Filipino Culture Forum

An amateur basketball game being played in a rural province in the country.

Sipa is the national sport in the Philippines. Other popular sports include basketball, boxing, football (soccer), billiards, chess, ten-pin bowling, volleyball, horse racing and cockfighting. Dodge ball and badminton are also popular.

Filipinos have gained international success in sports. These are boxing, football (soccer), billiards, ten-pin bowling and chess. Popular sport stars include Manny Pacquiao, Flash Elorde and Francisco Guilledo in boxing, Paulino Alcántara in football (soccer), Carlos Loyzaga, Robert Jaworski and Ramon Fernandez in basketball, Efren Reyes, and Francisco Bustamante in billiards, Rafael Nepomuceno in ten-pin bowling, and Eugene Torre in chess.

The Palarong Pambansa, a national sports festival, has its origin in an annual sporting meet of public schools that started in 1948. Private schools, and Universities eventually joined the national event, which became known as the "Palarong Pambansa" in 1976. It serves as a national Olympic Games for students, competing at school and national level contests.

The year 2002 event included football (soccer), golf, archery, badminton, baseball, chess, gymnastics, tennis, softball, swimming, table tennis, taekwondo, track and field, and volleyball.

Traditional Filipino games

Traditional Filipino games include yo-yo, piko, patintero, bahay kubo, pusoy and sungka. Pusoy is a popular gambling game. Individuals play the game by trying to get rid of all the cards by choosing poker hands wisely. Sungka is played on a board game using small sea shells in which players try to take all shells. The winner is determined by who has the most shells at the point when all small pits become empty. Filipinos have created toys using insects such as tying a beetle to string, and sweeping it circular rotation to make an interesting sound. The "Salagubang gong" is a toy described by Charles Brtjes, an American entomologist, who traveled to Negros and discovered a toy using beetles to create a periodic gong effect on a kerosene can as the beetle rotates above the contraption.

*source - wikipedia