Editor's note: This post was written by Rafe Bartholomew, author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball.

Let me get something out of the way up front: I am a basketball fanatic. I've played and followed the game my entire life, and with the publication of Pacific Rims last year, the sport has also been at the heart of my biggest achievement. The other half of this equation, of course, is the Philippines, a country that I've come to love as if it were my own. A major part of my relationship with the Philippines is the nation's relationship with basketball, which I found a great deal of inspiration in while devoting five years of my life to studying and writing about Pinoy hoops. So right now, let it be known and acknowledged: I write this from an unapologetically pro-basketball point-of-view.

The Philippine national soccer team has captivated the sports community over the past few months. I don't need to re-cap the Azkals' success in the Suzuki cup or their recent win over Mongolia, since both have been beaten to death in blogs, Tweets and the traditional sports media. Yay!

I meant that. The fact that Philippine soccer is improving and people are excited about the sport is great news. I wrote in Pacific Rims that although I loved basketball as much as just about anything in the world, more variety would be a good thing for the world of Pinoy athletics. There's no doubt that if sports aside from basketball were beloved in the Philippines, talented kids would be more likely to try their hand -- and maybe develop into world-class athletes -- at some pastime other than hoops. I played baseball, soccer and basketball as a child and chose which sport I liked most. I wish every kid from NYC to Aparri had a similar chance to choose.

So while I've enjoyed and taken pride in the Azkals' recent success, I've been pretty disappointed that so many people, from professional sports writers to casual fans on Twitter, have decided to turn soccer's success into basketball's loss. It doesn't need to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. There is definitely enough room in fans' hearts and imaginations to enjoy soccer and basketball, as well as other sports. I would argue that there's even enough funding. Even though the patronage model of funding that applies to much of the Pinoy sports landscape means that wealthy donors only have a pool of so much money to spend on sports, if tycoon/sportsmen like MVP and Mikee Romero believe they can gain exposure by sponsoring soccer along with basketball, they'll fit both into their budgets.

This is not a zero-sum game, but a lot of commentators have been treating it as one, so what I'm going to attempt to do here is defend Philippine basketball while also respecting and supporting Pinoy soccer. In the words of everyone's favorite half-Filipino celebrity, Rob Schneider, "You can do it!"

For starters, I don't think the Philippine basketball team gets the respect it deserves from sports writers and fans for its achievements in international competition. In a recent story, Inquirer sports columnist Ronnie Nathanielsz described the Azkals' recent success as an "unprecedented surge to prominence in the sport," by which he seems to mean world soccer. This was written before last week's win over Mongolia, so at that point all the team had done was beat Vietnam and play Indonesia tough in the Suzuki cup.

I'm not sure how the 151-ranked soccer team (the Philippines) in the world beating the 134-ranked team (Vietnam) and moving up one spot, from 152 to 151 in FIFA rankings qualifies as an unprecedented surge to prominence in soccer. And beating up on Mongolia, number 182, doesn't really prove that the Azkals are a team to be reckoned with. And that's fine. The Azkals' improvement and achievements are impressive for what they are. We can admire them for that, without the hype.

Let's compare these achievements with the RP team that represented the country in the 2009 FIBA Asia tournament (I'm using this team and not Smart Gilas in the 2010 Asian Games because Gilas is still a work in progress and I was able to see more of the 2009 squad). The RP team was pretty much shat on in the press for finishing eighth in the tournament. Yet the Philippines (currently ranked 53rd by FIBA) logged wins against Chinese Taipei and Japan, ranked 41 and 33, respectively, and played tournament champion Iran (ranked 20) as tough as almost any other team in Tianjin. It's hard to imagine the Azkals doing this well against similarly ranked FIFA teams, but I'm not saying we should expect them to. Maybe someday they'll be that good, but the Azkals' progress is impressive on its own terms. Let's also give Pinoy basketball players the credit they deserve, because they already are among the best in Asia.

Which leads me to this maddening old saw that just won't die: Filipinos aren't suited to basketball and stand a better chance at succeeding in soccer, where height is not as important to success. Jaemark has already done stellar work debunking this, but here it is once again, now being touted by none other than Carlos Conde, one of the Philippines' most prominent journalists and the country's stringer for The New York Times. I admire Conde's reporting on Philippine politics and breaking news, among other subjects, but I think he's gone off the deep end with a recent post on his Asian Correspondent page:

If Filipinos can be as supportive and encouraging as the Bacolod crowd, soccer should have no problem becoming popular in the Philippines. As many Twitter users pointed out last night, soccer is more suited to Filipinos than basketball. ... And folks were exchanging jokes about the future of the Philippine Basketball Association. Journalist Kenneth Guda wrote on Facebook: ”Suddenly lots of Pinoys have become football fans. By the way, there’s a PBA tonight. Anybody watching? ;-). To which a friend replied: “Basketball? What’s that?”

OK, let's cut Conde some slack here because he was writing as a casual fan and not a journalist, and in no way implied that his post was a rigorously reported piece. Still, since he's a real luminary in the national media scene, his voice -- even his casual voice -- carries a lot of weight, and I wish he hadn't suggested that Filipinos are naturally more suited to soccer than basketball simply because his Tweeps seem to think so.

Likewise, I enjoy a good joke at the PBA's expense as much as the next guy, but the one Conde quotes is not very good. It's not even true. There was no PBA game on at the same time as the Azkals-Mongolia match. Let's put it this way: If Conde or his Times colleagues Seth Mydans or Norimitsu Onishi end up writing for the Gray Lady about soccer's new prominence in the Philippines and the article resembles this, I'll be writing a letter to complain.

What gets my goat more than anything else, however, has been the way that the Azkals' success has been turned into yet another cudgel with which commentators can beat up on Fil-Am basketball players. Apparently, Fil-European athletes are more palatable to Pinoy fans than Fil-Ams because they're more gentlemanly, or "gallant," as Nathanielsz recently described them. Here's more from another Nathanielsz column:

The other key factor, we believe, is the character of the players who are mostly from Europe and have imbibed a different culture from the Filipino-Americans who demonstrate their skill in the PBA. ... In a British educational system which brothers Philip and James Younghusband and Chris Greatwich surely enjoyed, they teach young men to first and foremost be gentlemen.

In America, from what we know, the accent is on how to get ahead and do well financially. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that except that the difference is eventually palpable and being suddenly exposed to Fil-Europeans ... our fans have warmed to the difference.

Some of this analysis I find genuinely offensive. The bit about the American education system is wrong -- the U.S. press has focused recently on how the country's schools don't really prepare young Americans for anything, although I would personally agree with the statement that American values are overly focused on getting rich. What really makes me want to bash my head against my keyboard is the idea that Fil-Ams, because they aren't genteel Europeans, are somehow lower class.

I don't know what part of the British class structure the Younghusbands come from. They could be from Eton or London's East End. But most Filipino Americans come from the U.S. middle and working classes, and it sounds like the writer somehow deems them poorly bred compared to Fil-foreigners from Europe. I'm from the middle class -- my father is a bartender, my mother was a cook who put herself through college and graduate school one course at a time until she became an administrator at a local college. Somehow, I managed to overcome my service industry roots and get a decent education, and my parents -- miraculously, I suppose -- were able to turn me into something less than a hoodlum. Can I layer any more sarcasm into those sentences? If so, I'd like to.

Seriously, though, the issue of Fil-Ams in Philippine basketball is a fraught one, filled with misunderstandings and miscommunication committed by both local Pinoys and Fil-Ams. Certainly not all Fil-Am basketball players are great guys; neither are all locals. But to suggest that their education or upbringing was somehow deficient because they didn't go to private schools or they aren't rich, well that's wrong.

If the Azkals' Fil-foreign players are finding easier acceptance than PBA Fil-Ams do nowadays, I can venture a few guesses as to why. First, the media loves them. Writers go out of their way to argue that the Azkal's foreign-born players show the Pinoy trait of loving their families. Isn't that a pretty universal value? Granted, I'd be willing to grant that Filipino families are generally tighter-knit than American families, but Fil-Am families tend to preserve that closeness. Does anyone doubt how important Ryan Reyes's family is to him after the tragedy they suffered last month?

Second, I think Filipino fans may find it easier to accept foreign-born athletes in soccer because most Pinoys still see the sport as somewhat foreign, and definitely more foreign than basketball, which is, to borrow from Nick Joaquin's riff on supposedly "Spanish" adobo, "as Filipino as the Pinoy's guts." Basketball is such a part of so many Filipinos' lives that when people see Fil-Ams representing the country and losing, they wonder "can't we get somebody who was born here to do that?" Finally, let's see how this plays out over the next ten years. Fil-Ams were all the rage in Philippine basketball in the days of Vince Hizon, young Jeff Cariaso, Rommel Santos and the Lago brothers. Perceptions change over time, and the media, in constant search of storylines, can turn on athletes, especially those born or raised outside of the Philippines.

Regardless of perceptions, I hope that the Younghusbands and the other talented Fil-Euro booters currently playing for or soon to join the Azkals have a similar effect on Philippine soccer as Fil-Ams have had on basketball--that is, raising the level of play and forcing local talent to adapt and improve. Thanks to them, Philippine soccer can only get stronger.

So there you have it. Instead of One Big Fight between soccer and basketball fans, I'm calling for One Giant Kumbaya: Can't we all just get along? The Azkals are achieving something exciting. They deserve the support and praise of Filipino fans. PBA players, SMART Gilas players, UAAP and NCAA players, and while we're at it, Inter-Barangay players--they're all part of a great tradition of Philippine basketball, and they too deserve praise and support.

Rafe's book Pacific Rims is still available online and at bookstores across the Philippines. Check out his blog at RafeBartholomew.com.