This is Other Kinds of Intimacy, a newsletter about love and relationships at their most expansive by journalist and writer Juliana Feliciano Reyes. You can subscribe here.

I write to you from the throes of a Filipino basketball fever dream.  

The first flickers of madness began three weeks ago at Araneta Coliseum, with what remains the best game I’ve ever seen. Our boys, De La Salle University, on a three-game slump, digging themselves out of a 16-point hole against the team that beat them in the finals last year. The drama! The heroics!  

And it’s only grown more dizzying since.  

With every slow crawl toward the arena in Manila holiday traffic, every replay of the game on TV (mandatory now; gotta see it from another angle), the hours Jennie, my dad, and I spent indoors on a beautiful day at the beach anxiously watching the livestream of the first semifinals game, the sleep I lost from the adrenaline of the second semifinals game where the boys knocked out the top seed, all the slow-mo highlights of our point guard Jacob Cortez set to Nipsey Hussle that I kept getting served on Instagram (had to delete, not good for the brain), my constant refreshing of the podcasts and the news sites and Reddit, not to mention writing this post...it’s been like that. I have succumbed.  

In truth, sports fandom has long eluded me, despite the more than a decade I lived in Philly. I once tried, of all things, to be a Braves fan as a way to get closer to my brothers but I gave up after a season—the games too long and too numerous, my brothers too unimpressed with my effort, to make it worth my energy.  

But if you were going to move anywhere and end up obsessed with basketball, it would probably be the Philippines (I learned as I read a book on this very topic).

Or, put another way: If you were, like I was, longing for a way to commune with a place you felt estranged from, and that place was the Philippines, you might find yourself in the throes of a Filipino basketball fever dream, too.

Not long after I moved to Manila last year, I ended up at my first game because my uncle had tickets and because the games promised to reveal something previously locked away about my dad. My brothers and I grew up in the States, far from my dad’s college, far from Filipino basketball.  

The year before, my younger brother had sent me a video of my dad at a LaSalle game, clad in an emerald green polo, erupting in joy. “I’ve never seen Papa so happy,” he wrote.

At my first game, in a neon green halter top (only green I had), I remember cheering but feeling self conscious, like, am I doing this right? Who am I watching exactly? Why do they keep stopping the game? Am I showing too much skin? (Always in Manila wondering this—it’s hot here! And conservative).  

What I liked best were the drummers. High up in the stands on either side of the arena, they flung their bodies, conjuring a wildness that clattered in my chest. I thought of Hyunjin playing the big drum, of all the Korean drummers I played with back home, and was suddenly tearing up. Something about the recognition I felt, a familiarity I had been missing.

The move to Manila had been jarring. I lacked ties and intimate knowledge of the geography, of the culture. I couldn’t even really speak Tagalog. It was nothing like my life in Philly, a place I had not only lived but reported on for years. Here, I found myself short of breath with yearning. I ached to know Manila, and by extension, that elusive thing we call Filipino-ness.

My uncle somehow always got tickets, and so I kept accompanying my dad to the games, even though it was a nearly all-day commitment because of the traffic. And even though it got a little boring because we always won. No narrative tension. I figured it was a nice way to spend time with him. To witness him in what was once his natural habitat.    

The first game I remember watching with a different kind of attention was the first close one I saw, against the University of Santo Tomas. We beat them in overtime.

My dad said, about UST point guard Kyle Paranada, that’s a small guy. (He’s 5’9, which is fairly standard for point guards in the league, but it’s true they look miniature next to the bigs, especially the “imports,” mostly students from West Africa.)  

He was small. And he was also incredibly fast. That game I realized how thrilling it was to track him darting around the court. (There’s a rookie on our team this year, Gian Gomez, who, at a slight 5’6, is truly tiny—and adorable—and the crowd always went wild when he got his minute or so of playing time.)

This was one of those only-in-Filipino-basketball things that I came to love about watching the game here.  

Among the other seemingly¹ uniquely Filipino basketball things that won me over:

• The best names and nicknames: Forthsky, Topex, Lebron Jhames Daep. Steve Nash Enriquez! (Yes I had to look up who Steve Nash was.)
• Players making threes against the backdrop of blinking chicken Spam ads, the sponsorship of literally everything, including replays of rebounds and the last two minutes of the game. (OK, can’t say I love this but it is very Filipino.)
• The grown men (and sometimes women) bellowing belligerently, which always makes my dad laugh. They’re shouting “PANGIT!” (ugly) and “OVERRATED!” They’re screaming, “REFEREES, I-KULUNG” (Lock em’ up) as a play on the anti-corruption chant the cheerleaders had done at halftime. I can still hear the man booming, “MAGWRESTLING LANG KAYO!” (You might as well be wrestlers!) after Wello Lingolingo (another incredible name) had a nasty fall on our point guard Kean Baclaan which took him out of nearly the entire season.

• The constant physical intimacy between the players. Like when two of our bigs carried Vhoris Marasigan off the court after a fall, one meaty thigh in each hand. Or when Mason Amos, newly back after a long injury, missed two three-pointers, the second of which was an air ball, at a very important rivalry game against his former school (the crowd was really letting him have it), and Marasigan lumbered up to graze Amos’s chin with his finger, as if to say, chin up, big guy.  

• And of course, the boys. Filipinos from the city and the province, from the States, from Australia. So many mixed race Filipinos, so many Blackipinos. The boys with their neck tats and their bigotilyos and their shooting sleeves emblazoned with “GOD.” 

  Sure, in the States, I had seen Filipino guys crush on the dance floor. But I had never seen them like this. Dunking, slamming the ball away from a shooter, hitting daggers in the nick of time (yes I just learned “dagger” a few weeks ago). Obviously, I have crushes on many of them. It’s only…a little weird how young they are.      

  I know, I know, am I really talking about representation in the year of our lord 2025? But after living most of my life in a place with such limited imagination around what Asian men can be, I can’t deny how much pleasure I get from seeing Filipino boys as sports stars.    

This is all to say that my newfound passion for basketball became a lens through which to understand this place I now call home. An invitation to draw deeper—the very thing I had yearned for, am still yearning for. Is obsession always about longing?  

In those early days in Manila, I clung to that book about Filipino basketball, Rafe Bartholomew’s 2011 Pacific Rims, feeling strangely close to the author, another American immersed in our version of the sport (did I mention I was lonely?).

Later, I noticed the hoops at the palengke (public market) where a guard told Jennie and me about their league and invited us to watch his game against the meat section. I learned that all I needed to do to make Tagalog small talk with a Filipino man was to ask him about basketball.  

Once, while zoning out in traffic along an elevated highway, I realized, with a start, that on the roof of a nondescript cement building, there stood a basketball hoop—seemingly suspended in the sky. Of course, I thought, smiling to myself. And I could almost hear the city whispering back, you know me too well.  

Thanks for reading. Do you remember when you became a FAN? I’d love to hear about it.

Till Sunday again,

Juliana