The oldest book Cueto gave me was a 1911 Athletic Handbook for the Philippine Public Schools distributed by the Bureau of Education. The book contained descriptions of about fifty activities that could be taught in gym classes. Basketball received no special attention; it occupied just a page with the heading BASKETBALL FOR GIRLS and a description of how to modify the rules to make the game easier for female players. Longer sections were devoted to baseball and volleyball, while basketball’s word count seemed to place it in league with some of the handbook’s more offbeat suggestions, like wand wrestling, a competition in which two boys sat facing one another with the soles of their feet touching while they grasped opposite ends of a stick and tried to wrench it away from the other.
Two postcard-size black and white reproductions of photographs of the girls basketball exhibition at the 1911 Carnival Meet, an interscholastic field day event, were printed in the back of the handbook. Elwood S. Brown, the athletic director of the Manila YMCA and a physical education true believer who lobbied the American colonial government to build playgrounds in Manila schools, took the photos. In the top photograph, six girls from the Philippine Normal School stared blankly into Brown’s lens. Their baggy V-neck jerseys all had a large letter N printed on the front, with three girls standing behind their teammates, who sat cross-legged in the foreground, the girl in the center holding an old, brownish leather ball. Below that a second photo showed these girls playing against the ladies of Tondo Intermediate School. The girls were pictured running in transition, with their billowing white skirts trailing behind them to reveal black stockings underneath.8 The court was just a grass field with a hoop at each end. The backboards were constructed from planks of wood and the rims were actual baskets, which seemed appropriate since the Carnival Meet took place just twenty years after James Naismith invented the sport and used peach baskets for goals. It was hard to imagine how those expressionless girls chasing each other through the grass in ankle length skirts evolved into the bruising, flamboyant stars of the PBA. There was one noticeable similarity between Philippine basketball in its embryonic stage and its fully developed form: Even in 1911 the sport could draw a crowd. In Brown’s photo, the bleachers next to the field were packed with onlookers, just like the stands at Araneta Coliseum would be teeming with fans when I watched Alaska play against crowd-favorite Ginebra.
With the support of Manila’s Catholic colleges, it didn’t take long for basketball to grow from a curiosity to a national pastime. Catholic educators shared the colonial government’s zeal for teaching values through sport and formed a Philippine NCAA in 1924. The schools built gyms and hired American coaches, who taught players the skills of early twentieth century basketball—set shots, layups, chest and bounce passes, and defensive slides. Basketball didn’t dominate the sports landscape back then like it does today; baseball was also popular. But because college hoops was played indoors, it thrived as a spectator sport. Almost every day in the Philippines is either stifling hot and humid or wetter than Noah’s flood. Neither was ideal for watching nine-inning baseball games. Instead, fans packed themselves and all their school spirit into gymnasiums to watch basketball, and the sport became the preferred pastime of Manila’s wealthy, college-educated elite. Along with that social caché came headlines and attention, and that popularity attracted more young athletes to the sport.
In 1933 the news magazine Philippine Graphic published an account of basketball’s burgeoning popularity. The author was Ambrosio Padilla, who had been a high-scoring forward at Ateneo and would soon be named captain of the Philippine national team. Padilla became the country’s first real basketball star; he also went on to earn a law degree from the University of the Philippines and eventually spent time as a senator, solicitor general, and a vice president of FIBA, the governing body for international basketball. His article was another document I never would have found without the librarian. There was no trace of it in the archive’s electronic database, and Cueto simply slid it onto the table while I leafed through a bound volume of Philippines Free Press issues from the forties. “You should look at this,” she said, “but you can’t touch the pages.” She handled the brittle, seventy-five-year-old newsprint like it might crumble between her fingers. The deteriorating corners of some pages looked like they’d been nibbled off by mice. She held the pages between her fingernails and turned them delicately so I could read Ambrosio’s antiquated prose:If you want to know where little Pedro is at the sizzling hour of two in the afternoon, amble to the nearest basketball court and there you will find him judiciously throwing a bouncing ball into a hoop. The ambition of every healthy boy now is to be a basketball player. His hero is no longer the baseballer but the basketballer.
The hammy writing had the ring of newsreel patter, but the image of a Filipino youth standing beneath a rim and slinging two-handed shots over his shoulder because he wasn’t quite grown enough to shoot a proper shot resonated with me. I felt like I’d already seen hundreds of iterations of it: at the covered cement court in my neighborhood, on dirt courts throughout the countryside, where the backboard was nothing more than a couple sheets of plywood nailed to a coconut tree, and now in the fragile pages of history. The kids I saw in 2007 weren’t much different from Padilla’s “little Pedro.” Philippine basketball’s roots ran that deep.
Padilla, as a member of the national team, was a biased commentator. For many Filipinos, baseball wasn’t the afterthought Padilla portrayed it as, and throughout the American occupation of the islands, the United States promoted baseball more vigorously than basketball. In 1910, Governor General Cameron Forbes sponsored a nationwide baseball tournament and promised the winning team in each provincial division a set of new uniforms. By the twenties there were more than 1,500 of these school teams. The emphasis that American governors placed on baseball reflected the sport’s importance in the pre-WWII United States. Those were the halcyon days of America’s national pastime, with players like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams rewriting the record books. Basketball, which had only been around since 1891, was still mired in the era of half-court weaves and 19-18 final scores, with innovations like the twenty-four-second shot clock, slam dunk, and three-pointer still decades in the making.
One undeniable factor in basketball’s successful conquest of Filipinos’ hearts and minds was accessibility. The sport required fewer players, less space, and less equipment than baseball. More of the playgrounds built in Manila contained full-courts than baseball diamonds. And, as I had already seen all over Manila, people didn’t need to live near a public court to play basketball; they simply built their own hoops. But there had to be something deeper, some cause behind Filipinos’ emotional bond with basketball. I didn’t understand yet where that affinity came from, but I knew I felt it too. I had been a decent Little League pitcher—a lefty—and I had even thrown a no-hitter in a playoff game. I wasn’t a serious prospect, but you could have made the argument at the time I quit baseball, at age thirteen, that I was more talented with a bat and a glove than I was with a basketball. It didn’t matter. I knew by then that my heart was with hoops.
The early years of basketball history coincided with a golden age in Philippine hoops, at least in terms of international competition. Because the United States had introduced basketball to the islands at such an early point in the sport’s history, Filipinos learned to play before the rest of the world. The Philippine national team was fine-tuning its game while players in other countries were still studying the rulebook. Filipino teams used their head start to become one of the most successful countries in early international tournaments. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the first games to include basketball as a medal event, a Philippine team captained by Padilla beat every team it faced except for the United States. A scheduling quirk, however, kept the team from earning a medal. The Philippines won their first two games against Mexico and Estonia, but their loss to the Americans in the next game bounced them into a consolation bracket. They ended the tourname
nt with wins over Italy and Uruguay and having defeated bronze medalist Mexico in their opening match, but finished in a disappointing fifth place.9 Still, the team’s strong performance meant that the Philippines was among international basketball’s elite.
As the Philippine team was showing that it could hold its own against the world’s best, it was also proving itself the cream of Asian basketball. Padilla’s Olympic squad cruised to championships in the 1930 and 1934 Far Eastern Games, a precursor to today’s Asian Games. In fact, the Philippines won nine of the first ten Far Eastern Games basketball titles. These achievements coincided with an emerging sense of Filipino nationalism and the desire for true self-rule. Just two years before the Philippines’ strong Olympic showing, the United States passed the Philippine Independence Act, putting the islands on a ten-year track to full-fledged sovereignty for the first time since 1565, when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi established the first Spanish settlement in Cebu. In the years before the Second World War, Filipinos searched for unifying forces that could forge a national identity out of the scattershot archipelago populated by dozens of regional ethnic groups who spoke disparate languages and followed a mishmash of Christian, Muslim, and animist faiths. Most of their shared experiences came from being under the dominion of Spain and the United States. Catholicism, brought by Spain, was the most common religion. Americans made English the language of instruction in public schools, and it remains an official language, although Filipino, a tongue based on the Manila region’s Tagalog language, is more widely spoken. Basketball was also introduced by a colonial power, but Filipinos seemed to embrace it as their own, and as their national team dominated Asian tournaments and delivered gutsy performances on the world stage, basketball became a major source of Philippine pride and a binding agent for the whole archipelago.
I found an account of the country’s crowning achievement in international competition during one of my last visits to the American Historical Collection, the same morning that a typhoon arrived in Manila. The storm was merely sideswiping the city while slicing toward the northern Philippines and Taiwan, but even this glancing blow caused enough mayhem to shut the college down. The rain was intermittent that day, but powerful gusts of wind had knocked down trees and sent palm branches swirling through the air. The normally bustling campus had turned desolate, and I tiptoed around the floral detritus and minimudslides along the flooded walkways leading to the library. I worried that the building would be closed, but since I had already decided to brave the storm, I felt honor bound to complete the trek. I lucked out. Thanks to a few librarians—probably those who received late notification of the closing and continued to work out of the same stubborn fatefulness that carried me through the storm—Rizal was the only open building on campus.
The librarians were in, but the lights were out. The tempest had knocked out the building’s electricity, which made my solo trek between dark, looming bookshelves and up a pitch-black stairway seem even more like a last-man-on-Earth zombie film. But when I arrived at the American archive, Cueto was there and she had set up a table with two lit candles and a volume of Philippines Free Press from 1956. I found an article about Caloy Loyzaga, a six-foot-four center of partially Spanish descent who is still considered the best player in Philippine history. Loyzaga led the Philippine team to a bronze medal at the 1954 basketball world championship in Brazil, the hoops version of the World Cup. It is still the best finish of any Asian team in an international hoops competition, and a moment that brought Philippine pride in basketball to its pinnacle while solidifying the sport’s monolithic role in society.
Reading by candlelight, with some additional help from my cell phone’s built-in flashlight, I imagined Loyzaga. Although he was the team’s big man, he was remembered as the best defender, scorer, ballhandler, and playmaker of his era, and his well-rounded skills earned him a majestic nickname: the Great Difference. The article included Loyzaga’s recollection of the 1954 triumph, which alluded to the young nation’s identity crisis. Although Loyzaga felt Filipinos unite behind the national team, he remained aware of the Philippines’ persistent class, ethnic, and regional divisions:My most unforgettable experience occurred in 1954 upon our return from the World Cage Tournament in Brazil, where we placed number three. We were lionized at the airport and given a rousing welcome which I will never forget to my dying day. In this connection my only gripe is that whenever I play for the national team, I am hailed as a full-blooded Filipino. But when I play for other teams, I am sneered at as a mestizo.
As I flipped through these volumes under the candle’s warm glow, I came across dozens of tangential and offhand references to basketball. Gossip columns tallied the socialites and government ministers who were spotted courtside at NCAA jousts. I unearthed a two-hundred-word brief recounting a visit from Taylor University’s basketball team. Players from the Indiana evangelical college sang Gospel tunes with an accordion accompaniment before exhibition games during a 1955 Philippine tour. I felt pangs of postcolonial guilt while looking at print ads featuring drawings of rosy-cheeked, wavy-haired white boys playing hoops, but hand-wringing aside, I was astounded by the variety of businesses that channeled their sales pitches through basketball. The nonslip, rubber-soled sneakers were obvious, but basketball was featured just as prominently in ads for products with weaker connections to the sport. Sloan’s Balm ran images of a painter and a baller atop a slogan promoting a good rubdown. A 7UP ad contained the following copy: “So pure, so good, so wholesome for everyone! That’s why Seven-Up is the favorite ‘Fresh-Up’ drink of basketball players.” The same way I saw hoops reflected practically everywhere in Manila’s street life, I found the sport embedded in publications stretching back almost eighty years. The basketball Nirvana of my imagination was turning out to be a reality.
Aside from Cueto’s lesson in teamwork, the time I spent bunkered in the library gave me a skeletal view of the history of Philippine basketball. To put some meat on those bones, I tried to reach some of the game’s sage old-timers. An obvious first stop, because of my connection with Alaska, was Kurt Bachmann, whose son Dickie played for Alaska in the nineties and remained with the team as an assistant coach. When I asked Dickie to introduce me to his father, he laughed. “Set aside a full day,” he said, “because he’s not going to stop talking.”
Kurt Bachmann was one of Caloy Loyzaga’s contemporaries and also a former Olympian. He joined the national team a few years after the 1954 bronze medal and played in the 1960 games. Bachmann’s father was German, but his mother was Filipina and he was raised in Manila. At six-foot-five, he was one of the tallest players of his generation and a star in the Manila Industrial and Commercial Athletic Association (MICAA) during the sixties. Back then, he was known as Mr. Hook Shot, a nickname that spares me the work of describing his offensive arsenal. At the end of his playing career, Bachmann parlayed the business and political connections he’d made into a successful career in selling imported goods. By the time I met him, he was the president and CEO of Mantrade Development Corporation, named for a transportation hub in the southern area of Metro Manila. Under the Mantrade umbrella, Bachmann owned a Nissan dealership, the local rights to distribute And 1 sneakers and apparel, and a host of other consumer items.
I took the train down to Bachmann’s Nissan storefront one morning when Alaska had an off day. When I arrived, Bachmann was seated at a table in the corner overlooking the deadlocked traffic on Chino Roces Avenue. His assistant had two piles of checks, outgoing and incoming, and he was pushing them one by one across the table for Bachmann to sign or endorse. As I walked toward the table, Bachmann stood to greet me. He wore dark slacks and a sky blue barong tagalog, a short-sleeve dress shirt embroidered with tiny floral patterns. He used his arms to pull each of his long legs from under the table, then unfolded them as he rose to his full height. Seventy-plus years had put a hunch in his back and shaved an inch or two off his standing height, but Bachmann was still about six-foot-four and had giraffe legs, with hips that
reached as high as my sternum. He had a grayish complexion and loose, heavy jowls hanging below large, mischievous eyes.
“Hoy! Puta! Get him Coke Zero!” Bachmann barked at one of his employees, who returned moments later with a soda can and a glass of ice. Bachmann’s crotchetiness evoked some of Walter Matthau’s better moments. He greeted everyone with a curse, often in Spanish. Between that first Coke Zero and lunch, I heard “Puta!” and “Coño!” at least a dozen times, as well as several outbursts of the Spanish-Tagalog hybrid “Putang ina!” (meaning, more or less, “son of a bitch”) and an occasional “Fuck!” While I’m sure that Bachmann had offended and startled his share of people with his gruff manner, nobody in the dealership seemed upset when he called them “son of a whore,” or some near multilingual equivalent. For Bachmann, “shithead” truly seemed to be a term of endearment. It reminded me of the private vernacular I’d developed with my father, where his decades tending bar at McSorley’s have inspired a slew of esoteric slurs—“bunghead,” “knobber,” “scummer,” and “skel” to name a few—that have become common adornments in our conversations.
I noticed an odd, tender kind of symbiosis between Bachmann and his assistant, Angel de Leon. Throughout our interview, de Leon would prod Bachmann to recount the proudest moments of his career while beaming with admiration. When the boss flung insults and epithets at his employees in ways that wouldn’t be hard to mistake for verbal abuse, the soft-spoken de Leon smiled warmly at the subordinates, soothing their frayed nerves with a gentle touch on the back of the hand or a moment of eye contact and a shrug to remind them it was all part of Bachmann’s bombast. Despite his immense frame and put-on fury, Bachmann was becoming weak. After decades of smoking, he had developed emphysema. His tirades were punctuated by wet, guttural coughs and violent gurgling, and it was de Leon, prim and fey with his black pompadour and pencil-thin mustache, who rushed to Bachmann’s side and whacked him on the back to clear the mucus from his lungs and airway. “It’s okay, boss,” de Leon would say. “It’s okay.”
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