Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Now, when Roe guarded Poch in Alaska’s practices, the body language wasn’t much different. Poch still scraped and shoved and did everything he could to manhandle Roe and get the upper hand, while Roe gritted his teeth and took the punishment, waiting for the right moment to snatch the ball. But their relationship had changed greatly since their 2001 scuffle. They had become good friends. Over the years, Roe became a regular at Poch’s kids’ birthday parties. Where their jostling had once been punctuated by pointed elbows and icy stare-downs, now it was filled with playful nudges and laughter. After practice, Gus Vargas, Alaska’s trainer, went around the gym calculating each player’s body fat percentage by testing how much flesh on the guys’ stomachs and triceps could be pinched with a set of large plastic pincers. Roe and Poch were shooting trick shots when Vargas approached. Roe went first, and Vargas could hardly find any loose flesh over his ripped abdominals. His body fat was just 4 percent.

  “You’re bulimic, man!” Poch said, then lifted up his jersey and allowed his belly to tumble out. Poch called this single mass, which was completely devoid of muscle definition, his “ab.”

  “Poch, you crazy,” Roe said, chuckling. “Put that thing away.” Before Poch lowered his shirt, Vargas was able to grab a handful of tummy and announce the results: 32 percent.

  Poch raised his hands like he’d won a contest and offered to take Roe to a Philippine fast food joint for fried chicken and spaghetti: “Come on, Roe. We’ll eat at Jollibee, my treat!”

  When Roe left the gym that afternoon, he sat down to ice his knees and chat with team captain Jeff Cariaso, who was sitting with his feet submerged in a rectangular basin filled with ice water and a pair of thermal footsies covering his toes to keep them warm. Jeff, thirty-four, was in his thirteenth PBA season, entering the twilight years of a career that included multiple championships and all-star appearances. He was no longer among the league’s scoring leaders, but Jeff remained Alaska’s premier defensive guard and served as the bridge between Alaska’s homegrown Filipino and Filipino-American players. Born and raised in San Francisco, he spoke the best Tagalog out of Alaska’s Fil-Ams and was equally revered by players hailing from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Jeff also played with Roe in past seasons, and the two had developed trust and confidence in each other. For Roe, having the support of Alaska’s proven leaders, Jeff and Poch, meant that the team’s younger players would embrace him.

  Jeff pointed to a nearby Chinese food menu. “You ever eat soup number five?” he asked while a ball boy strapped ice packs to Roe’s knees.

  “Nah, what’s that?” Roe asked.

  “Bull nuts and vegetable soup. They gave it to me when I first came out here, then halfway through the bowl they told me what it was and I almost threw up right there.”

  Roe giggled. “Oh no, I never had that. I did buy this book about international aphrodisiacs, though, that’s got tiger penis soup in it.”

  “What about balut?”

  “I don’t know why, man, but I can’t eat it.” Roe shrugged apologetically. “I eat eggs. I eat chicken. I just can’t take that balut.”

  “You gotta eat it all in one bite. Sometimes I see a little bit of head or beak, but I just think of it as an egg.”

  “It just reminds me of this TV dinner I had once. I opened the box and just saw this nasty little wrinkled chicken lying there. I never ate a TV dinner since.”

  Jeff said he had just finished reading the personal finance book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Roe had read it months before in Australia. Both players were a few years away from retirement and thinking about life after professional basketball. As long as they didn’t become desk jockeys, it sounded like Roe and Jeff could be satisfied. “I gotta own something,” Roe said. “I don’t want to get up every morning to go make money for somebody else.”

  “I don’t know about stocks, but I think I could make it in real estate,” Cariaso said.19

  Roe shook his head. “I got halfway through my real estate licensing course before having to leave for Australia last summer. There are some places outside Seattle where houses are real cheap. I could fix them up, sell them. Be a landlord or something. I’m not trying to get rich, but I wanna make my money work for me.”

  Jeff felt the same way. A couple years earlier, Alaska hired former Chicago Bull Dickey Simpkins as the team’s import, and Simpkins’s entrepreneurial spirit inspired Jeff. “He played eight, nine years in the league; played a lot overseas,” Jeff said of Simpkins. “He’s got real good money. So if he’s still out trying to make more, how can I not do that? I’ve been making pesos for twelve years.”

  The two sat there, talking like old friends dreaming on a porch together in the late afternoon. Roe had hardly been in Manila a week, but his past relationships allowed him to find easy acceptance with the Aces. They were both looking ahead to life after hoops, but before long the ice dripping on their knees and ankles brought them back to the present and the season ahead.

  6

  The Birth of Paeng Bartolome and Other Initiations

  While Roe was busy ingratiating himself with Alaska’s locals, I too was being initiated by the team. The Aces’ relationship with Roe could mean the difference between another lost year and a championship, whereas their courtship with me was a matter of curiosity. The chances that I would somehow don a uniform and step onto the court as Alaska’s import were practically nil. I did like to think, however, that if some freak occurrence knocked Roe out of commission—perhaps if, on the afternoon before a game, mutinous soldiers bent on overthrowing the government seized his apartment building20—Cone might consider tossing me into the lineup. Similar last minute swaps had been made before, when imports suffered injuries or got sent home on short notice. Before the U.S. military bases north of Manila closed in the early nineties, teams responded to import crises by recruiting soldiers who had been decent basketball players in their civilian lives. Now, with the bases shut down and the talent pool of able-bodied foreign men severely depleted, the practice of hiring imports off the street had more or less ceased. It’s probably safe to say that the PBA’s loss was the country’s gain, since too many of those American servicemen used their able bodies to patronize massive girlie-bar industries around the bases. Even so, the sad truth about the likelihood of me playing for Alaska was that even if Roe were struck by lightning en route to a game, Cone would almost certainly opt to field an all-Filipino lineup and hope for the best.

  Still, the players were curious about me. Non-Peace Corps, nonretiree American expatriates are pretty uncommon in the Philippines, where the typical image of a Western man tends to be an overtanned lecher in his fifties or sixties married to or dating a Filipina half his age. I really, really wish this characterization were exaggerated or unfair. It’s not. Several times a week, often in jeepneys, I would cross paths with inquisitive folks who wanted to know if I was a Mormon or a Marine. It was hard to explain that I was neither, because people just weren’t used to seeing white American men in their twenties who weren’t in the country to proselytize or fight terrorism. Even stranger, I was a foreigner interested in Philippine basketball, which had been in the country for almost a hundred years yet never attracted much interest from writers and scholars from any country, including the Philippines. Many Alaska players wondered how I ever heard of their league.

  From the beginning the Aces seemed interested in me as a novelty. In the six weeks since Alaska lost in the first round of the all-Filipino playoffs, the team had done little but practice and wait for the import tournament to begin. Players found the preseason tedious—nothing but conditioning and endless drilling of the triangle offense. Cone, on the other hand, seemed to love this part of the season because he could focus on conducting the movement and flow of his offense. Cone’s troops were less seduced by the abstract realm of hoops; they craved the packed arenas, referees’ whistles, and hard fouls of actual competition. Alas, they could do nothing but wait, and during this lull, any diversion was welcome. I was one such d
iversion.

  At one of these preseason practices, I sat on the bleachers and watched five-man squads race up and down the court in a simulated fast break drill. The team still didn’t know me, but my plan to keep a low profile lasted all of two minutes, until reserve forward Eddie Laure left his lane in mid-drill and sprinted toward me. Eddie, with the triangular face of a pit viper, may have been the fiercest-looking player on a team full of tough customers. I froze as he strode toward me, as if a six-foot-three praying mantis was bearing down on me and my only hope was to stay still and hope it decided not to slice me into pieces. He stopped on a dime inches away from me. Still wondering what would happen, I gulped and stared at Eddie, who then broke into a toothy grin. He slapped me on the knee and said, “Good morning!” before hustling back into the drill in time to catch a swing pass and drill a nineteen-foot lefty jumper from the wing.

  Next, I had to be baptized with a nickname. Partly because Filipinos tend to be named Spanish-style,21 with three or four given names followed by a surname, and partly due to a cultural affinity for abbreviations and contractions, nearly all Filipinos have nicknames. Often, people are better known in public by their informal handles than their actual names. These sobriquets are often onomatopoeic, like Jinggoy or Ding, and a few have unfortunate double meanings in English—Dong and Bong being the classic examples. Bong, in fact, has nothing to do with pothead paraphernalia, but instead indicates the suffix “junior.” Thus, Ferdinand Marcos’s son, Ferdinand Emmanuel Romualdez Marcos Jr., the former governor of Ilocos Norte province, is commonly known as Bongbong. Foreigners, especially Western writers, have poked fun at these so-called “doorbell” names, but I’m going to resist the easy pickings. Truth be told, after a few months I stopped smirking whenever I met someone named Buboy, Biboy, or just plain Boy. Nicknames were so common they began to feel normal to me.

  Nicknames were prevalent throughout the Alaska organization. Assistant coaches Rene “Bong” Hawkins and Isabelo “Jojo” Lastimosa22 became household names as starters on Alaska’s championship teams in the nineties. Among the current players, Poch Juinio’s real name was Edward, while fellow center Joachim Thoss was always called “Sonny.” Backup forward John Ferriols was nicknamed Tisoy, slang for mestizo, due to the Eurasian features that made him the team heartthrob. I’m not sure many people on the team knew the given names of Alaska’s four ball boys. Utol and Datu’s monikers meant “brother” and “chief,” respectively, while Jun and Cabs shortened their full names.

  After practice, Cone introduced me to the team. Almost immediately, team wits Poch and John began sounding out my name, inverting it, tossing it around with different prefixes and suffixes. They were searching for a suitably clever and crude nickname. In a matter of seconds they pounced on the most obvious option: “Rafist.” The letter F does not exist in Tagalog, nor does its sound occur naturally in most Philippine languages. So, in one of the more enduring ironies of Spanish colonialism, the archipelago was given a name—in honor of King Philip II—that its natives had to learn how to pronounce. The Tagalog spelling of Philippines is “Pilipinas,” and a common verbal tick of Philippine English is the unconscious transposing of Fs and Ps. This was never a problem when a jeepney driver threw an arm over my shoulder and proclaimed, “My priend!” It was another story, however, when I visited friends’ families and explained to their prim aunties and grandmothers that my name was Rafe, pronounced with a hard A and a silent E.

  Their eyes would widen with alarm as the matriarchs sounded it out in their heads. Then they’d look at me with a sour face: “Ray—Ray—Rape? I don’t like that name.” Real fast I got used to going by Raphael, my given name, and its less incriminating forms like Raf. I even tolerated Raffi, a name I’d despised since kindergarten, when classmates would taunt me by caroling “Baby Beluga.”

  Decorum was less of a concern inside Alaska’s locker room, however, and my vulgar name delighted Poch and John. “Stop! Rafist!” Poch yelled, while John chimed in with a falsetto “Rape me, Rafe!” Before long, however, they were back in brainstorming mode, challenging themselves to devise something fresher. The phonetic gag with Rafe was too easy. The players, given this crisp new canvas, wanted to create something special. They gave up on Rafe and started using Raphael.

  “Paeng!” (pronounced pah-eng) Poch rejoiced, repeating a fairly common Philippine reworking of the name, which takes the last two syllables and adds the ng sound to the end. “Paeng Bartolome! You’ve been Filipinized, man!”

  A puckish glint appeared in John’s eyes. He was about to deliver the coup de grace. “Chu-Paeng! Chu-Paeng!” he announced, and when the rest of the team heard it, they burst into hysterics. This was a pun on the Tagalog verb tsupain (pronounced choo-pa-eehn), derived from the Spanish chupa, meaning “to suck something,” where in most cases that something is a dong, and this time I don’t mean the nickname. The “Chu-Paeng!” chorus continued for a few minutes, with different players and even ball boys joining in and laughing. The moniker stuck throughout the rest of the season; whenever I arrived in the locker room, I could expect a round of fist bumps and Chu-Paeng catcalls. Maybe I should have objected or lobbied for a downgrade to the tamer “Paeng,” but I never did. Because the team had given me the alias, I didn’t mind being named after a blow job. What mattered was that I had a nickname. I was in.

  It wasn’t just the players who wanted to break me in. Alaska’s assistant coaches had a plan of their own. Two of them, Jojo Lastimosa and Dickie Bachmann, were devoted mountain bikers who rode through the hills and livestock trails of nearby provinces several times a week. One Saturday morning before practice they invited me to join them. Dickie and Jojo had played for Alaska when the team was still called the Milkmen. They were members of Alaska’s 1996 Grand Slam team that swept the championships of all three conferences in a single season, a feat only accomplished three other times in league history. Dickie was a backup forward then and now served as the Aces’ big man coach, and Jojo, who had been the team’s shooting guard and most consistent scorer, was named one of the PBA’s twenty-five greatest players during the celebration of the league’s silver anniversary in 2000. These weren’t the kind of guys who pedaled leisurely through the countryside to enjoy the fresh air. They were ex-athletes out to push themselves and whoever rode alongside them.

  I had been mountain biking once before, when I took a visiting friend to Guimaras, a small Western Visayan island known for mango plantations. Our ride through the island’s craggy hills had been gorgeous but grueling. My buddy had only been in the country a week, not enough time to acclimate to the tropical swelter, and he quickly became dehydrated. Every time we passed a roadside shack, I bought some kind of liquid for him—an imitation Mountain Dew drink called Sparkle, water-filled plastic baggies, even a pitcher filled with murky agua from a pump well. Before he fell into a woozy stupor and stopped talking, he joked that if I’d told him that morning he would be drinking water out of plastic bags, he would have called me insane. When we reached a real road, I hailed a tricycle, helped the driver strap the bike to the top of the sidecar, and sent my friend back to town while I rode back.

  Before riding with Jojo and Dickie, I made it my goal to avoid getting strapped to a motorbike and carted off like a wounded animal. Jojo, who lived twenty minutes north of me, called at four-thirty that morning and told me to meet him at a nearby McDonald’s. He picked me up and drove south for an hour to Santa Rosa, Laguna, where we met Dickie and the other bikers. Like recreational cycling in the States, mountain biking in the Philippines appeared to be a yuppie pastime for athletic types with an eye for spandex. Everyone, including Jojo and Dickie, was covered in specially engineered “performance” gear that clung to their bodies and supposedly kept them cool under the vicious sun. The coaches’ bikes came equipped with cutting-edge accoutrements like long-stemmed, shock-absorbent seats and pedals that clipped into cycling shoes to make spinning the wheels more efficient. Meanwhile, Dickie walked me to the bike shop, where
the owner set me up with his only rental—a creaky machine that looked like the Huffy I received for my eleventh birthday. Like that bike, it was perfectly sized for a five-foot-six rider. By the looks of things, I would have to ride standing most of the day. Jojo got a hearty laugh out of the sight of me giving the miniature bicycle a test-ride around the parking lot, and I got the feeling that only training wheels could have made the moment more perfect for him. The coaches filled their two-liter camel packs with mineral water and strapped them to their backs. I was given a sixteen-ounce bottle of orange Gatorade. In a moment of compassion, Jojo offered to loan me his spare set of biking gloves. That is, until he saw my hands, which are small for a six-foot-three guy.

  “Hold up your hand,” Jojo said. I raised my left hand and pressed it against his. He winced, unable to mask his disgust. “Damn, those are ladies’ hands! I bet you have small feet too.” He looked down at my size eleven feet and just shook his head before mounting his bike.23 “Okay, let’s go now,” he said, and then took off at full tilt without looking back.

  My middle school bike made an alarming clacking noise with each crank of the pedals, but it held together and the gears worked, which was all I needed to keep Dickie and Jojo in sight. We rode along country roads and water buffalo paths that zigzagged through parts of Laguna, Cavite, and Batangas provinces. The March sun had singed the grass brown in many of the fields, and whenever we passed houses, local kids ran out to slap hands and yell “Good morning!” as we passed. From the hilltops, we could see the highways, subdivisions, shantytowns, and malls of the southernmost parts of Metro Manila. It was a lovely way to see the country, if you could stand six hours of relentless sun. We passed one enchanting basketball court where four wood boards had been nailed haphazardly to a tree trunk and a netless rim dangled over the dirt playing surface. A pile of coconut husks lay parched and blackened at the base of the tree, with a ball waiting in the soil about ten feet from the hoop. My heart dropped and I stopped to daydream on the pastoral scene, one of thousands like it across the archipelago.