Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  “They say the team we’re playing today is the measuring stick. If we beat them, then we become the measuring stick.” Tim Cone was standing in a cramped locker room at the Olivarez College Gymnasium in Parañaque City. As a nod to fans on the south side of Metro Manila, the PBA had scheduled the Alaska-Red Bull tiff away from the Araneta Coliseum. Olivarez could seat a few thousand spectators and held hot air like a greenhouse. Alaska’s locker room came equipped with about twelve plastic chairs and low, irregular ceilings with buttresses cutting through the room at sharp angles. The players staked out territory on the tile floor and listened to Cone rehash the game plan: Keep Penny off the boards. He’s long-limbed and jumps high. If he can’t get easy put-backs he might get frustrated. When Red Bull runs the staggered double screen for Cyrus Baguio, go under the picks to deny his penetration. Red Bull’s big men—Carlo Sharma and Mike Hrabak—are shooters. Guard them close.

  Willie hadn’t arrived yet. He was en route from a court appearance, but with a couple hours left before tip-off, there was little worry that he wouldn’t make it in time. Despite the week’s distractions, the players seemed locked in, nodding along to Cone’s words with silent conviction. While the players stretched and had their ankles taped, the arena sound system blasted one grating eighties bar mitzvah jam after another: “Hey Mickey,” “My Sharona,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Cone stewed over a recently released PBA stat sheet that compared the various imports’ numbers. Somehow, Roe had been left off the list. To Cone, this confirmed once again that the league didn’t give Alaska the respect it deserved. Roe, for his part, seemed unperturbed. He was wolfing down an unusual pregame snack for a man with almost no body fat—a Chicken McNuggets value meal. I was standing a few steps away, pondering what kind of chips I would eat for dinner at halftime. Would it be the barbecue-flavored tortilla chips that offered the highest caloric bang for the buck or the tastier salad-flavored multigrain snacks that never quite filled my stomach? At these small gyms there were no restaurant stalls selling rice meals or burgers, just hawkers roaming the crowd with wire baskets full of chips and cherry red, lukewarm hot dogs with gray innards.

  Out of nowhere someone tapped me on the back. “Hello, Rafe!” The greeting was extremely cheerful. Too cheerful. I felt a tinge of alarm as I turned around to see who was responsible for all this effervescence. Who else but Willie, back from his court appearance and naked except for a bundled-up T-shirt held in front of his junk. He stood facing me, a mad grin on his face and his palm outstretched for an uncomfortably low high-five. I slapped his hand and Willie sauntered away, butt jiggling, for his pregame shower, while Alaska reserves Dale Singson, Eddie Laure, and Rensy Bajar collapsed in hysterics.

  My encounter with Willie’s birthday suit was another locker room rite of passage. There would be countless opportunities to glimpse Willie’s unmentionables in months to come, but having this first brush with his ass meant I had passed another milestone. Willie had a fierce exhibitionist streak, and few things seemed to satisfy him more than surprising a teammate with his nakedness. Even on a basketball team, where men were constantly in various states of undress, Willie gleefully flouted the norms of privacy. That, of course, was the joke: that Willie was so sure of his masculinity that he made everyone around him a little unsure about theirs. It also allowed him to pull some epic stunts. Almost every player had seen a cell phone video of Willie running up and down the aisle of the team bus, with his shorts at his knees and his wang flopping while he screamed, “Snakes on a bus!”

  Tony dela Cruz, the forward Alaska loaned to the national squad, may have possessed the team’s best Willie story. Every weekend the PBA would schedule a provincial game and send two teams to some corner of the archipelago as a treat for fans outside of Metro Manila. On one of these trips during another season, Tony was taking a pregame nap in his hotel room. He knew it was time to get up because he could hear his roommate, Fil-Am point guard Mike Cortez,25 dressing for the game. Tony hit his mental snooze button. He couldn’t summon the energy to get out of bed yet, so he dozed flat on his stomach with his head buried underneath a pillow. A few dreamy minutes passed and he felt something soft touching the sole of his foot. It tickled a little. Tony couldn’t tell if the sensation was real or part of a dream. He reflexively curled his toes and rubbed back. That’s when he heard Mike and Jeff Cariaso, who had entered the room, snickering. He bolted upright and saw Willie, naked, standing over the corner of his bed. Upon realizing that he’d been playing footsie with Willie’s penis, Tony ran screaming into the shower and started scrubbing his foot with soap. Willie followed him in and asked what was wrong. “You didn’t like it? But you were rubbing back? Wasn’t it soft?” The fact that Willie’s teammates put up with these shenanigans, and even laughed about them afterward, may be the strongest proof of their deep affection for the unhinged star guard.

  Between Cone’s stone-faced spiel and Willie’s loosey-goosey arrival, there was nothing left for the Aces to do but go out and beat Red Bull. By the time of the jump ball, the climate inside Olivarez gym felt like simmering molasses. It had been hot earlier, before fans filled all the seats and hundreds of spectators packed standing room only space in the aisles and behind the baskets. A handful of daredevil supporters even climbed to viewpoints in the rafters. With thousands of people jammed into the glorified high school gym, it felt like there was no air left to breathe. Two refrigerator-size air conditioners labored from opposite sides of the building, and two industrial electric fans rattled away next to the teams’ benches, but on this night the machines were overmatched. Somehow, despite these circumstances, Alaska and Red Bull ended up playing the most intense, fast-paced game of the young PBA season on a court that felt like Mother Nature’s sweaty armpit.

  Both teams scored on their opening possessions. Red Bull drew first blood when Penny hit a sixteen-footer off the tap. Alaska came back and found Willie on the left wing for a long jumper. Then Penny, sensing that Nic Belasco was playing off him to stop the drive, drained a three-point shot. Alaska big man Sonny Thoss hauled an offensive rebound on the following play, then strung together two dribbles and a shot fake to get his defender off-balance before rising for a textbook half hook. On plays like that it was easy to see why coaches hoped Sonny, only twenty-five years old with a ballet dancer’s footwork, classic big man moves, and a soft shooting touch, might develop into a Filipino Tim Duncan.

  The game’s furious pace never let up in the first half. Penny, who made his mark as a pass-first import, switched gears and looked to score. He canned three-pointers, baseline floaters, and putbacks galore. Alaska tried three defenders on the Red Bull import—first Nic, then rat-tailed backup forward Rey Hugnatan, and finally, as a last resort, Roe. Even Roe, who was probably the league’s finest one-on-one stopper, couldn’t lock down Penny. Willie and Roe had to score on nearly every possession just to keep pace with the Red Bull import. Willie abused Red Bull’s smaller guards in the post and sank pull-up jumpers that had fans smacking their foreheads in disbelief. Roe was steady as ever, dropping left-handed bank shots through the net almost every time he touched the ball within ten feet of the basket.

  But the lucky bounces went to Red Bull. On one possession Penny swiped the ball away from Roe and appeared to be cruising for the game’s first breakaway dunk. Roe somehow willed himself back into defensive position in time to poke the ball out of Penny’s hands as he jumped for the slam. The ball bounced back toward half-court and both imports gave chase. Their feet became tangled, and Penny stumbled while Roe crashed to the floor. The ball rolled gently to Penny, who seized it, dribbled once, and delivered a feral two-handed jam. Roe, sprawled on the hardwood, could only watch. Extra possessions like this were enough to give Red Bull a 69-59 halftime lead.

  In the locker room, Cone praised his players. They had weathered Red Bull’s first half onslaught and only trailed by ten points. Eventually, the law of averages would take over and Red Bull’s shooting would peter out. If Alaska played agg
ressive in the third quarter, the coach said, they’d be back in the game. That’s more or less how it happened. Alaska scored six straight points to open the half. Behind the bench, the Alaska wives, who had been silenced by Red Bull’s dazzling play earlier, became bolder. Bong Hawkins’s wife Nancy screamed “Bobo!”—Tagalog slang for “stupid”—at Red Bull’s Cyrus Baguio, who wore a six-inch elastic headband26 that covered his forehead and made his hair stand up like a pencil eraser. When Red Bull reserve Carlo Sharma entered the game a few minutes later, Nancy led the Alaska fans in rhythmic chants of “Shawarma! Shawarma!”27 When she wasn’t heckling the opposing team, Nancy plied me with chewing gum and chocolates from her purse.

  On the court, Roe and Willie combined for beautiful give-and-go plays. Roe would flash to the free throw line, catch a pass from Willie, and either hand the ball off to him streaking for a layup or wait for him to fade into the corner, then whip the ball to him for a three-pointer. Every time Alaska cut the lead to two or three points, however, some Red Bull player, often some relative unknown on Guiao’s roster, rattled in a three-ball to kill the Aces’ momentum. First it was Larry Fonacier, a lanky second-year shooter. Then it was Leo Najorda, a defensive specialist who rarely scored but managed to make four three-pointers that game. And when the locals weren’t scoring, Penny was. The import had hardly missed all night. Roe kept Alaska close during Red Bull’s surges with an array of push shots in the paint, but the heat in the gym was starting to affect him. When players took free throws, Roe would trot to the bench to wipe off sweat and gulp down a couple swigs of Gatorade.

  With less than eight minutes to play in the fourth quarter, Nic Belasco narrowed Red Bull’s lead to two points on an up-and-under post move. As the ball was dropping through the net, Roe fell to the floor writhing in pain. The Alaska bench watched in horror as their import clutched his right thigh and rolled on the floor like he was on fire. “Cramps!” he yelped loud enough for the entire arena to hear. The bench players, relieved, sat back down. Roe would have to come out of the game, but the injury posed no long-term threat to Alaska’s season. Cone called time-out to reorganize his players, who would have to complete the comeback without their import. Meanwhile, Alaska’s trainers maniacally rubbed Roe’s legs to loosen the knotted muscles. Cramps were one hazard of hiring an import with extremely low body fat. Playing in the country’s saunalike heat, imports sweated more than usual, and in Roe’s body there was no extra fat to burn. When he sweated out his water weight and his muscles became exhausted, they would simply clench up. It was one of the quirks of Philippine basketball that in a hot gym, an import in peak shape could be less reliable than a player who carried a few extra pounds. Nancy remembered Derrick Hamilton, a former Alaska import with a ripped physique like Roe’s. Hamilton suffered the worst cases of cramps she had ever seen. Near the end of games he would remove his tank top on the sideline, and the spasms of his chest and abdominal muscles looked like a squirrel running laps under his skin.

  Without Roe, the Aces’ late surge started to fade. The team was down two with more than seven minutes to play and no import to lead them. But an unsung hero, Dale Singson, emerged. With Roe watching from the bench, the seldom-used backup guard connected on a three-pointer, then orchestrated a trip to the charity stripe for Rey Hugnatan, who trailed Dale on a drive and received a no-look drop pass a step away from the rim. Alaska finally took a lead, but gave it up when Penny was fouled on a drive. The teams traded leads until the game was tied at 108 with less than two minutes to play, when suddenly the frenetic shootout became a stalemate. Roe returned to the game, but the threat of cramps kept him in partial paralysis; he shuffled around the court with short, measured steps, as if any sudden movement might cause his muscles to seize up. Still, he managed to force a Red Bull turnover by harassing Penny into dribbling off his own foot. Alaska had a pair of chances to steal the game, but Sonny missed two foul shots after Sharma was called for pushing, and Willie got stripped on a drive.

  Neither team scored in the last two minutes. The game went to overtime—a death sentence for Alaska. Roe made his last stand in the waning minutes of regulation. The cramps returned and Alaska was forced to start the extra period without him. This time no savior stepped up to carry the team while Roe sat. Fonacier returned for Red Bull and outscored the entire Alaska team in overtime. His nine-point outburst pushed Red Bull to a 124-113 win, with Penny tallying 44 points and Roe and Willie chipping in 27 and 24, respectively. Although the Aces lost, the postgame mood in the locker room was one of low-grade elation, like the players knew how well both teams had played, and they understood, as did everyone else in that tiny, sweltering gym, that they had been part of a special game. Also, the way Alaska and Red Bull withstood each other’s surges and battled to an even score after forty-eight minutes of basketball suggested that both teams were destined for deep playoff runs, and that Roe and Alaska would have a chance to avenge the loss and rekindle this rivalry later in the season.

  7

  The Legend of the Black Superman

  I couldn’t get the Alaska-Red Bull game out of my head. A lot of PBA games, like regular season NBA games, were sloppy or just plain uninspiring. Between the all-Filipino and import conferences of a PBA season, most players suited up roughly sixty games per year. Imports like Roe and Penny played even more. Their seasons in the Philippines and other international leagues added up to something roughly equal to the NBA’s eighty-two-game schedule, with the added burdens of carrying their teams and hardly ever resting during games. Over the course of these grueling seasons, athletes would sometimes cut corners. On defense, they might zone out and forget to help on the weak side. Or, on offense, they could settle for outside shots instead of scoring at the rim. Then again, some games were breathtaking.

  There was no way to predict which contests would be epics and which would be footnotes. Before the loss at Olivarez, Alaska had plenty of excuses to take the night off. Willie’s court case had distracted the team all week and forced him to miss practices. The podunk arena felt small-time. With only a couple thousand seats, most of the players had been performing on grander stages since they were teenagers. The air-conditioning was struggling. The tarpaulin banners strapped to the basket supports, adorned with the grinning visages of the Olivarez men (local politicians as well as founders of the school that hosted the game) brought to mind a neighborhood tournament sponsored by the beneficence of a crooked mayor. Yet, for some reason, both teams came out that night and played one of the best games I’ve ever seen in any league. The highlights reenacted a roll call of famous moments from sports movies and real life—Roe and Penny tripping simultaneously like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed; Roe pulling a mini-Willis Reed by returning to the game after his debilitating cramp attack; and unsung shooters like Dale Singson and Red Bull’s Fonacier swinging the momentum with long-range bombs like the Hickory High boys from Hoosiers . If Filipino fans had been witnessing battles like this for the past fifty years, it was no wonder they worshiped the sport.

  The game reminded me of another early season classic that occurred more than twenty years earlier, which I’d read about in old sports magazines and heard PBA old-timers describe as a night that jolted Philippine basketball into the modern era. It also established archetypes for PBA imports that have prevailed ever since. That game, in May 1983, was the first head-to-head match-up on Philippine soil of Billy Ray Bates and Norman Black,28 who are still considered the best two imports in league history. It was the opening game of the import conference. Bates, then twenty-six years old, was hired to reinforce the Crispa Redmanizers, one of the PBA’s storied franchises, which, along with the Toyota club, dominated competition throughout the league’s first decade. Bates’s four-year NBA career came to an end a month earlier when the Lakers cut him; this was his PBA debut. Black, already in this third PBA season, won the previous year’s best import award and had signed to play for the up-and-coming Great Taste Coffeemakers. Along with Black, Great Taste had hired the
PBA’s first high-profile Filipino-American, a former Pepperdine guard named Ricardo Brown, who had been drafted by the Houston Rockets but never made the team. They also signed a deadly shooter named Bogs Adornado, who was the league’s first MVP. A knee injury had hobbled Adornado over the past few seasons, but he’d finally healed. If Adornado, Black, and Brown could lead Great Taste to victory over Crispa, it would herald the arrival of new PBA royalty.

  No one knew what to expect from Bates, who was brilliant in his first season with the Portland Trail Blazers but eventually drank himself out of the NBA and into rehab. This wasn’t the first time an NBA has-been washed up on Philippine shores, and judging by the skeptical coverage Bates received in sports magazines prior to his Crispa debut, the local basketball cognoscenti doubted that he could pull himself together. It didn’t take long for Bates to turn them into believers. The first time he caught the ball, he blew by a helpless defender and threw down a vicious dunk over two others that shook not just the rim but the entire Araneta Coliseum, packed that day with more than 20,000 fans.

  They had never seen anything like Bates, a six-foot-four, 215-pound guard with a chest like the trunk of a redwood tree and powerful, expansive thighs that gave him Jordanesque29 hang time. That is no exaggeration. He was a tank with wings. In terms of aerial grace, Bates was probably the closest most Filipinos ever came to seeing Michael Jordan or Julius Erving in person. With Portland, when he was focused and sober, Bates dunked with ease over legit NBA big men like Artis Gilmore and Darryl Dawkins. On top of that, he was a natural shooter. Off the dribble or catch-and-shoot, when Bates was hot he didn’t miss. He had three-point range as well as the delicate touch required to make pull-up bank shots and floaters in the lane. There weren’t a lot of men in the world who could average 25 points per game in an NBA playoff series. Bates was one of them. He did it in the first round of the 1980 playoffs against the Seattle Supersonics. Bates had all-star talent and all-world athleticism.