I spent more than a thousand words on my review of Rafe Bartholomew’s Pacific Rims, and it’s a good thing GMANews.TV still published it:

Continue reading "If, for some reason, you’re still not convinced you should grab a copy of Pacific Rims…"

To follow-up my previous post about the Black Superman, here are a couple of YouTube videos about Billy Ray Bates in his days 1983 stint with the Crispa Redmanizers.

Manotoc even hints at Bates’ alcohol problem, which PBA teams over the course of the next few years were only too willing to ignore as long as Billy Ray put up the buckets.

Continue reading "Billy Ray Bates on video"

A couple of nights back, I was chatting with Rafe Bartholomew to congratulate him on making it to Quinito Henson’s column (an honor that falls somewhere between his Fulbright scholarship and his Bakekang television appearance). Quinito quoted Rafe, who wrote a feature on the Knicks guard last season for Seattle Weekly, as texting that Nate Robinson might have Filipino blood through his mother, and the Philippine Star columnist raised the possibility of the defending NBA slam dunk champion playing for the country in international competition.

Continue reading "Krypto-Nate and the Black Superman"

It’s always a treat when Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, perhaps my all-time favorite Filipino writer, delves into sports. He doesn’t do it often, seeing as, with the state of our country, he really needs to be writing about other things, but when he does it, the results are almost always excellent, like the two articles he wrote about pound-for-pound champion Manny Pacquiao over the last couple of weeks.

The first one was about Pacquiao’s otherworldly confidence, as he notes that the Pac-man was just “as fearless facing his interviewer as he was facing Ricky Hatton.” He then wonders if Pacquiao’s extraordinary success is something borne of his extraordinary confidence, something that is frowned upon in our country’s culture:

Continue reading "Conrad on Manny Pacquiao"