If you were to believe Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) executive director Noli Eala’s tweets, the reason here’s no local television coverage of the ongoing 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games is because the government simply doesn’t care enough about Philippine sports. If the government actually bothered, Eala implies, then there would be no reason for everyone not to be able to watch our beloved Smart Gilas and the rest of our country’s athletes competing in the Asiad.






The only problem with that argument is that it’s simply not, well, true. As the always-awesome Patricia Hizon reported on Twitter, the problem with the Asian Games television rights was that the broadcasters from Guangzhou decided not to produce basketball games or boxing matches before the semifinal rounds of each sport. This made television coverage a hard sell for any network looking to find sponsors for the broadcast. Without sponsorship money, of course, it just didn’t make any fiscal sense for any network to carry the games.

But suppose the government actually cared about sports as much as Eala presumably does. If the government-owned National Broadcasting Network decided to air the games at a loss – perhaps the government could realign the budget that would otherwise go to building new classrooms and buying textbooks to buy the rights for the games, because who needs those, right? – we STILL wouldn’t be able to watch any Smart Gilas games because the local broadcasters aren’t producing any video of the games. In fact, the only thing the Philippine government could have done was to declare a war on China, or at least file a diplomatic protest, to force it to air the basketball games.

And even then there’s no guarantee that move would work, because the Olympic Charter aims to make sure that National Olympic Committees are autonomous and free from government intervention. In fact, it reads: “The NOCs must preserve their autonomy and resist all pressures of any kind, including but not limited to political, legal, religious or economic pressures which may prevent them from complying with the Olympic Charter.”

(I had a joke here about how Noli Eala should have known this considering he used to be a lawyer and all, but let’s move on.)

If we’re looking for people to blame, maybe we should start with the Guangzhou Asian Games Organizing Committee for the decision, a headscratcher considering that basketball is usually a marquee sport that garner a lot of attention. But I couldn’t help but think that Fiba-Asia, the governing body for basketball in the region, also dropped the ball for allowing this to happen. At the very least, they could have lobbied the GAGOC for provisions for competing countries to be able to broadcast the basketball games, such as perhaps allowing foreign media outlets to bring their own equipment to shoot and transmit them.

Fiba-Asia could also have communicated this issue better with the basketball federations of the competing countries, who should be aware not only of the circumstances surrounding the tournament proper, but everything that has to do with basketball – including the broadcast of the games. These basketball federations could then have communicated earlier with their countries’ Olympic committees and media partners to make the necessary adjustments.

It’s actually a surprise that we didn’t find about this broadcast situation earlier, when perhaps something could have been done. By the way, our representative to Fiba-Asia, the one who should have been keeping abreast of these matters? The SBP, led by its executive director, Noli Eala.