Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Since starting his overseas career in Argentina in 1998, Rosell Ellis had built a reputation as one of the most versatile and selfless imports on the market. He had earned nicknames like “Mr. Everything” and banked enough money to make himself a millionaire a couple times over, with a handful of luxury cars and snazzy motorcycles sitting in his Seattle garage. But despite Ellis’s success in international basketball, his career had always felt like a bit of a letdown. Like Cone says, no player chooses the PBA over the NBA.

  For many players, signing a deal with an international team means giving up their NBA aspirations. Players who can’t shake the NBA ambition toil in domestic minor leagues like the CBA and NBDL, while those who accept the fact that they’ll probably never play for the Lakers or Celtics become journeymen—literally. The ones who can deal with culture shock, bouts of loneliness, and Shaquille O’Neal-sized communications barriers become imports for international teams, where the pay is better and they can be franchise players. Occasionally, an NBA veteran who’s been out of the league for a year or two will wash up on Philippine shores, hoping to play his way into shape and enjoy a paid vacation before making one last run at an NBA line-up. The most recent pedigreed pro to take a walk of shame along the Pacific Rim was Darvin Ham, last seen in the 2005 Finals with the Detroit Pistons. He joined a PBA team for three games in January 2006. Cedric Ceballos, who won the NBA’s slam dunk competition in 1992, endured a short PBA stint in 2003. Dickey Simpkins and Scott Burrell, who played for the Bulls’ championship squads in the nineties, are also members of the NBA-to-PBA fraternity.

  Because basketball strategy in the Philippines was unconventional, a player like Ellis, who might seem small-time compared to these former big leaguers, could outperform his more celebrated colleagues on the court. And Cone seemed quite pleased with his choice of an unconventional import. Watching his highest paid player botch shot after shot, he just smiled and folded his arms in front of his chest. “Right now, I’m stress free,” he mused. “I was able to get the guy I wanted.”

  “Let’s go! Four lines!” Cone barked, and the players assembled on the baseline in groups of four. Cone’s four-lines drill served as an extended warm-up that let his players find their shooting touch before they moved into full-speed scrimmages. Aside from helping the team break a sweat, the drill also reinforced the foundations of Cone’s triangle offense. The triangle relied on options and choices rather than set plays. Instead of dribbling the ball downcourt and calling a play designed to set up the shooting guard by having him run his defender off staggered screens set by the big men, Alaska’s players learned a pattern of movements organized around three offensive players at a time. They don’t know what they’re going to do until they “read” how the defense is playing them. Playing the triangle well depended on split-second decision-making in which the players watched their defenders’ reactions and moved to counter them.

  Ellis was teamed with other starters Willie Miller, Jeffrey Cariaso and Nic Belasco, while six-foot-seven center Sonny Thoss waited near the far basket. As the players darted up and down the court, Cone called out instructions. “One down!” he bellowed, and Cariaso and Belasco ran in opposite directions off Thoss’s screen in the post. The play ended with Ellis dashing toward the basket on the weak side and Thoss shoveling him the ball for a feral two-handed dunk. “Blind pig!” Cone shouted, and the players scrambled into a new series of cuts that ended with Cariaso curling around a screen in the post, catching a pass near the foul line, and draining a pull-up jumper. “Dribble entry! Two-front! Power out!” Cone called out, and each time the players would begin in four lines, then zigzag off to different spots on the floor to execute the play.

  Ellis was earning twice as much as his highest-paid teammates, but he threw himself into drills with the enthusiasm of a walk-on desperate to be selected for the last spot on the bench. While Alaska’s locals trotted to their spots, Ellis was four or five steps ahead of them, charging forward in a full sprint and leaving trails of sweat in his wake. Every time he received the ball within five feet of the basket, he planted his right foot in front of him and pushed into midair, then cocked the ball with both hands behind his head before banging it through the rim. Still, because this was his first practice and his first time running the triangle in years, he was usually out of position. Sometimes he played catch-up, watching where his teammates were headed and then filling the remaining open area of the floor by process of elimination.

  At one point Ellis cut across the baseline too early and crashed into Cariaso, who was streaking in from the wing. Later, Ellis received the ball in the corner and kicked it to Miller at the top, except Miller had already dashed into the lane and the ball sailed into the bleachers. After these initial gaffes, Ellis came up with a new strategy: when in doubt, dunk. But he also strived to learn the offense. After each mistake, he consulted team captain Cariaso, who started running the triangle when he joined Alaska as a rookie in 1995. Ellis rested one hand around Cariaso’s shoulder and jabbed a finger into Cariaso’s palm, tracing hypothetical cuts and screens. “Don’t beat up on yourself,” Cariaso told him. “We’ve been running this for years and we’re always making mistakes.”

  The four-lines drill embedded the triangle’s basic movements in the players’ minds, so that during games they would read defenses automatically instead of worrying about where they were supposed to run next. In fact, when the offense really got rolling, the players didn’t even think about what to do next. They just reacted. Their decisions to pass, drive, or shoot were made on a level beneath conscious thought. The result was a fast-moving offense that appeared artful and creative because of the players’ responses to situations on the floor, but such deep understanding of the triangle could only be attained through endless repetition. And indeed, after running through fifteen or twenty minor variations of the offense in a half hour, the players could probably run the offense blindfolded.

  Cone taught himself the triangle in the same rote manner. The coach moved to the Philippines from Oregon when he was nine years old. His father was a reforestation expert who came to the country to work in logging. The Philippines introduced Cone to basketball; in his American childhood, he only played football and baseball. He first fell in love with hoops while playing in flip-flops on a provincial dirt court that had a massive coconut tree at halfcourt. He earned the Alaska coaching position on a dare, while watching one of the team’s games in the late eighties with Wifred Steven Uytengsu Jr., whose family owned the Alaska Milk Corporation. Cone opined that he could do a better job coaching the team, and Uytengsu called his bluff, inserting him as coach in 1989.

  In those early years, Cone groped for his coaching identity. He found it in the early nineties Chicago Bulls teams. Back then NBA games weren’t televised regularly in the Philippines, so Cone had to buy a pair of enormous bunny-ear antennae to intercept broadcasts from the U.S. military bases north of Manila. He taped grainy Bulls games and watched them over and over, charting the team’s offensive patterns in his mind and then on paper. He didn’t even know that the offense had a name. Cone just knew that he wanted it for Alaska. I could see the sleepless nights he spent rewinding and replaying footage of Jordan, Pippen, Bill Cartwright, and Horace Grant in the purple half-moons under the coach’s eyes. Deep inside, I hoped the Philippines could inspire another young American to similar feats of hoops devotion. Of course, that American was me.

  Just from watching the team run four lines, I was feeling ready to step in and run a few blind pigs myself. In fact, there were moments during that practice and every subsequent one when I yearned to be out of street clothes, in shorts and on the court. Part of me was curious to see how I’d fare against the Aces. I had already played with Nic Belasco and Alaska’s injured point guard Mike Cortez in off-season pickup games, but I still had no proof that I could hang with the pros when it counted. Here’s my honest projection of how my imaginary Filipino doppelganger would stack up in the PBA: I had the size and tenacity and co
urt awareness to be a nice complementary piece. I might have been a role player, a seventh man, a glue-guy type who could bother the other team’s scorers and make some nice passes. I never would have been a star. The league’s best talents were flashy guards like Miller, who could have been undersized stars at mid-major NCAA Division One schools.6 The rest of the league was mostly Division Two quality, and in that kind of mixed company, I could blend in and help a team. Proving myself or being able to brag half truths about playing with pros, however, weren’t why I pined to join the Aces during practice. It was just that I had never been around basketball so often without playing. No matter how much I learned from watching Cone conduct the offense, I preferred the sweaty realities of hoops: elbows, bruises, gasping for breath, fighting for offensive rebounds, passing the ball out for a teammate’s three, and watching it splash through the hoop.

  A few ticks before 10:00 a.m. the temperature inside the gym had passed sweltering and was headed to scorching. The players dragged themselves through the heavy air and frequently checked the wall clock hanging above the doorway. I managed to sweat through my shirt just by sitting and scribbling in my notebook. The last of the bananas and apple slices that Alaska’s trainers brought to practice had been devoured more than an hour ago, and now only browning peels, Tupperware bins, and empty Gatorade bottles were left roasting on the sideline.

  Finally, Cone blew an extended note on his whistle, signaling that practice had ended. The entire team walked toward center court, first clapping together slowly like a steady heartbeat and then speeding up to a frantic pace. At halfcourt, they bowed their heads and held their hands behind their backs. Poch Juinio, a veteran big man, gently put his arm around the waist of fellow forward John Ferriols. Cariaso bent over, held his knees and said a team prayer, while Ellis dropped to one knee and nestled his forehead in his outstretched palm. “Thank you, Lord, for waking us up this morning,” Cariaso began, then continued to ask for divine guidance through the upcoming season and protection from injury. He promised that the team would give its all on the court and remain grateful for their charmed lives, whether they won or lost. “Amen,” they said in unison, and as the huddle broke, Poch slipped his hand down below Ferriols’s ass and goosed him. Ferriols jumped and took a swipe at Juinio’s nipple. He missed, squeezing nothing but sweat molecules and putrid midday air. But the season was young, and Ferriols would have plenty more opportunities to seek revenge. As a matter of fact, Alaska’s next practice was scheduled to begin a few hours later, at three that afternoon.

  3

  A Career Reborn

  Having adjusted somewhat to the staccato rhythm of Manila life, I was eager to get Ellis’s take on the expat experience, but for the first few days team practice took up most of his time. He did, however, find a moment to instruct me and everyone else on the team to call him “Roe.” Later that week I finally got to know him better, when Roe invited me to see the apartment the team had rented for him.

  Since moving to Manila, I’d often bragged to friends in the states that my shared town house was nicer than any apartment I’d lived in since college, but Roe’s pad in Makati City put my digs to shame. Makati is Metro Manila’s business center and richest municipality. Ayala Avenue, Makati’s main drag, feels like a steamier version of Chicago’s Miracle Mile with its spotless malls and skyscrapers. Many expatriates live and work in the neighborhood, and the area allows them to avoid the more squalid realities of the teeming, third-world megacity. By no stretch of the imagination could my neighborhood be called a slum, but it offered the more typical Philippine patchwork of privilege and destitution. In Loyola Heights, gated subdivisions sat side by side with labyrinthine shantytowns, and when I glanced out my back window I could see into a neighbor’s yard full of fighting cocks. In contrast, Roe’s apartment came with daily cleaning and laundry services, air-conditioning in every room and a home entertainment system that could be a showcase item on The Price Is Right. Sitting pretty on top of a white leather couch, watching muted CNN on the flat screen, and listening to Marvin Gaye classics, Roe seemed right at home. He sunk into a leather cushion, rested a foot on the coffee table, and began to unravel the basketball wisdom he had accumulated in his ten-year career as an import.

  As Roe saw it, being the most talented player wasn’t all that important in international ball. Versatility was what really mattered, and throughout his career, his ability to succeed in vastly different on-court situations had served him better than a picture-perfect jump shot ever could. Most teams already had a dead-eye shooter and a go-to scorer among their local talents. Instead, foreign teams needed a guy who was strong enough to wrestle with inside players and fast enough to stay in front of guards; they needed a guy who could post up in the lane as well as face up on the perimeter. They needed a guy who was comfortable handling the ball, who could see the court and pass to streaking teammates for open shots.

  According to Roe, if you could be that kind of player, you’d always have a job. But that job might take you to some pretty far-flung places. Roe had played in Venezuela, Argentina, China, Indonesia, and Australia. He’d put up with some pretty shoddy playing conditions. The courts in Chinese gyms looked pristine, but the franchises neglected their playing surfaces—like a “Made in China” knockoff purse that looks fabulous until the zippers fall off. The floors felt more like ice-skating rinks than parquet, and you could forget about sudden stops or turns. Roe, playing at full-tilt, was wiping out all over the court, but he wasn’t at a competitive disadvantage because the other players were also skidding to and fro.

  Argentine hardwood was similarly afflicted, but ingenious team managers there came up with a solution. Hours before each game, ball-boys poured Coca-Cola onto the playing floor. By game time the soda would be dry and sap sticky, causing a different set of traction problems for players to endure. Alas, soft drinks were powerless against the other major problem with Argentina’s courts—dead spots. Roe knew the spots to avoid on his team’s home court, but on the road, scouring the floor for cracks and stomping up and down the court to listen for the hollow thud of warped wood became a vital part of his pregame routine. The space above players’ heads was equally perilous. In some drafty Argentine gyms players dodged fluttering insects and swooping bats.7 There were times Roe started a drive to the hoop and was stopped dead in his tracks, not by his defender but by a bat diving to snatch a bug.

  And then there were the Argentine fans. Even though Argentina won a gold medal in basketball in the 2004 Olympics and they’ve sent players like Manu Ginobili and Andres Nocioni to the NBA, Argentina remains a soccer country at heart, and basketball fans there bring a bit of futbol-inspired hooliganism to games. It was the only place where Roe, a relentless hustler throughout his career, hesitated to chase loose balls into the crowd. “If you go out of bounds you gonna get up quick,” he said, leaning forward and looking urgently into my eyes. “You don’t wanna lie down too long or you don’t want to get too close to the rail, ’cause they trying to spit on you, grab you, everything. Man, if you fall close to that wall, they are trying to literally kill you.”

  Roe considered Manila one of the best places for an import to ply his trade. In other countries, basketball played second fiddle to soccer, rugby, and even cricket, but the Philippine infatuation with hoops ensured that imports gained instant celebrity status. Still, this time around, Roe didn’t jump at the opportunity to return to the Philippines. He had a competing offer in Venezuela, and although the money there wasn’t as good, he was tempted to accept. The PBA had its drawbacks. The same passion for basketball that made the Philippines an ideal place to play could also lead to headaches. Teams were desperate to succeed and could be irrationally demanding of their imports. The media devoted a lot of attention to professional basketball, and a cameraman catching an import at a nightclub in mid-grind with a half-naked groupie (or even worse, a transvestite) would teach an American player a quick lesson about the dark side of fame. With other options and a fat savin
gs account, Roe wondered if another PBA campaign would be worth the hassle. Eventually, however, the money and his desire to prove that he could still handle the PBA led him to sign with Alaska.

  I understood why Roe would choose the Philippines, but it took me a while to work up to the question I really wanted to ask: How had he wound up playing overseas in the first place? When I finally asked, his answer caught me off guard.

  “You know I choked a ref, right?”

  He spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone that he might use to say: “You know I’m from Seattle, right?” I bolted upright in my seat like someone had jolted me with a cattle prod. “Only half the story,” I bluffed, while somewhere inside my brain the scandal lobe was doing somersaults. “What happened?”

  Roe’s career started out on track. He was a bona fide superstar at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School—the same school that produced NBA guards Doug Christie, Jamal Crawford, and Nate Robinson. Roe was Washington’s state player of the year as a senior in 1993, when he was also named an honorable mention McDonald’s All-American, an accolade that serves as a reliable predictor of NBA potential. But Roe’s career veered off course after high school. He didn’t meet the academic requirements to receive a basketball scholarship from an NCAA Division One university, so he spent two years at the College of Eastern Utah. Junior colleges like Eastern Utah serve as athletic purgatory for classroom underachievers. They give players a second chance at a scholarship, but at the same time claim two of the athletes’ four years of eligibility and tarnish the reputations of once-coveted blue-chip recruits. After toiling at unknown Eastern Utah, Roe moved up to the relative obscurity of McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which competes in the Southland Conference against other no-name schools like Stephen F. Austin University and the University of Texas at Arlington. Even so, he was among the national leaders in field goal percentage, making more than two-thirds of his shots in his senior season. His performance was good enough to win the conference’s player of the year award in 1997, but despite his achievements, he didn’t attract much NBA attention. McNeese State’s basketball program just couldn’t compete with major conference schools like Duke and Kansas University.