A country that talks basketball

Word coming out of the discussions and ocular inspections by the Fiba visiting team seems to indicate a vote of confidence in the capability of the Philippines to host the 2019 edition of the world basketball championships.

It is by no means guaranteed that the country is the frontrunner or the favorite.  It is quite simply a favorable evaluation of venues and the infrastructure to stage and manage such a challenging sporting event involving the world’s best teams, hundreds of media personnel and a huge number of supporters and fans of the qualifying teams.

The final test will be a presentation in Geneva, Switzerland, the home base of the world’s basketball governing body.  Important and relevant documents, photos, financial details and a final pitch will be delivered before the decision-makers and against five other interested countries: China, Turkey, Qatar and a France-Germany joint bid.

The pitch will really matter.  One is reminded of how it is done in the Olympics when even US President Barrack Obama was part of the presenting team for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics.  Chicago didn’t win (Rio de Janeiro did) but it shows the importance cities give to hosting the Olympics.

The Fiba World Championships is not the Olympics but it will probably be the closest chance we will have to host a global sports extravaganza.  We already did this in 1978 in a pre-Internet and social media world and where there was definitely less traffic to go around.  The venue was the Araneta Coliseum and it was more than enough at the time.

But now we have more venues like the Mall of Asia Arena, the Philippine Arena in Bulacan and the upcoming sports complex being eyed by the SM group in Cebu.  Along with Araneta Coliseum, we have sufficient world-standard venues that will meet the requirements of the players, media and fans.

But more importantly, and this was observed by the visiting Fiba team, the Philippines breathes and talks basketball.  I am reminded of bids we used to do when I was in advertising and we pitched to have the Philippines host the Asian Advertising Congress.  We would always say that English is not a problem because almost everybody can speak the language.  Ergo, getting around to enjoy the country won’t be hard.

By the same token, the world will find kindred basketball spirits in this country. If the rest of the world loves football, Filipinos consider basketball their game. Coach Tim Cone once said that if you roll out a basketball in any street in the Philippines, people would automatically know what to do with it.  Author Rafe Bartholomew, who lived here for three years, captured that same spirit so succinctly in his book Pacific Rims.

So we wish for the best as we extend an invitation to the world to come to the Philippines in 2019 for the Fiba World Games.  We can’t wait to cheer for all the teams aside from our own.  We can’t wait to see our game played by the world’s best.

Follow the sports talk on Twitter@spsortssev.