The week of Roe’s measurement, the lying-down system claimed its second victim. Jaws dropped in the Alaska players’ lounge when Mang Tom returned from witnessing the measurement of the San Miguel Beermen’s intended import, former Seton Hall standout Kelly Whitney. San Miguel was one of the PBA’s flagship teams. It was almost unfathomable that the import they had flown out for the upcoming season would get the boot for being too tall. But there was no leeway in the new scheme, so when Whitney lay down and measured less than half an inch over six-foot-six, he had to go. When the news passed from the lounge into the coaches’ room, Cone smiled; it was the kind of grin you see on a cartoon cat who just scarfed a bird. He knew San Miguel would have to scramble to find a replacement for Whitney, and whoever they hired would likely be a downgrade. A major rival was likely to get off to a slow start that season; Alaska’s window for success just got a little wider.
Getting stretched out on the floor and measured was just the first of many potential hurdles Roe would face in the PBA, which was known as one of the trickiest and most unforgiving leagues in the world for visiting imports. The Philippines’ outsize passion for hoops cut both ways on the lives of imports. In Manila the PBA was the only game in town, and imports were feted as kings of the local league. That is, if they could remain on their teams long enough to enjoy the royal treatment. As long as imports satisfied the expectations of coaches, teammates, and the media, Beatlemania could be theirs: awestruck teens would screech and point at them in malls; earnest, lifelong basketball fans would approach them to shake hands and say “You’re my idol”; and mothers would ask them to hold their babies and pose for cell phone pictures. The catch, however, was that satisfying a PBA team could require Herculean efforts, and about half of the imports who arrived in the Philippines in any given season ended up being shipped home before the playoffs even began.
The international pro leagues where basketball hired guns like Roe played were known as results-oriented businesses, but even in this unforgiving universe, PBA teams were known for being among the most cutthroat employers. The expectations heaped on imports were limitless. With few exceptions, Philippine teams demanded that their imports put up gaudy statistics every night. An acceptable game might include at least 25 points, around 12 rebounds, and a smattering of assists, blocked shots, and steals, depending on a player’s talents. For most players that would be a career game, a dominant performance that occurred maybe five times before retirement. For PBA imports that was an average. And although numbers mattered, they alone were not enough. Ideally, they would be accompanied by wins. Nothing pleased owners more than topping the standings. It attracted more press for the franchise and associated the team’s corporate backer—whether it be a canned meat company or real estate developer—with success.
The only imports with a measure of job security were those who filled up stat sheets and delivered winning records; achieving one or the other was not enough. An underperforming import on a winning team might be swapped for a new reinforcement who could make the team even better. An impressive import on a losing team would be branded a talented loner who didn’t know how to win. Stats and wins were the absolute requirements, but a second tier of expectations also burdened imports. They were expected to play tirelessly for forty-five minutes every game, and some nights they wouldn’t rest at all. They had to play through injuries and set an example by outworking their teammates in practice. Teams wanted imports to be clutch scorers who could will their teams to victory in tight games.
There was no reasonable boundary to the responsibilities heaped on PBA imports; anything short of Michael Jordan was not quite good enough. Of course, the PBA had neither the money nor the prestige to lure a player like His Airness, or even most NBA twelfth men, to Manila, so they settled for lesser talents and poorer pedigrees. But PBA teams were constantly on the lookout for upgrades, and no import was ever totally safe. The failure to satisfy any of his team’s myriad expectations could buy him a seat on the next plane back to the States.
To ratchet the pressure up even further, PBA teams made it clear to imports during preseason meetings that they had to produce these results immediately. Learning curves and gradual success were the luxuries of NBA teams, with their eighty-two-game seasons. In the PBA, where the import conference lasted only eighteen games before playoffs, it was score and win or go home. It wasn’t uncommon for a team to lose faith in an import and send him packing after just one performance, and during some seasons a third of the imports hired by PBA teams were gone after three games or less. A mid-season replacement might face the daunting prospect of flying to Manila from the United States or wherever he’d been playing in Europe, then having twenty-four hours to acclimate to Manila’s heat, meet his teammates, learn a couple of plays, and sleep as many hours as his frazzled circadian rhythms would permit before suiting up for his first game. And if this dehydrated, jet-lagged, somewhat bewildered substitute turned in a lackluster debut, chances weren’t bad that he would be sliding his passport through an immigration window on his way out of the Philippines at week’s end.
PBA teams had split personalities when it came to their imports. As long as the club was winning and the import looked great on the court, he would be heralded as a savior. But the moment his game sputtered or the team dropped a few close games, team managers reoriented themselves and began treating the import like a flat tire that needed to be changed immediately. Around the PBA, disappointing imports were referred to as “lemons,” a term usually reserved for broken-down washing machines and used cars.
The season before I started following Alaska, I watched another import, Quemont Greer, go through the PBA wringer. Greer was the DePaul star I watched pour in almost 50 points in the first PBA game I attended. Greer scored almost every time he caught the ball, using slippery stutter-steps and crossover dribbles that had the big men who tried to guard him stumbling over their own feet. When smaller, more agile defenders were assigned to stay in front of him, Greer set up in the low post, where his bulk was too much for them to handle. His shooting touch was feathery; Greer converted three-point shots, pull-up jumpers in the lane, a tricky bank shot on the run, and several point-blank layups, tip-ins, and dunks off offensive rebounds. On the few occasions when Greer broke down his initial defender and a second line of opponents swarmed him, he was able to shovel the ball to open teammates for easier baskets. It was a masterful performance, and I was not surprised to find out after the game that Greer was leading the league in scoring while his team, Red Bull, was near the top of the standings.
A few games before the end of the regular season, I talked my way into a Red Bull practice to get a closer look at Greer. The team worked out in a cavernous gym with two adjacent full-courts, each showing a lot of wear and tear. I could hear the thud of dead spots in the hardwood as players dribbled through warm-up exercises, and the far court was only used for shooting around because one of its rims was slightly off-kilter. I thought the spacious interior might make this gym cooler than some of the stuffy bandboxes other teams used.17 Instead, however, there seemed to be too much space in Red Bull’s gym to get the heavy air moving. The breeze from four wheezing electric fans on the sidelines couldn’t reach the players at center court. In between drills the players walked to the bleachers and wrung pools of sweat from the bottom of their shorts, then crowded around the fans and lifted up their jerseys.
No one seemed more bummed about the facility than Greer, who had spent the previous four years practicing in DePaul’s state-of-the-art field house. During individual drills, coaches asked Greer and Red Bull’s big men to fake running to the corner, then change directions and sprint to the free throw line for a catch-and-shoot. Greer moved through this sequence like he was caught in a glue trap. His body language while waiting his turn alternated between two langorous poses—hands on his hips with head lolling, or bent over with hands on his knees—that seemed like comic exaggerations of off-the-charts laziness. After some cajoling from the Red Bull
coaching staff, Greer straightened out and trotted gingerly through the exercises, an improvement over his previous effort but still not exactly inspired basketball. Minutes later he walked off the court without saying anything to his coaches. He took a folding chair and sat on the sidelines. An assistant coach looked at Greer and raised his eyebrows to get his attention. Greer pointed to his hamstring. It was tight. He spent the next half hour or so watching practice from the chair while two ball boys massaged his calves and thighs. I got the feeling Greer, as the temporary face of the Red Bull franchise, wasn’t the ideal spokesman for an energy drink.
Red Bull scrimmaged during the final half hour of practice, and the opportunity to compete roused Greer. He stepped into the game and immediately took over. He scored on his typical array of pull-up jumpers, powerful drives, and a couple emphatic dunks. It looked like a reminder to the coaching staff: “I may dog it in practice from time to time, but I’m also really good.”
When practice ended I walked over to Red Bull Coach Yeng Guiao to chat about how the season had been going and how he felt about his import. Since Greer was averaging more than 27 points a game and Red Bull was in contention for a top seed in the playoffs, I expected Guiao to repeat a few old basketball saws about Greer’s talent, pepper it with a couple caveats about his inconsistent effort, then sum things up with a generally positive and confident outlook heading toward the postseason. And that’s pretty much how it started.
“You know, I think Quemont is probably just one notch below the NBA,” Guiao said. “He definitely has the talent of an NBA player.” Then Guiao used his own change-of-direction move to turn the conversation. “But actually, he’s not the right import for us. Please don’t tell Quemont, because he doesn’t know yet, but there’s another player arriving later this week who could be his replacement.”
If Guiao had told me he saw Imelda Marcos’s face in a bowl of man-goes that morning and it asked him for a Bulgari watch, I would have been less confused. The fact that Guiao had plans to dump the league’s leading scorer, who’d carried Red Bull to a winning record throughout the season, was shocking. Plus, the nonchalant way the coach described his plan took my breath away. The team concepts that had been drilled into me throughout my own paltry basketball career and reinforced by countless sports broadcasters—togetherness and loyalty, win or lose, to the end—didn’t seem to apply in the PBA, at least not for imports. Guiao thought there was a better player available, and he wasn’t going to stick with Greer based on fealty alone. “We’re reaching a point,” he told me, “where it’s better to make a wrong decision than not make one at all.”
Guiao’s problem with Greer had little to do with his talent or production on the court. In fact, Guiao’s only quibble with Greer’s game was that he was a volume shooter and a possession killer, a player who often attempted twenty or more shots per game and who sometimes dribbled away half of the twenty-four-second shot clock instead of passing to his teammates. When Greer was hot, he’d score 45 and Red Bull won. When he was cold, he’d score 17 and they lost. Guiao didn’t want to hang his team’s playoff fate on Greer’s streak shooting. These seemed like valid critiques—at the NBA level. Aside from his lack of height (six-foot-six is dreadfully short for NBA forwards), Greer’s affinity for one-on-one basketball and low percentage shots probably played a role in his not being selected in the 2005 NBA draft. But in the PBA, so-called “black hole” players like Greer—the ball goes into them and doesn’t come out—had once been the prototypical imports. In fact, when Guiao was coaching the Swift Mighty Meaties hot dog franchise in 1992, one of his most celebrated past imports, Tony Harris, set the PBA single-game scoring record with 105 points. Guiao and Harris won a championship that season, and even though the league had grown to embrace a more team-oriented style in recent years, imports were still expected to play with a ball-hog streak. Besides, in a league where imports were expected to average close to 30 points per game, jacking up shots was a way to keep your job.
The rift between Greer and his coach was rooted in personality differences and Greer’s reluctance to embrace the role of team leader. I met up with Greer later that week to hear his thoughts about the season. Red Bull was putting him up in a Holiday Inn not far from the team’s practice facility. Greer said that Guiao had challenged him to act like Red Bull’s captain, but as a twenty-four-year-old in his first job, Greer wasn’t comfortable giving orders when he was the most recent addition to the roster. He had teammates who’d been playing pro ball for ten years. Why weren’t they leading the team? Guiao countered that Greer’s talent trumped the locals’ experience. They would follow his cues on the court, and sitting down at practice to enjoy a thirty-minute rubdown while the rest of the team panted their way through suicides certainly wasn’t inspirational leadership. Again, Greer defended himself. Guiao rarely gave him a breather during games, and Greer didn’t want to wear himself out or exacerbate his nagging injuries by going all-out in practice: “I felt that I’m out here doing a lot of the work, and I need a break too. They was looking at it like, he’s the import. He don’t need no breaks.”
Greer’s mild-mannered ways seemed to irk Guiao, one of the PBA’s most volatile coaches. PBA lore had it that years ago Guiao, in a fit of Napoleonic rage, waved a pistol at his players during practice to motivate them. It was a tale that everyone seemed to have heard but no one could ever confirm. Even if the story was pure fantasia, it reinforced Guiao’s fiery reputation and lent credence to the conventional wisdom that Guiao’s players worked so hard because they were scared of him. One indisputable display of Guiao’s wrath occurred a month before Roe arrived for the import conference, when Red Bull was playing the San Miguel Beermen in the semifinals of the previous all-Filipino conference. During the second quarter of game six, San Miguel guard Don-don Hontiveros hit a jump shot in front of Red Bull’s bench, then turned to head back on defense and ran into a hybrid clothesline-forearm shiver from Guiao. The blow struck Hontiveros in the Adam’s apple, and he collapsed to the ground clutching his neck. Guiao was ejected from the game but not suspended. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Guiao was also a statesman. When he wasn’t coaching, Guiao moonlighted as the vice governor of Pampanga province north of Manila, but Guiao’s coaching colleagues believed that his combative nature originated from his experience in the vicious world of local politics, which made the PBA look like Romper Room.
With his players, Guiao’s only rule was that they remain confident and aggressive and never back down from challenges. If a player passed up an open shot or let an opponent continually get the best of him, he was likely to end up planted on the bench with Guiao howling in his face. Greer, on the other hand, was calm and docile to the point of seeming passionless. Even when he dominated games, he did so with the air of someone who drank a pregame cocktail of Sleepytime Tea and Quaaludes. Guiao thought this sent mixed messages to Greer’s teammates—play lazy but score 40. Greer’s easygoing style contradicted his coach’s kill or be killed hoops philosophy. So when Red Bull lost, Guiao blamed Greer’s blasé air, and even when they won, Guiao couldn’t feel the satisfaction of winning his way because Greer didn’t buy into his confrontational ethic.
When we spoke, Greer was always polite and responsive, but the blank expression on his face never wavered. If he felt any emotion while discussing his dashed NBA ambitions and PBA difficulties, it remained hidden behind his hooded eyes. Even the threat of being sent home before season’s end failed to rouse more than mild frustration. “If they don’t like me being myself, so be it,” he told me. “If they decide to replace me, that’s on them. It’s really not in my control.”
I returned to Red Bull practice later in the week to see Greer play against his potential replacement, James Penny. Penny had arrived the night before—not long after Red Bull management finally informed Greer they were hiring a second import—and he looked drained and frazzled at practice. Penny, twenty-nine, had played at Texas Christian University and possessed a sig
nificant edge on Greer in experience. He had suited up in U.S. minor leagues, Canada, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, China, and Lebanon. Red Bull planned to conduct an extended tryout between Greer and Penny over the last two weeks of the regular season. Since Greer was clearly a serviceable import, the team would let him finish out the schedule and give Penny time to settle in, get over his jet lag, and learn Guiao’s system. At the end of that period, if Penny proved to be the stronger import, he would take over for Greer in the playoffs. If Greer turned out to be the better man, he could keep his job. The way Red Bull exploited its imports seemed cruel and cynical, but from the franchise’s perspective, paying the Americans twice as much as the highest-paid locals gave management license to jerk them around for the greater good of winning. Also, within the frame of Philippine basketball, Red Bull had done nothing wrong. Holding mid-season tryouts between imports wasn’t common in the PBA, but it was an accepted tactic. Red Bull was not the first team to do it and they would not be the last.
At practice, Greer and Penny seemed determined to restore some of the dignity that Red Bull had removed from the situation. They arrived together, since Red Bull had arranged to have the imports driven back and forth to practice in the same van, and although they had already met, they courteously shook hands at the beginning of the session. After that, they kept their distance, with Greer staying on one sideline and Penny the other during water breaks. Greer smirked when reserve center Omanzie Rodriguez dunked on Penny, who was still a step slow from the long flight and Manila’s mid-morning swelter. As the practice wound down and Guiao called for a full-court scrimmage, everyone in the gym tensed up. This would be the first head-to-head confrontation between Greer and Penny. When the game began, the imports’ contrasting styles were obvious. Greer showed flashes of brilliance: a dunk over Penny and two other players, then a crossover that left Penny flat-footed at the top of the key. But Penny’s team was more cohesive. He passed to back door cutters for easy layups and set screens that gave his teammates open jumpers. Guiao, stoic on the sideline with his arms folded in front of his chest, nodded his freshly shaved head in approval. Penny wasn’t going to score like Greer, but because he was better at creating scoring opportunities for his teammates, he wouldn’t need to. Plus, the extra touches might boost the locals’ confidence and spur them to hustle more on defense.
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