Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Another factor in Roe’s low profile among NBA prospects was that he wasn’t the type of player scouts covet. At only six-foot-five, he was a classic ‘tweener, a player whose size and skills left him stuck between positions in the NBA. With his he-man physique and knack for scoring close to the basket, Roe played like a slashing power forward. He was a savvy ballhandler and passer, but his height was closer to that of a shooting guard, and his awkward jump shot ruled out any chance of him playing that position. Roe’s reputation as an undersized forward who might not be able to outleap and overpower the NBA’s seven-foot centers dropped him off most teams’ radars. He was passed over in the 1997 NBA draft.

  Roe wasn’t about to give up on the NBA dream. After college he joined the Des Moines Dragons in the now-defunct minor league International Basketball Association and played his way back to relevance. Midway through the season he was a lightning quick swingman close to fulfilling the NBA potential he showed back in high school. He was averaging 22 points per game and ranked fifth in the league in scoring. In the post, Roe was strong enough to create space against taller players and release an almost automatic baby hook. His perimeter moves weren’t slick, but combined with his powder-keg first step and his battering ram shoulder, they were enough to get into the paint, where he rarely missed. At that point he started attracting the attention of NBA scouts. He was at the height of his basketball powers: capable of beating defenders off the dribble, scoring on powerful dunks or graceful flip shots at the rim, and connecting on occasional long-range bombs.

  Then, on January 17, 1998—a Saturday night in Des Moines—Roe’s NBA aspirations derailed. The Dragons were playing the Wisconsin Blast for the second night in a row. The previous night’s game, which Des Moines won by a close margin, had been hotly contested and very physical. Before the second leg of the back-to-back, referee crew chief Bob Schoewe brought the officials together and told them to call the game closely to keep any lingering tensions from boiling over. “We know it’s gonna be interesting out there,” Schoewe told the other referees. “Let’s keep it under control.”

  Wisconsin took a double-digit lead early in the first quarter. The Dragons’ players blamed the referees. Roe was particularly steamed because Schoewe whistled him twice for fouls in the opening minutes. After Des Moines committed a foul and a Wisconsin player went to the free-throw line, Roe lined up on the block and loudly voiced his grievances to a teammate on the opposite side of the lane. Schoewe was standing under the basket, between the two players. “This is bullshit,” Roe said. “We’re getting fucked.” From the referee’s perspective, Roe wasn’t just discussing the game with a teammate—he was shouting across the key, and his comments were directed at the official.

  “Knock it off or one of you is gonna get hit with a technical foul,” Schoewe warned. After the first free throw, Des Moines called time out. Roe continued. “This is some fucking bullshit, man,” he yelled. “We’re getting jobbed.” Schoewe, true to his word, hit Roe with a technical foul.

  Roe remembered it differently. According to him, the trouble started when the players took their spots on the line and Schoewe began “talking shit” for no reason. “You guys aren’t gonna be shit,” the ref said. “You guys are just gonna be in this league—you won’t make any money. This is all your careers are gonna amount to.” Schoewe, whose twenty-five-year career as a referee included work in NCAA Divisions One, Two, and Three, several semiprofessional leagues, and the NBA during the 1999 lockout-shortened season, said that he had seen the best and that neither Roe nor any of the other players on the court came close.

  Roe couldn’t believe his ears: “I’m standing there, and I’m thinking, damn, did you guys hear this shit? This is the ref. Not the crowd. This is the ref talking shit.” So Roe tried to set Schoewe straight. “Don’t talk to me like that,” he said to him. “I don’t make enough money to sit here and listen to you talk like that.” That’s when Schoewe called the technical foul.

  Schoewe has always denied insulting Roe and the other players. Late that night, after I talked to Roe, I called Schoewe in Minnesota, where he still refereed small college basketball, and he explained that he had no reason to deride the players, since insulting the IBA would insult his own role in it. “Why would I demean where they are?” he asked me. “If you’re working in that league, you’re doing it for the love of the game.”

  Although Roe and Schoewe remember the precipitating events differently, no one disputes what happened next. After the first technical foul, Roe became more aggravated and the Des Moines coach called another time-out to calm his player. It was too late. Roe kept cursing at Schoewe on his way to the bench. The referee decided he’d heard enough and gave Roe a second technical foul, ejecting him from the game. Schoewe turned his back to Roe and walked to the scorer’s table to report the ejection. Roe followed. Roe only planned to get in Schoewe’s face and yell at him, but while he stalked behind Schoewe, a teammate grabbed him in an attempt to defuse the situation. Instead, Roe snapped. He shoved his teammate out of the way, ran to the scorer’s table, leaped on Schoewe’s back and put him in a sleeper hold. After just a few seconds he realized his mistake and released the referee before a mob of teammates, coaches, and security guards dragged him away. Schoewe never saw Roe coming, but he wasn’t hurt as much as bewildered by the attack. The main thought running through the referee’s mind was, What the hell is he going to do now? When Schoewe felt Roe’s grasp loosen, he figured the player must have come to his senses, and just as fast as the attack had started, it ended. Security shepherded Roe into the locker room.

  Afterward, Roe stood in the shower for half an hour, replaying the altercation and pondering the consequences of his attack. The same NBA scouts who had been watching his physical game blossom had just seen his mental game crumble. He made a public apology immediately after the game and Des Moines suspended him indefinitely, with hopes that the scandal would die down and he could eventually return to the team. But Roe’s fate was determined the moment he pounced on Schoewe. Within days footage of him choking the ref was on Sports-Center. The IBA banned him for a year, and his reputation in American basketball was ruined.

  There is no such thing as a good time to strangle a referee, but Roe probably couldn’t have picked a worse one. Less than two months earlier, in December 1997, Latrell Sprewell had beaten Roe to the choke. Sprewell, a standout guard for the Golden State Warriors, tried to strangle then-coach P. J. Carlesimo after a dispute in practice. Sprewell left the gym but returned later to take another swing at Carlesimo. The initial assault on Carlesimo’s windpipe and Sprewell’s premeditated repeat attack—both unprecedented for the NBA—earned the all-star a one-year suspension without pay and stoked public outrage.

  In the basketbrawl canon, Sprewell’s attack rests alongside Kermit Washington’s spinning punch that nearly killed Rudy Tomjanovich in 1977 (Tomjanovich said he thought the scoreboard fell on him), and the 2004 carnage unleashed on Detroit Pistons fans in Auburn Hills, Michigan, when Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson, and other Indiana Pacers bum-rushed a courtside section after an onlooker tossed a cup of beer at Artest. On the heels of Sprewell’s rampage, Roe’s misstep was enough to shatter his chances of reaching the NBA. Being branded a ref-throttling headcase became Roe’s scarlet letter and thrust him into basketball exile.

  How good were Roe’s chances of actually making the NBA? He was never a lock, but Mike Bethea, who coached Roe at Rainier Beach (and whose other players, Jamal Crawford and Nate Robinson, made it to the league), thought he had a shot. Although Roe was a couple inches too short and his jumper was rife with kinks, he played the game with a rare and valuable mind-set: like a madman. Roe’s obsession with winning every contest and besting every challenge was the kind of trait that, found outside of an elite athlete, might qualify him for a personality disorder. On the court, however, it was priceless. His work ethic had become legendary at Rainier Beach, and Bethea still invited him to team practices to spread the gospel of lunch
pail basketball. Roe’s manic competitiveness could lead to steals, offensive rebounds, and extra possessions—the kind of unheralded statistics that add up to wins at all levels of the game. If not for bad timing, Bethea thought Roe’s relentless style of play would have earned him an NBA roster spot.

  After the detonation in Des Moines, Roe became baller non grata in the United States and was forced to look for work abroad. Although it quashed his NBA hopes, his misstep didn’t prevent him from making a living in professional basketball. Depending on his base salary and performance incentives, Roe made between $15,000 and $20,000 per month as an import on foreign teams. He could play in Australia from October to February, then in the Philippines from March to July to almost double his earnings. Although Roe’s intense nature had led to some volcanic tantrums, there didn’t seem to be a coach in the world who wouldn’t choose him over a less fiery import who watched practice from the sideline while scheduling dates for later in the evening.

  Over the years, Roe developed a reputation as one of the most reliable forwards on the world basketball market, a consistent 20-point scorer who played tireless defense and often outworked his local teammates. The image of Roe clinging to a referee’s back with his arms around the official’s neck faded and was replaced by that of one of international basketball’s most energetic hustlers. Occasionally, though, Roe still thought about his actions in 1998 and wondered what could have been. “It was the biggest mistake of my life,” he told me, staring at the bare white wall in his apartment. “If I had never done that to him, there’s no telling where I might be.”

  Roe laid his head back on top of the couch and closed his eyes. I thought of the persistence and determination it must have taken to carry the stigma of his attack on Schoewe while restarting his career. The moment passed and we realized it was already midnight. He walked me to a nearby Starbucks. I left him there and headed toward EDSA, Manila’s perpetually congested—even in the dead of the night—thoroughfare, where I could catch a bus to Quezon City.

  On my way home I looked out the window at the steady procession of McDonald’s franchises, KFCs, and 7-Elevens. Many foreign visitors to the Philippines saw Manila’s ubiquitous chain restaurants as a sign of the country’s extreme Americanization, but there was another side to the city. For every American restaurant, there were a dozen roadside barbecue stalls selling grilled skewers of isaw (pork intestines), helmet (chicken heads), and betamax (cubes of coagulated pork blood that resemble the ancient video format’s tapes). The hard wooden benches of buses were crammed with breast-feeding mothers and construction workers who had washcloths tucked into the backs of their shirts to soak up sweat. This wasn’t a country where one foreign culture simply dominated its native counterpart, but a place where Spanish and American colonial influences mixed with the imprints of Chinese and Malay merchants who had been trading in the Philippines since before the archipelago even existed in the eyes of the West. A dizzying array of ingredients made up the Philippines’ cultural brew, and they blended over time to form something uniquely Filipino.

  Roe, with his swank apartment and team-provided driver, would barely get to see this side of Manila. But on the basketball court he’d encounter a similar mishmash of cultures. Although the PBA was modeled after the NBA, any American who served in the league would tell you that playing here felt vastly different from playing back home. Filipinos have been playing basketball almost as long as Americans have. The game has been the country’s dominant team sport since the 1930s, when most Americans were still more interested in baseball and football. Philippine hoops had developed its own styles and idiosyncrasies, and if an import didn’t adapt to the PBA’s quirks, he’d probably get sent home early—swapped for a more malleable ringer. Roe had endured four seasons in the Philippines, but this time he questioned whether he’d have the patience to make it through another year. Could he earn a full season’s worth of salary and hopefully win a championship without garroting anyone along the way? This time, even he wasn’t sure.

  4

  A Head Start Becomes Destiny

  The PBA was a symptom of the Philippines’ basketball obsession, not the cause. I was thrilled to be witnessing the professional game from inside Alaska’s locker room, but that wasn’t what brought me to Manila in the first place. I was inspired by the idea that a Southeast Asian nation populated by five-foot-five men and mostly forgotten by America except for its political corruption, widespread prostitution, and violent Muslim separatist movement could be devoted to hoops with a passion unequaled by any other country. It was a nationwide tale of unrequited love. Forty million short men obsessed with basketball—they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians. I followed that alluring and, let’s face it, somewhat bizarre fact across the globe. I considered myself an amateur historian-slash-detective, maybe not the most qualified man to discover why basketball became a prime mover in Philippine culture, but the only guy willing to battle tropical cockroaches and fight off a few bouts of hookworm to understand the sport’s grip on the Filipino soul.

  The Alaska Aces and professional basketball are parts of that story, but they are too modern to reveal the roots of basketball’s role in the Philippines, which date back to the dawn of the twentieth century and the beginning of American colonial rule. I spent the months before Alaska’s season buried in the stacks of the American Historical Collection at Ateneo de Manila University’s Rizal Library. Ateneo was a fifteen-minute walk from my house, but since the PBA off-season coincided with the Philippine rainy season—a four-month period between June and September when the weather bebops and scats from relative peace to hurricane bedlam—I typically arrived at the library sopping wet and squished up the stairs to the American collection in waterlogged shoes.

  The library research I knew as a college student tended to be a solitary pursuit—historians scouring card catalogs (or these days, online databases) for potential sources, then pulling volumes from the stacks and sifting through them in their carrels. My research in the Philippines, however, was much more collaborative. This was because the materials at the American Historical Collection were in a perennial state of reorganization, and the existing catalog was incomplete. There was an index of articles and publications related to sports and basketball, but if I had relied solely on that list of documents, I probably would have missed two-thirds of the relevant material.

  I should mention that Ateneo was definitely not starved for resources. The university is one of the Philippines’ most elite private institutions, with an alumni list that includes the names of dozens of past and present leaders of government and business. Yet even at this bastion of the upper class, the library lacked a reliable card catalog. It reminded me of the inconsistencies of wealth in the Philippines; many Ateneo students could afford drivers to take them to school in BMWs, but their riches couldn’t make up for unreliable infrastructure. Despite its minor inefficiencies, however, the American collection was a gold mine of information about the origins of basketball in the Philippines, and the librarian, Waldette Cueto, was brimming with enough institutional knowledge to fill in the catalog’s gaps. When I first sloshed into her domain, I planned to be the solitary historian and wandered toward the drawers filled with index cards. She cut me off midway. “Maybe you should tell me what you’re looking for,” she suggested not too delicately, and I was on my way.

  She took me to the archive’s back room. From the door to the back wall, the room was about the length of a shot from the top of the key. With high ceilings and tall shelves in the middle of the room, every inch of space was occupied by books. Thick, dark green volumes of magazines like Philippine Graphic and the Philippines Free Press that dated back to the 1920s and 1930s lined the outside walls of the room. The shelves in the center housed pamphlets and bound volumes of official documents from the United States colonial government, which ruled the Philippines until the Japanese invasion during World War II. Cueto handed me a stack of books on physical education in the earl
y years of American rule. “Start with this.”

  In 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. Over the next four years, American forces held the islands during the Philippine-American War, a brutal conflict to suppress the Filipino independence movement that fought the Spanish and resisted control by yet another foreign power. The United States justified colonizing the Philippines by touting its desire to civilize the natives, who were supposedly incapable of self-rule. There were, of course, less altruistic motives, like gaining a military and commercial foothold in Asia and providing American industrialists access to commodities like sugarcane and lumber.

  This early American attempt at nation-building included a broad effort to increase access to education for a local population that had been largely excluded from schooling during the three hundred years of Spanish rule. Education was also used to indoctrinate Filipinos with American values, and sports, in particular, were believed to promote discipline and cooperation. The United States developed a comprehensive physical education curriculum for use in public schools throughout the country; in Manila, Americans built recreational facilities like playgrounds and a YMCA. American teachers in the Philippines began using basketball in gym classes in 1910. The sport was introduced as an activity for girls, who were deemed unfit for the more strenuous track and field exercises taught to boys.