Sometimes family friends would jokingly point out that he perhaps purposely bred an entire basketball team for him to coach. I must admit that my relationship with my father—which was partly estranged for a time—had probably colored my view of the game. (He loved watching PBA endlessly.) But truth to tell, my father never forced me or my brothers to play (and a significant number of us are quite tall for the average Filipino male!). But because of what I’ve posted on X, I have been getting so many responses detailing intense parental or familial pressure—usually from elder male relatives—to play the game to prove their manhood, and eventually courting disappointment when they failed.

In my case, it was the men in all the neighborhoods I grew up in that somehow signaled to me that to participate in this fandom or to play the game was the only way I could get into their brotherhood. And like what I’d written, my schoolmates also did the same in varying degrees. It was not always overt. It can be very subtle. I somehow learned to read from social cues what was expected of me, and proving my “straight malehood” through basketball was certainly up there. (Given that I was a closeted boy who did not want to be found out added to the tension.)

And it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls, too. One response I got was from a woman who truly loved to play basketball, but when she was a student in a Catholic girls school, she and her schoolmates were forbidden by the nuns to play the game lest they turn into lesbians! Our culture has definitely coded sports in gendered ways for so long, and we don’t even question why. Basketball as a code for “straight malehood” can be insidious in the way it expresses itself. You will get snickers and you will hear the whispers of people “confirming your sexuality” just by how you take to the game. One such response I got on X was from a man who told me this story: that as a boy he was aware he was being tested by friends regarding his sexuality when they asked him to name two of his favorite NBA teams. He replied: “Boston and Celtics!” Alas, he didn’t know that those two were one and the same team—and so he invariably outed himself because of that response.

Another person told me that a new male employee at the company he worked in casually asked him to describe himself in terms of positions in a basketball game—whether he was a point guard, or a shooting guard, or whatnot—and he knew that the question was loaded to test him whether he was “man enough” to know what basketball was. When he couldn’t answer, he heard the co-worker later whisper to others: “Bakla nga!”

The same trajectory happened to another man who responded: “I was a senior in high school, there was a party, and my friends wanted to play basketball after dinner, but kulang ng isang player yung isang team. Kinukulit ako ng buong tropa so I had to pretend like I was f*cking asleep just to get them off my back. I heard one whisper: ‘Bakla nga.’”

Another one told of a time he and other gay boys in his high school class were grouped together as one basketball team by their P.E. teacher—and the fact that they actually played a good game did not matter, because they were really teamed together to be the butt of jokes running through the game. The hoots and jeers and laughs they had to contend with at their display of flamboyance and effeminacy while running around a basketball court were humiliating—but they endured. That P.E. teacher was being cruel—but I doubt anyone had the temerity to call him out. He was just being a man of the culture.

Others still remember being told that “sayang yung height mo,” just because they did not want to play. Another respondent recalled that a P.E. teacher coerced him into joining the basketball team because of his height, and then proudly announcing to his mother that he had consequently “saved the boy” from being seen as “gay” by other people.

Others have had opportunities denied them simply because of the basketball they were required to play in school. The journalist Ryan Edward Chua [who is now out] recalled: “I hated basketball so much and the shame and humiliation that came with not being able to play it. Once in grade school P.E., we had to play basketball for our final exam. I refused to join and chose to get a failing mark.”

Why this common disdain by many gay men for the sport? It is not the fear of “balls hitting them,” although many people have suggested that to be the case. In high school, I may have hated basketball but I loved soccer and volleyball. I wasn’t scared of balls coming my way and hitting me. So many other gay men attest to this, so it really is something else about basketball that bothers them—and the only answer I can muster is how coded it is with toxic and performative masculinity. It is that machismo that we reject, not really the game itself. The same machismo that has largely been violent to men like me who could not pass the ephemeral standards of manhood, like the mere liking of basketball.

So yes, basketball is coded as a “masculine” and “heterosexual” sport in our culture. And so is boxing. Volleyball and gymnastics, on the other, are somehow considered feminine sports. So if you were male, and you played these last two sports, you were definitely rendered sexually suspicious. (Remember all that old gossip about Carlos Yulo being gay?) The ridiculousness of these assumptions are titanic.

* * *

Like so many others, when Carlos Yulo won his first gold medal in gymnastics, I felt so much of me moved by an intensity of feelings. I cried when he cried on the sidelines when the final scores were tallied and announced. I could feel the weight of the mountain of expectations set on his shoulders—and the mountain of his personal frustrations as well—somehow melt in his utter disbelief at his win, but also in his eyes somehow a glimmer of vindication of what he could do and set out to do despite all the setbacks. In a sense, at that moment, I projected my own life and frustrations and hopes to his spectacular win, and it felt good to know that somehow we are always capable of overcoming the most monstrous of our challenges when we face it.

Later, when I had time to think more about the impact of Caloy’s win, I found it sufficiently validating that the gold medals we have won so far at the Olympics were won by athletes who defied the stupid gendered preoccupations of sports. Hidilyn Diaz, a woman, won a gold medal in weightlifting—which is taken as a male sport by most of us. And Carlos Yulo, a man, won two gold medals in artistic gymnastics—which is considered a female sport by most of us as well. I love the irony, and it’s a very telling rebuke to our outdated sexual politics. But will Filipinos learn from this realization? I can only hope so.

But the power of seeing Caloy clutching his gold medals is tremendous, and I hope it will have good repercussions in the way we view sports. The power of a winning image cannot be discounted. Many Filipinos saw on television and on the Internet Carlos Yulo powering through those gymnastics moves, and win, and I hope that that is enough for many to change their mindset about what kind of sports is good for them or for their kids, regardless of the gendered way we think about it. (It helps that Caloy is being celebrated now, especially financially. Sometimes that helps. I remember a time when careers were heavily gendered—for example, being a nurse for many decades before in the Philippines was considered only as a career for women. That changed eventually in the 1980s and 1990s when widespread economic difficulties forced many Filipinos to seek greener pastures abroad, and one sure way to do that was to be a nurse. Suddenly we had a flood of men suddenly taking up nursing. And now we don’t even blink twice anymore when we encounter a male nurse. It has become commonplace.)

So Caloy’s win can be a watershed moment in how Filipinos view gender in sports. Children, especially at a certain innocent age, are not usually mindful of the politics of sexuality and gender in everything; they just do what they want to do—although eventually, when they grow older, they do get socially conditioned to think of things in a certain way, with all the biases from adults and from the culture eventually absorbed and ingrained. So if these children will want to pursue certain sports that’s not part of their gender expectations, I hope their parents have become enlightened enough—because of Caloy and Hidilyn—to let them pursue these. And I hope their localities will have the sufficient facilities to meet their athletic needs. The children with dreams will always be there. Let’s hope their parents and their communities can be there for them as well. And let’s hope we will have moved on from gendering sports unnecessarily, and from having more ligas shoved down our throats.