Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  What I saw on the court looked like a miniature NBA. Watching power forwards who were my height (as opposed to the American standard of six-foot-ten) was strangely empowering. I hadn’t watched a Knicks game and thought, I could play with those guys! since I was ten years old. Physically, at least, I matched up pretty evenly with PBA players. The game, between the brewery-sponsored San Miguel Beermen and the Air 21 Express, started off at a manic pace. San Miguel won the tip and within five seconds one of their guards launched a line-drive three-pointer that ricocheted off the backboard without coming close to the rim. Meanwhile, tinny synthesizer music—it sounded like the unfortunate coupling of European trance and a circus jingle—was piped into the arena. A rebound fell to an Air 21 guard who went coast-to-coast, skittering downcourt with blinding speed and passing most of the Beermen on the way, only to flub his layup on the other end. A San Mig guard scooped up the ball and pushed the action in the other direction, but he ran so fast that he kneed the ball into a teammate’s back and out of bounds.

  The on-court action looked more like human pinball than professional basketball, and I wondered if I’d traveled 8,000 miles to observe a glorified version of high school hoops. Thankfully, after a few possessions the frenzy wore off, players started to sink their shots, and it became clear that the PBA’s level of play was competitive with other foreign professional leagues. Relieved, I was able to let my guard down and take a look at the scene away from the court. The arena was papered with banners and jerseys for teams like the Santa Lucia Realtors, the Talk ‘N Text Phone Pals, and the Purefoods Chunkee Giants. PBA teams, including the Beermen and the Express, were marketing vehicles for their owners’ primary businesses and were named accordingly, even when they sounded absurd.

  The courtside entertainment provided similar commercial thrills. Smaller businesses that couldn’t afford their own teams bought the right to have company mascots wander the aisles, where they posed for photographs, danced as much as their cumbersome costumes allowed, and further blurred the line between professional basketball and a Lewis Carroll acid trip. The PBA’s in-house mascot—an orange wookie in shorts and a jersey—owned the most traditional costume. He was joined by a rotating cast that included a seven-foot walking waffle;4 the Welcoat paint company’s person-sized paint can, which required seeing-eye people to lead it through the crowd; and a representative of the Xtreme Magic Sing home karaoke set, dressed as a caped superhero with a microphone head. The most outlandish getup was an anthropomorphized lactobacillus bacterium that was meant to promote the digestive benefits of Yakult yogurt drink, but really looked like a giant white condom. A scarlet L painted on the megamicrobe’s chest only confused things further, as the letter could be mistakenly thought to stand for libog, Tagalog for “horny.” At halftime, human-sized bottles of Casino brand rubbing alcohol and Omega liniment joined the fray. The brown liniment bottle, wearing khaki safari shorts and a big cartoon smile, danced in a way that made the most of his rectangular body’s capacity for lightning-quick pelvic thrusts. When he approached a gang of ecstatic toddlers in the front row and started jackhammering away, I could hardly bear to watch, but the children giggled and squealed in delight.

  The PBA was pretty weird, and I liked it. Plus, during the moments when I could pull my attention away from the mascot sideshow, I saw a striking cross section of Manila’s population seated in the crowd. At courtside, wealthy families, dressed in matching polo shirts and yellow Livestrong bracelets, took in the game. The teams’ die-hard fans sat immediately behind both hoops. Sometimes these PBA lifers harassed the referees and players with high-frequency banshee shrieks and Tagalog epithets vicious enough to make their well-heeled neighbors blush, and sometimes they joyously waved homemade banners with the players’ names sewn on them. Nuns shared aisles with television starlets, and the nosebleeds were almost entirely given over to sinewy young men who watched intently from their crow’s nest viewpoint. It was hard to imagine an NBA crowd representing such a wide spectrum of Americans, although I couldn’t say so with empirical certainty, since I hadn’t watched a live NBA game in more than five years. But that was the point: PBA games were affordable—the cheapest tickets sometimes cost less than jeepney fare to the coliseum. Everyone watched, not just suits and celebrities. It seemed that the Philippine relationship with basketball remained so intimate because people communed with the sport daily by playing their own games, following the professional league or even just glancing at the images adorning jeepneys in traffic.

  In the double bill’s second game, I watched Quemont Greer, a player who’d starred for DePaul while I studied at nearby Northwestern University, rack up almost 50 points against the PBA’s most popular team, the Barangay Ginebra Gin-Kings. (Yes, they sell gin.) One of the things that first fascinated me about the PBA was that each team in the league was allowed to hire one American player to reinforce its local lineup. These players had been coming to Manila since the league’s founding. Some found fame and small fortunes, while others, who couldn’t cut it on the court or who rubbed their coaches the wrong way, were shipped back to the States in less than a week. Over the years, the PBA experimented with different height regulations to limit imports’ dominance over local players. Sometimes the league capped the Americans’ heights as low as six-foot-four and other times it allowed seven-footers to compete. This season, Greer stood a hair below the current six-foot-six ceiling. No matter the height limit, however, PBA imports were expected to play like stars. I wondered how a player like Greer, who nearly made it to the NBA after college, dealt with life in the center of the PBA’s two-rim circus. Was there a sense of being better than it all? Did he just roll with the punches, no matter how bizarre things got? Was the PBA—along with other international leagues—where NCAA stars’ hoop dreams went to die?

  I had arrived in the middle of the PBA season, so it was too late to observe how Greer’s attitude shifted throughout the year, but I knew after watching my first game that to really understand the PBA, I would have to get to know one of the imports. A few days later I got in touch with the league’s front office, and they agreed to help me find a team to follow through the next season. After talks with several general managers, a team called the Alaska Aces agreed to open its doors to me. I would go to practices, sit through strategy sessions, eat with the players, travel with the team, and follow the Aces from inside the locker room. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d finally be part of a big league team! Sort of.

  I’d watched Alaska play on television a few times, so I was familiar with their roster, but it took a little research to figure out the story behind the team’s name. The Alaska Milk Corporation, which owned the PBA franchise, was one of the country’s largest retailers of canned and powdered dairy products. But what did milk have to do with the state of Alaska? Nothing, actually, although in the tropical heat, I could see how allusions to an arctic breeze might be an attractive marketing ploy. “Alaska,” it turned out, was a Tagalog contraction of the words alas and ka that means “You’re an Ace!” It was also the grammatical root of the Tagalog verb alaskahan, which means to joke around or banter with friends. Both meanings fit the dairy empire’s family-friendly image, and their team full of tall, robust star athletes was a further extension of that brand identity. Before 2000 the team had gone by a more straightforward name, the Milkmen.

  Within the PBA, people often compared Alaska to the Chicago Bulls. The team ran former Chicago coach Phil Jackson’s triangle offense, and, like the Bulls, Alaska was the dominant team of the 1990s, when the franchise won nine league championships. But as the Alaska players of the Nineties aged, the team was forced to rebuild—and apparently they’d never found the right mix of new players. They’d been near the bottom of the league for the past few seasons. But maybe getting assigned to a losing team wasn’t such a bad thing. I called Alaska’s American-born head coach Tim Cone to introduce myself, and he sounded almost as excited to have a writer nosing around his team as I felt about becoming a PBA in
sider. In the casual, authoritative tone that he’d developed over eighteen years of coaching, Cone told me to be at practice the next morning. In a few hours he’d be picking up Alaska’s import, Rosell Ellis, at the airport. It had been more than five years since Alaska’s last title, and Cone hinted that his chances of picking up another championship would depend on Ellis.

  Rosell Ellis cleared customs at the Manila airport on a sweaty pre-dawn morning in March. Despite his exhaustion, he was due at practice in less than eight hours. A veteran of international leagues from South America to Australia, Ellis would be joining the Aces as the team’s lone American star. Across the street from the terminal, Tim Cone was waiting for Ellis in an outdoor holding pen. Ellis didn’t know that Cone couldn’t come inside the airport to meet him, so he grabbed his black duffel bags and found a seat near a hallway full of travel agents and money changers. Before long the other passengers collected their bags and headed for the exits, leaving Ellis alone with the airport security guards and porters, who quickly recognized him as a player and asked for autographs. Ellis’s twenty-hour flight from Seattle had come only five days after an even longer jaunt to the Pacific Northwest from Melbourne after he’d finished a six-month stint in the Australian league, and he was drained from his travels. Still, he managed to stay fairly cheerful while discussing his prospects for the upcoming season with his newfound fans.

  Cone suspected that Ellis was waiting for him inside, but he’d have to talk his way past a succession of security guards to get to him. Cone easily disarmed any suspicion by introducing himself as a PBA coach, although this created its own problems, as the guards were so thrilled to meet the Philippine answer to Phil Jackson that they stopped Cone and insisted on talking hoops. Eventually, Cone sweet-talked his way to the baggage area, where he found Ellis holding court amid a swarm of eager PBA followers.

  Cone drove Ellis to his apartment, a luxurious one-bedroom in Makati City, the business center of Metro Manila. Ellis would have preferred to hit the sack immediately, but Cone, riding a caffeine wave from a nearby Starbucks, was eager to bond with his new hire. Ellis was about to become Alaska’s most important player—the one expected to set a standard of hard work and competitiveness for his teammates to follow, and to lead the team in most statistical categories from the moment he stepped on the court for his first practice. Cone was determined to start off on the right foot with Ellis, even if it meant waylaying the woozy player at the tail end of a twenty-four-hour transcontinental slog.

  While Ellis unpacked, Cone brought him up to speed on the Aces’ team dynamic. Alaska lacked a true point guard and played the same triangle offense that NBA coaches Tex Winter and Phil Jackson used as the engine for nine championships with the Bulls and Lakers. Ellis, who knew he needed to win his new coach’s trust, patiently endured Cone’s description of the role the coach envisioned for him. Cone was particularly excited about the possibility of using Ellis, an adept ballhandler, as an occasional point-forward to plug the aforementioned absence of a lead guard.

  Ellis wasn’t a rookie import—in fact, he’d played four seasons in the PBA from 2001 to 2004—so he knew that developing a rapport with his coach could mean the difference between staying on the team for a whole season and being replaced by another import. And, at Ellis’s salary of around $20,000 per month, the longer he lasted with Alaska, the more money he would earn. Not to mention it was worth losing a bit of sleep if it helped him and Cone achieve the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that could lead to a title. Still, by the time Ellis finally went to bed, it was almost three in the morning and he was due at his first practice by seven. It was going to be a rough day.

  Even after a full night’s sleep, I was dragging when I walked into the gym the next morning. The journey from my town house in Quezon City had taken an hour and a half, most of which was spent packed inside a train so crowded that it forced its passengers into a sort of low-grade hyperventilation. There wasn’t enough space in the car to take a deep breath and expand one’s rib cage, so instead everyone stood around panting like dogs. I felt fortunate to be a head taller than my fellow straphangers. The passengers around me, especially the guys with their heads nestled in my armpits, weren’t so lucky. The trip sounds revolting, but I fancied the hardcore commuting aspect of Manila’s train system. I always figured that the six years I spent riding New York’s subway during middle and high school had prepared me for anything in the world of light rail, and this was the ultimate test.

  PBA teams scheduled practices in the early morning to avoid Manila’s debilitating midday heat, but in March, the beginning of Southeast Asia’s blistering summer, trying to plan around the temperature was wishful thinking. Well before noon, the tropical air was sticky with the city’s humid, particulate miasma, which was known to sometimes leave people sneezing soot at day’s end. That morning, instead of reflecting off the gymnasium’s sheet-metal roof, the sun beamed through the high windows and the temperature inside climbed to triple digits.

  Alaska’s owners had agreed to let me write a chronicle of the team during the 2007 Fiesta Conference. For the next four and a half months, I would spend nearly every day with Alaska’s players and coaches, observing practice, occasionally stepping in as an auxiliary passer in drills, and sitting behind the bench at games. But before all that could happen, I had to survive my first three-hour practice without collapsing in a puddle of sweat. Shortly after I took a seat on the benches next to the court, Alaska’s players shuffled into this hardwood sauna, looking drowsy and dragging large red shoulder bags bearing the Aces logo, a big, stylized A with a basketball peeking out from behind. About six weeks before Ellis joined the team, the Aces lost in the first round of the All-Filipino conference playoffs.5 Since then, the players had settled into a tedious practice routine, but when they stepped onto the floor and caught a glimpse of their new import shooting at the far end of the court, the sleepwalking athletes were jarred into alertness.

  Ellis, a six-foot-five, 230-pound human muscle gleaming with sweat, was launching casual jumpers from the right side of the court. Outfitted in Alaska’s red and white reversible practice uniform, his upper body displayed the kind of definition usually seen in comic books. His shoulder muscles were heaped on top of each other like boulders, and the ropy veins in his arms demanded as much attention as the tattoos spread across his upper body. Ellis wore his hair in a two-inch puff—the embryonic stage of an Afro or braids—with a red headband under his hairline. His Filipino teammates watched intently as the thirty-two-year-old forward worked out. They weren’t just sizing up their new teammate. They were calculating their own chances for a successful season.

  This wasn’t the most promising first impression. Ellis was the walking antithesis to the hoops adage that all left-handers possessed textbook shooting form and a sweet stroke. His unconventional shot was riddled with the kind of wasted movements that make coaches cringe. Ellis’s shot began normally, with his feet square to the basket and his shooting elbow straight under the ball. From there things got loopy. Once Ellis was airborne, his left elbow jerked out to the side; with the ball still cocked in his hands, he turned his wrist and rotated the ball about ninety degrees to the left before releasing it. When the shot ricocheted off the rim with a harsh thud, the players winced, but they kept watching. Maybe it was a slip. Ellis shot over and over with similar results. It was the basketball equivalent of a knuckleball. Without the slow, even backspin of a proper jumper, his shot spun in a different direction every time he launched it. It always reached the rim, but after that there was no telling where it might bounce.

  Ellis missed a steady stream of eighteen-footers. The ball struck the near side of the rim—clang! The next one banged off the backboard to the rim and hit the floor. With each shot, the ball boy tasked to chase down Ellis’s rebounds had to scramble to a different corner of the gym, and before long he was winded and sweating harder than Ellis. Watching Ellis hurl his barrage of broken shots, I suspected that Alaska was in f
or a difficult season, but when I asked what they thought, Alaska’s players and coaching staff said they saw things differently. The fact that Ellis dragged himself out of bed early enough to be first at practice impressed them. His character meant more than his shooting touch. It was a wonder that Ellis’s travels hadn’t sapped his strength; under the circumstances, he could be forgiven for the lack of precision in his outside shot. On top of that, many Alaska veterans had played with and against Ellis during his earlier tours in the PBA. They knew what kind of player he was—that he used athleticism and cleverness, rather than a finely tuned offensive skill set, to dominate games. Before Ellis arrived, the biggest question in their minds was: “Would he be in shape?” One look at his physique convinced the Aces that their import was ready to run.

  Cone agreed. “He’s got a lot of negatives to his game,” he told me before practice. “He can’t shoot. He can’t make free throws.” But those weren’t the skills the Aces were looking for in an import. “Generally, the guys we get are right at the cusp of making the NBA,” Cone explained. “These guys are as good as any athlete in the NBA, but they’ve got character issues. Coaches just won’t touch them in the States. Or we get the guys that don’t really have the skills, but have the great character. It’s rare you get a guy who’s got good skills and good character, because usually those guys are in the NBA.

  “You’d be surprised about a lot of imports. They come in and they don’t want to practice, or they’ll play a game one night and want the next two nights off. They’ll sit on the sidelines with a little ache or pain. You’ll never, ever see that with Rosell. He’s a workhorse. He just takes everything up to another level. He’s gonna bring so much to the game in terms of rebounding, getting out on the floor, hustling for loose balls, and the ability to play as a teammate.”