Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball [Hardcover]

Rafe Bartholomew (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 1, 2010

Hoops dreams in the Philippines-a fresh and unforgettable basketball diary of one man's journey and one nation's passion.

Welcome to the Philippines, where the men are 5'4," the everyman's Air Jordans are a pair of flip-flops, and the rhythm of life is punctuated by the bouncing of a basketball...

Allured by the idea of an island nation full of people who love the game as irrationally as he does, American journalist Rafe Bartholomew arrived in Manila to unlock the riddle of basketball's grip on the Philippines. On his unforgettable journey, Bartholomew spends a season inside the locker room of a Philippine professional team, dines with politicians who exploit hoops for electoral success, travels with a troupe of midgets and transsexuals who play exhibition games at rural fiestas, and even acts in a local soap opera. Sweating his way through hard-fought games of 3-on-3, played with homemade hoops for 50-cent wagers, Bartholomew uses a mix of journalistic knowhow and the hard-court ethics he learned from his dad to get in the paint and behind the scenes of Filipinos' against-all- odds devotion to the sport.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wonderfully written and conceived: a white man walks the earth with a basketball and discovers a society so colorful it almost sounds make-believe. This book is more than a front row seat to a body-twisting, triple-clutching, no-look passing basketball world in flip-flops. It humanizes a nation and reclaims the innocence of a sport that has been swallowed whole by stereotypes and clever marketing schemes."
-James McBride, author, Miracle at St. Anna, The Color of Water, and Song Yet Sung

"This is the kind of book that makes you proud to be a sportswriter, for at its best, sportswriting informs, entertains and educates, like all great writing. Rafe Bartholomew, the young, 6-3 'giant American' in the land of the Lilliputian-but-basketball-mad, turns the Philippines into a hoops carnival, teaching us as much about this complex nation as any history book. I learned, I laughed (I mean, out-loud, splatter-the-page hilarity), I loved it all. Pacific Rims is nothing but a joy."
-Rick Telander, Senior Sports Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times, author, Heaven Is a Playground

"Rafe Bartholomew's Pacific Rims is a rollicking good time, a kind of gonzo basketball journey filled with laughs and pathos. Who would've thought the Philippines was so hoops obsessed. What a cast of eccentric characters. Just hearing the tales of players like Billy Ray Bates - an American import known in his day as the Black Superman - makes this a ride worth taking."
-Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River

"Rafe Bartholomew traveled to the Philippines to better understand a country that loved basketball as much as he did. What's resulted is a book as varied and unique as the hoops tradition he found there, a dizzying mish-mash of social history, personal narrative, and rock-solid sports journalism. As raw with emotion as it is informative, Pacific Rims can make you both laugh out loud and tear up-sometimes in the span of a single sentence."
-Bethlehem Shoals, author, FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Rafe Bartholomew is an assistant editor at Harper's magazine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Seattle Weekly, Detroit Free Press, and The Best American Sports Writing 2007. He currently lives in New York. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: NAL Hardcover; 1st ed edition (June 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451229991
• ISBN-13: 978-0451229991
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #597,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent sports writing. June 17, 2010

By Vic I.

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm a basketball fan, an avid reader of sports journalism, and a Filipino. So I had high expectations for this book, and was not disappointed. It manages to be both scholarly and sidesplittingly funny at the same time.

Just like Jack McCallum's "Seven Seconds or Less", the author spends an entire season as an embedded journalist with a local professional ball club. However he alternates his fly-on-the-wall reportage of practices and player hijinks with well-researched chapters on past Pinoy sports heroes, defunct leagues, and the country's culture in general.

I noow realize that it takes an outsider's point of view to really put the bizarre yet wonderful world of Pinoy ball into perspective.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Long Overdue June 7, 2010

By Thomas Churma

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Well written. A very good read. This book should have been written long ago. It brought back memories of living, working and playing a whole lot of ball in the Philippines long ago.

The author captures the Filipinos' passion for the National Sport from barrio to big city and provides insight into this often misunderstood country as a Westerner immersed in the culture. Language and cuisine are important.

An Index (Personal Names, at the least) and a Bibliography would have been useful, but that just may be the librarian bias in me.

Thomas Churma
Kalamansi Books
[...]

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A joy to read January 23, 2011

By Nate C-K

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Overtly, this book is two stories spun into a single narrative:

- A general overview of the culture of basketball in the Philippines.
- The story of a single season ("conference") where the author follows a pro basketball team, the Alaska Aces, through their successes and struggles on and off the court.

However, perhaps the most important story in the book is that of a young man experiencing a new culture that he knew very little about before he arrived. The author arrives looking for something familiar, basketball, and through it discovers and attempts to explain much that is unfamiliar. The reader is taken along on this journey as well, and it's a lot of fun.

I myself have been to the Philippines several times, and I picked this book up at an airport bookstore in Manila. Even though I already knew a great deal about the country, I was pleased to learn tons of things that I didn't know before. Filipinos will probably also learn plenty, and even if they don't they will enjoy the author's perspective their culture.

You could undoubtedly write a much more comprehensive book about basketball in the Philippines than this one. The author makes a good effort to research the history of the sport there, but the brevity of his experience limits how much of an insider perspective he could really gain. Furthermore, his account of the present-day league lacks objectivity because he has become very close to the particular team that he covered. However, this does not negatively affect the book at all: it never pretends to give an objective appraisal of the league from a neutral point of view, but rather gives itself wholeheartedly to conveying a fan's sense of love for the game. This love rubs off on you as you read.

This book was a pleasure to read, and I laughed at loud every few pages. I read it mostly in one sitting, on my flight home from the Philippines; for weeks afterward I told everyone I knew about it. I am now passing it around to my friends, and I ordered a copy from Amazon to send to another friend abroad. In terms of sheer enjoyment this was one of the best books I have ever read, especially in the realm of non-fiction.