By Michael Rico Mesina
For the past few years, I have been in a quest to collect memorabilia pertaining to the rich basketball history of our country.
Being a “Batang 90’s”, at first I started acquiring items from that particular era, from sports magazines, to annuals, programmes, to posters, and even cassette tapes and balls.
Knowing that I had some of those items during my childhood, having them again brought out a lot of nostalgia.
Along with the nostalgia came curiosity on the earlier periods of Philippine basketball history.
While almost all my time is pre-occupied as a physician/radiologist, there’s this itch in me, wanting to go back further and know more. With that my quest widened not just to collect such items from my childhood, but also from the past era.
To date, I have been able to amass memorabilia from present day basketball down to the 1910s, when the sport was in its infancy in the country.
Why collect? Isn’t reading online articles or listening to short videos about Philippine basketball history enough?
Beyond the items themselves is the challenge and the joy of acquiring them; having a piece of history that you can actually see and hold in your hands.
In the long run, my advocacy is to promote greater awareness and appreciation for Philippine basketball history, to inspire new collectors to join the hobby and to foster deeper camaraderie among Philippine basketball and basketball ephemera collectors
What makes it even more special are the people you meet, the relationships that you create, as well as the behind-the-scenes research work which make the narratives behind them more special. Let me share a story on an item that I have just acquired the past week:
PRE-WAR MEDAL
One weekend while I was attending the birthday celebration of my Tito Jimmy, a ping popped on my cellphone showing a picture of an old Filipino basketball medal.
When I learned from the sender that the item was from the pre-war era, my interest was immediately piqued. I asked to be excused for a few minutes from the festivities to take a look at the pictures of the medal.
It certainly looked old, but more research must be done so that a more specific assessment of its time period can be made. Right then and there, I decided to acquire the item and have it delivered, excited to what information I can uncover from such an obscure item.
The medal arrived on the same day but I was not able to open and inspect it immediately due to a heavy workload the next few days. But finally I had some time in my hands, time to research and learn more from the medal. A bit larger than the current 25-centavo coin, it had some interesting features.
The first peculiar thing about it was the presence of tropical trees and plants in the background, which is not seen in modern basketball medals. In my research, I found out that this particular background design is common during the American Sovereign Period (pre-Commonwealth, or prior to 1935).
Second is the uniform that the basketball player is wearing in the medal as well as the basketball goal and court in the background. The player appears to wear a tight-fitting, non-sleeved jersey, with medium length shorts showing what appears to be a small belt. These jersey designs were prevalent in the 1910s to 1920s era of basketball in order to cope with the demands of an increasingly competitive sport.
On the other hand, the board of the goal appears to be planks of wood attached together while the court itself seems to meld with the surrounding plants, with no evident lines, which was the way basketball was played in the Philippines in its very early stages.
Lastly, at the back of the medal is a very small engraved name, C. Zamora, referring to Crispulo Zamora (1871-1922), a famed metalsmith and metal artisan who made trophies, medals, crowns and other awards.
Zamora is also credited to arguably be the greatest contributor to medallic art in the Philippines. He puts his stamp in his creations by engraving his name onto a small part of the items, similar to a painter putting his name or signature to his work. Given that he passed away in 1922, and with the other clues in the medal, we can date the medal to around the 1910s to early 1920s, at the infancy of basketball in our country, with the sport being a source of national pride and slowly but surely taking root into our culture.
Looking back, I am certainly glad that I took the time to take notice and become curious of a presumably mundane basketball medal and to get it almost immediately, not knowing then that an amazing piece of Philippine basketball history from its humble beginnings would fall onto may lap.
This is just the first of many more, as I will be sharing my basketball collection (now numbering to a few thousand) in the weeks to come. Hopefully you get to enjoy the fascinating stories behind them as much as I enjoyed the process of acquiring and knowing more about them. Until next week.
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Michael Rico Mesina, popularly known as Doc Mico in the basketball community, is a physician (radiologist) by profession. His hobby outside of his work is collecting Philippine basketball memorabilia, books and magazines, among others. He will start sharing the stories of his rare collections and his collecting journey regularly through this corner, From the Vault with Doc Mico, here on Manila Standard’s Sunday Sports)
