Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  One morning I tracked down Emilio “Jun” Bernardino13 and Mauricio “Moying” Martelino at the Century Park Hotel in Pasay City. They were sharing an early lunch of cold, shiny Hainanese chicken before heading to a pair of NCAA games at a nearby stadium. Between the two of them, these elder statesmen of Philippine basketball had held most of the major positions in the sport. Bernardino was serving as the NCAA’s commissioner at the time, but had previously been the PBA commissioner from 1994 to 2002. Martelino had been commissioner of the semipro Philippine Basketball League and the secretary general of the Asian Basketball Federation. Yet for all their combined experience and wisdom, when I asked why soccer had never challenged basketball’s dominance in Philippine sports, they couldn’t muster any answers besides bewildered shrugs and Zenlike koans.

  “Somehow, basketball caught the eye of the Filipino,” Martelino said, turning up his palms in surrender. “Why, for heaven’s sake, even I cannot understand it.”

  Bernardino, with a Buddhalike smile, chimed in: “Filipinos took to basketball like a fish takes to water.”

  I never found a solution to the soccer dilemma. The best explanation doesn’t come in the form of an eloquent quip, but wrapped inside history, where basketball and national identity have become intertwined like strands in the double helix of Philippine DNA and passed down through multiple generations. The lack of a precise answer regarding Filipinos’ devotion to basketball might be the strongest indicator of how deeply embedded it is in their lives. People have always struggled to define their essence, their soul, or whatever one wishes to call it. For Filipinos, basketball is part of that evanescent core. The Filipino novelist and cultural critic Nick Joaquin, in an essay about Spanish influences on Philippine culture, made a similar argument about food:If you tell the Pinoy-on-the-street that adobo and pan de sal are but a thin veneer of Westernization, the removal of which will reveal the “true” Filipino . . . the Pinoy may retort that, as far as he is concerned, adobo and pan de sal are as Filipino as his very own guts; and indeed one could travel the world and nowhere find . . . anything quite like Philippine adobo and pan de sal.

  Basketball, another colonial import, has also become as Filipino as the Pinoy’s guts. By following Alaska through a PBA season, I wouldn’t merely be learning about the overseas game or investigating a quirky professional league, but watching an essential part of the Philippine national character reveal itself through sport.

  5

  From Savior to Lemon, in 48 Minutes

  The next morning I tagged along with Roe to PBA headquarters to watch the league’s technical committee measure his height. The PBA complex was situated on a spacious lot behind two banks in Libis, one of Quezon City’s business enclaves. The league had recently moved from its longtime office next to the Philippine Department of Education, and the new location reminded me of office parks in suburban Illinois. I entered the lobby with Roe and two Alaska team representatives, Tomas “Mang Tom” Urbano,14 the team’s sixty-seven-year-old practice referee and scorekeeper, and Monch Gavieres, the assistant team manager. While Monch and Mang Tom checked in with the receptionist, I inspected the lobby centerpiece, a nearly life-size bronze statue of a player charging to the hoop with a ball cradled in his huge hands and one knee raised almost to his chest. Even though the sculpture bore an odd resemblance to Johnny Carson, I assumed it was meant to be Robert Jaworski, the most famous player in PBA history. A security guard told me it wasn’t Jaworski, but a former Alaska player, five-foot-seven point guard Johnny Abarrientos, the shortest MVP in league history and one of the vital cogs in Alaska’s late nineties dynasty. The statue’s contorted face and rusty color reminded me of Star Wars and Han Solo’s carbonite tomb, especially with regards to Abarrientos and Alaska; the franchise seemed frozen in time since it traded the point guard in 2000. The security guard must have noticed me beholding the statue with a little too much reverence, because he tiptoed next to it and rapped Abarrientos’s leg with his fist. The hollow thud confirmed that the sculpture was not majestic bronze but papier-mâché.

  League officials led us through the broad low-rise compound and down a long, pristine hallway, empty except for photographs of former commissioners and the PBA’s twenty-five greatest players. We turned into a room with bright fluorescent lighting and a crowd of men waiting for us. They were the technical staff, who would measure Roe and certify that his height was below the league’s limit for imports, which was set this season at six-foot-six. Representatives of the other nine teams were also present to make sure that every part of his measurement seemed aboveboard, and also just to size up a rival team’s top player.

  Roe, who came directly from practice and hardly had time to change out of his sweaty uniform, shivered in the air-conditioned room and bent over to remove his socks and sneakers. The crowd of men closed in around him as he unfolded his muscular frame and lay flat on his back against the linoleum floor. If the witnesses from other teams arrived at the measurement hoping that Alaska’s import had come to the country overweight and out of shape, the sight of Roe’s bulging muscles and trim waist surely disappointed them. Two men knelt beside Roe and pressed his knees down to the floor to make sure his joints remained locked and his legs fully extended. Three more league employees pinned his upper body to the ground, one pressing down on each shoulder and another gently holding his forehead against the cold floor. Roe shivered again but didn’t struggle. His demeanor was that of a patient being examined by a team of doctors—quiet acceptance of the unfamiliar people handling his body in unfamiliar ways. Finally, one last PBA worker placed a wooden board flush against the soles of Roe’s feet and hooked a tape measure to the plank. He walked to Roe’s head, squatted, and held the tape to the top of the player’s skull. Roe was exactly six feet, four and five-eighths inches tall, a little more than an inch below the league’s height limit.

  There was something unseemly about a dozen middle-age Filipino men pacing circles around a prone, half-naked black man, then holding him against the floor while studiously recording his physical attributes. The size disparity, with Roe being almost a foot taller and about seventy pounds heavier than his assessors, reminded me of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There was a racial aspect to it, but it didn’t match up to the black-white paradigm that dominated my American frame of reference. The sight of many men surrounding one and holding him down was ominous and primal, like Roe might be sent to the coliseum to wrestle a crocodile after the measurement, but then again everyone seemed comfortable with the proceedings. For Roe, of course, this was nothing new. This was his fifth season in Philippine basketball, and he had submitted to similar examinations before each of those campaigns. Also, for a professional athlete like Roe, there was nothing disconcerting about the notion that his body could be treated like a commodity. It was a fact of life.

  Although he had already been measured by the PBA on several occasions, the league hadn’t always found Roe to be this tall. Before his first season in 2001, he was measured at six-foot-two and a half. Now, at thirty-two years old, Roe certainly hadn’t grown two inches in the years since his original measurement, nor did he undergo any bizarre bone-lengthening procedure. Back then he had simply taken part in the PBA’s long-held tradition of shrinking imports, an act of subterfuge that had been part of the league for as long as teams had been hiring imports.

  The PBA set height limits for foreign reinforcements to offset Filipinos’ paucity in that most elemental trait of basketball players. The tallest full-blooded Filipino in the league, the Santa Lucia Realtors’ Marlou Aquino, crested at six-foot-nine,15 and only a handful of other locals, most of whom were of mixed Caucasian or black ancestry, stood six-foot-seven or taller. Several Filipino “big men” were barely taller than six-three, the standard height for NBA point guards. Many coaches and commentators—Manila’s basketball intelligentsia—remained skeptical of local big men taller than six-foot-five. They considered these players awkward and too slow to keep up with the ma
nic pace of the Philippine game. According to a common saying, any baller over six-five was abnormal. Supposedly, any Filipino that tall was probably a pituitary case more suited for provincial freak shows than the Araneta Coliseum. Yet the league still wanted to create an entertaining product that would attract fans and advertisers, and fans wanted dunks. Slams, however, were so rarely executed by local players that the league had toyed with the idea of making them worth three points.16 Imports were employed to add a dash of high-wire athleticism to PBA games, but the league limited their dominance by banning foreign players over certain heights.

  The rule works. PBA imports have always been a versatile bunch: workhorses like Roe who did a little of everything, pure scorers with velvet smooth inside-outside games, and burly inside operators who bulldozed their way to the hoop. But while the foreigners provided highlights and team leadership, they still left room for the best Filipino players—guards like Alaska’s Willie Miller, who whirled through defenses to score on twisting layups spun off the backboard at every conceivable angle—to do what they do best. In a competitive league, however, setting a height limit created an incentive to cheat. If a team could somehow temporarily shrink its import just before the league measured him, that team would have an advantage over its rivals. In the PBA, as in many Philippine institutions (like provincial municipalities that reported zero crime over the course of a year), the objective reality was often different from the more malleable official reality, data that could be massaged through gamesmanship or bribery.

  PBA teams managed to shave inches off their imports without greasing any palms. Instead, the league permitted a form of unspoken collusion between teams, wherein everyone played the same tricks and usually got away with them. The most effective shrinking technique was also the simplest. Until 2005 the league made imports stand against a wall during measurements. To appear shorter, players would just hunch over and bend their knees. In most cases the players were only an inch or two taller than the limit, so it didn’t take much crouching. All they needed was a slight bend in the neck and a pair of billowing shorts to conceal the crimp in their knees. This is how Roe got down to six-foot-two-and-a-half in 2001, when the ceiling was set at six-foot-four. It was Roe’s first season in the Philippines, and he was worried that he’d come in over height and be sent home before collecting his first paycheck. The idea of pretending to be shorter than his actual height ran contrary to the career-long habit for Roe and most other imports of overestimating height to appeal to NBA scouts. Since college, he had been listed as six-foot-seven. The assistant coach who accompanied him to his 2001 measurement reassured him that he’d make the cut and told him to get as low as possible, within reasonable limits. Roe did precisely that. He backed up against the wall, tucked his head down to the base of his neck and locked his knees. When the PBA’s knee-pushing henchmen arrived and did their darnedest to straighten his legs, Roe held the position and claimed it was his natural posture. Like so many imports who preceded him, this world-class athlete shriveled into the frame of a septuagenarian and shrunk by more than two inches. Behold, the amazing adjustable-height basketball player!

  When I asked Alaska’s players and coaches about the finer points of height manipulation they became giddy, as if this cheating was just one of the league’s lovable peculiarities, the PBA equivalent of a white lie. Nic Belasco, Alaska’s starting power forward and a ten-year PBA veteran, gleefully reenacted the bent-knees, tucked-chin stance for me after practice one afternoon, and when Cone saw Belasco he chortled, “Is he doing the import position? That’s not it!” After the players left, when Cone was less concerned about looking authoritative, he took me into his office and demonstrated the proper form: Belasco’s joints were properly crooked, but he wasn’t leaning against the wall at a severe enough angle. If an import got his legs out in front of him an extra inch or two, he could shrink more.

  The basketball elite’s happy-go-lucky approach to height manipulation reminded me of many Filipinos’ bemused fatalism toward the country’s famously corrupt politicians. They couldn’t stop the cheating, so they just laughed at it. Throughout his reign as PBA commissioner during the 1990s and early 2000s, Jun Bernardino invited teams to send witnesses to the measuring sessions, so they could see that the measurement process was fair and accurate. Instead, coaches found themselves schlepping to the league office to helplessly watch imports slouch their way below the height limit. If a team protested, the league would reap-praise the player’s height and invariably determine that the original measurement was correct, since admitting an error would embarrass the PBA more than allowing the mistake to go uncorrected. Rather than demand an accurate system of measuring imports, PBA teams formed an unspoken agreement that allowed everyone to save face: as long as players remained reasonably close to the height limit, there would be no complaints.

  Over the years, teams developed a battery of other height-reduction methods based on grooming and pseudoscience that coaches and team managers still believed to be effective. The league’s original height-altering technique was a trip to the barber. In the 1970s and 1980s teams tried to shave off inches by shaving players’ heads, but the practice had lapsed in recent years as large hairstyles like afros, shags, and flat tops went out of style. Also, the technique wasn’t foolproof. As many teams discovered, it was not big hair but pointy skulls that disqualified their imports.

  In terms of sheer lunacy, however, bald-faced cheating and goofy hairdos had nothing on the PBA’s musculoskeletal means of shrinking imports. Coaches throughout the league swore that intense exercise in the hours before a measurement would knock as much as an inch off a player’s everyday height. Shoulder presses and squats could compress a player’s bone structure, while running in the tropical heat would shrink him via dehydration. These techniques had more in common with folk remedies sold in the market outside Manila’s Quiapo church—magic potions and voodoo candles that served every cause from making someone fall in love to inducing abortion—than with medical science. There is no known way to shrink a person, although NYU orthopedic surgeons told me that weightlifting could compress the soft, fluid-filled disks between the vertebrae, and aerobic exercise might cause dehydration-related shrinkage in the disks. The resulting loss in height, however, would be in millimeters, not inches.

  Despite PBA teams’ widespread adoption of modern training methods like plyometric and core-strengthening exercises, the false notion that draining workouts could shrink imports persisted. Coaches and trainers vowed that these techniques were effective and claimed to have seen them work dozens of times. It was more likely that they saw the players shrink by means of drooping posture and attributed the change in height to spine-compacting workouts. I also wondered if coaches’ willful ignorance regarding the quack methods helped them avoid whatever pangs of guilt they might have felt over their mild dishonesty. Clinging to the myth that players could be shrunk through training preserved the illusion of fair play and let coaches off the hook. They didn’t recruit an over height player and then encourage him to break the rules; they found a competitive advantage. Or so they told themselves.

  The shift after the 2005 season to measuring players while they lay flat on their backs was rooted not in a desire to improve league policy, but a simple changing of the guards. That year, the league’s technical committee, which oversees officiating, was put in charge of measuring imports. Previously, the task had been outsourced to private doctors. The new committee thought heights would be more accurate if the players were measured lying down, so that became the standard operating procedure. As of yet, no team has figured out how to cheat the new system, and although there have been no official complaints about the stricter rules, there have been unintended consequences. The magical, shrinking imports of yore stopped shrinking. Some, like Roe, actually grew, as players who passed the measurement in previous seasons failed to make the same height under the new regime.

  Alaska was one of the first teams to be stung by the measurement cha
nge. The previous season, the team replaced import Artemus Mc-Clary late in the regular season. Cone brought in Victor Thomas, a gifted offensive player who won the league’s best import award in 2004. He arrived in Manila and immediately joined Alaska’s practices. Thomas could score from all over the floor and appeared to be a competent and willing passer; he looked like a perfect fit for Cone’s triangle offense. Management thought another championship might be on the way. The night before Thomas’s first game, he went to get measured. Because he had already played under the six-foot-six height limit, Cone assumed Thomas would pass. But in earlier seasons he had been measured while standing, and this time he had to lie down. An hour later Cone’s phone rang with the news that Thomas had sprouted and was now over height. Alaska was forced to hire a less experienced import and the team was swept from the playoffs.