Playing with the Big Boys

Lou Antolihao is a sociologist who specializes in leisure studies and comparative-historical analysis. He has held research and teaching appointments in the Philippines, Singapore, and Japan, most recently as the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.

• List of IllustrationsList of TablesAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Spheroid of Influence: Sports, Colonization, Modernity2. From Baseball Colony to Basketball Republic: Postcolonial Transition and National Sporting Culture3. The Hollywoodization of Hoops: Basketball, Mass Media, Popular Culture4. Rooting for the Underdog: Sports, Spectatorship, Subalternity5. Basketball without Borders: Globalization and National Sports in Postcolonial ContextConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

"Antolihao provides a well-crafted narrative of the historical and social discourse of basketball in the Philippines."-Chad Carlson, Journal of Sport History "Antolihao has written a very interesting study that nobody working on Philippine basketball and baseball can ignore."-Stefan HÜbner, Journal of Asian American Studies “Attentive to the ways in which so many aspects of political and national discourse intersect with the game of basketball. Any historians working on Philippine history or the history of sport and colonialism would be well served by reading this work.”-Andrew D. Morris, professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo