Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  When the hail of projectiles ended, the bar owner kicked everyone out and walked Bates and Scales back to their hotel, where he met a Crispa assistant coach and demanded several hundred dollars for his trouble. Was the near-riot actually just a shakedown? A choreographed fracas to give the bar owner a reason to insist on payback? There’s no way to tell. One thing is for sure: the Atlas article ended on a disturbing note. “Maybe, the next time Bates wants to unwind after a game,” it said, “his Crispa handlers ought to give him what he wants in the solitude of his hotel room.” The suggested solution—to ply Bates with willing love slaves in a private place where he couldn’t cause trouble—speaks to a common and unfortunate Philippine attitude toward black athletes. Players like Bates were idolized for the way they could dunk a basketball, but off the court they were often viewed as borderline savages devoted to sating their appetites for food, alcohol, and women. Part of the reason teams hired drivers for imports was to keep an eye on them. A driver was supposed to prevent a player’s inner Mandingo from emerging at an inopportune moment that might tarnish the team’s image or lead to the import getting hurt and wasting the team’s investment in him. As long as the booze-fueled escapades were kept behind closed doors, however, no one seemed to mind.

  This paternalistic, dehumanizing attitude toward black players was widespread, not only among teams but also with fans, who seemed willing to accept and sometimes even encourage sleazy behavior from their imports as long as they put on a show at gametime. A transcendent player like Bates could get away with almost anything. To the fans, all that mattered was his game. To his coach and teammates, all that mattered was winning. And Bates never failed them. His performances were electrifying. The three-point shot and the dunk were arguably the two innovations in basketball’s modern era that lifted the sport to its global status. The long bomb and the ferocious stuff are two of the most dramatic plays in basketball, and Bates excelled in both. His hot streaks from beyond the arc could have been lifted straight out of the video game NBA Jam; he could score 15 points in a matter of minutes, shooting a series of deeper and deeper three-pointers that seemed drawn through the hoop by a force greater than gravity. His drives were even more astounding. If a defender pressed Bates to deny his jump shot, that player would be left behind and Bates would already be soaring through the lane with the ball cradled beside his hip, about to be windmilled in another patsy’s face.

  Bates’s character only amplified his game. He never simply let his game speak for himself, but added flourishes of showmanship to excite crowds even more. When he heard that TV announcers were calling him Black Superman, Bates came to games with a cape flapping behind his back and dunked during warm-ups while wearing the hokey outfit. When Bates arrived at Crispa, he brought not just a jaw-dropping skill set, but also a flamboyant personal style from the twilight of the disco era that was new to many Filipinos. He was one of the first players to wear a headband—a white rag wrapped around his forehead and knotted Rambo-style in the back. The tendrils of a lush, shimmering jheri curl tumbled over the top of the headband. Bates’s hair and its accessories became the subject of a barrage of sports features, in which journalists asked Billy Ray to explain the look: with all the activator he was putting in those curls, he told them he needed something to keep the greasy mix of sweat and moisturizer out of his eyes. He was the first and only import in PBA history to have a line of signature sneakers made for him. The Black Supermans, made by local shoemaker Grosby, looked like a rip-off of Nike’s Air Force Ones sans the Swoosh. He further accentuated his look with wristbands, striped knee socks, and loads of swagger. Shortly after Bates joined Crispa, one of his boasts became the quote that summed up his PBA career: “The only way I can be stopped is to handcuff my right arm to my leg.”

  Bates had a natural star quality that allowed him to glide across the razor’s edge between two opposing values in Philippine culture. In many cases, being called mayabang—arrogant—is a condemnation. There’s no doubt that Bates was that, but he also projected another quality, diskarte—a celebration of skill and flashiness with a dash of machismo. People loved to watch a great player who knew how good he was. Somehow, Bates always managed to stay on the right side of these contradictory concepts. The fans never turned on him and called him a conceited jerk. They embraced Bates’s bravado on and off the court. Perhaps his instincts told him how far he could push his antics, or maybe Filipinos simply appreciated his otherworldly basketball brilliance enough to forgive his excesses. It was helpful that Bates was willing to share the fun with everyone around him. After games, he’d walk out of the Crispa locker room with a boom box on his shoulder and boogie with the fans waiting outside.

  Most importantly, however, Bates was a winner. This defused any arguments that his marvelous one-on-one game and garish shenanigans prevented his teams from thriving. Crispa won its first nine games with Bates and cruised to the finals of his first PBA conference. The best-of-five series was a rematch of their epic season opener, and Great Taste actually jumped out to a 2-1 series lead thanks to the hot shooting of Bogs Adornado and the defensive efforts of Alaska assistant coach Joel Banal, who was Great Taste’s import-stopper. Banal frustrated Bates with tight defense and a few well-timed flops. The import got his points, but Banal made it hard for him and earned a standing ovation for his efforts in Great Taste’s game one victory.31 Banal couldn’t keep up with Bates for five games, however, and the import took over in games four and five. This time it wasn’t his scoring that won the games, although he did notch his customary 50 points. Instead, Manotoc credited the championship to Bates’s decision to guard Norman Black for the rest of the series. Bates didn’t completely shut down the Great Taste import, but he managed to outplay Black, and Bates’s willingness to step up on defense inspired his Crispa teammates to match his effort. They ran the Coffeemakers out of the gym, winning both games by an average of 24 points and clinching the conference title.

  Bates stayed with Crispa for the third and final conference of the 1983 season—this time, teams were allowed two imports—and led the team to another championship. For Crispa, the win made a clean sweep of the year’s three conferences (Crispa won the all-Filipino crown before Bates arrived). Only four teams in PBA history have achieved that level of dominance, known as a Grand Slam. By the time Bates returned to the league in 1986, the Crispa franchise had dissolved, so he teamed up with another high-scoring import named Michael Hackett and the league’s biggest Filipino star, player-coach Robert Jaworski, to win a title with Ginebra. No PBA import aside from Bates has won three championships in his first three seasons. In 1987, Bates returned to Ginebra and averaged a career-high 55 points per game while nearly dragging the undermanned club to the finals. It was his only full season in the league that didn’t end with his team cutting down the nets.

  Over the months I spent tracking down Bates’s teammates and pulling clips about him from newspaper and magazine archives, I always sensed his lurking denouement. Each passing season seemed to hurtle Bates closer to disaster. Honestly, it was excruciating. I was reading about the exploits of a great basketball player whose rare talents not only won games but left crowds feeling inspired and awestruck. I was listening to Bates’s teammates reminisce on the highlights of their careers, many of which might not have occurred without him. But Bates’s fall from grace was always around some corner. There wasn’t a question of if, but of when he would lose basketball, the game that fueled his entire being. When it happened, it would be ugly.

  The death knell of Bates’s PBA career rang in 1988. He returned for another season with the Ginebra franchise, which changed its name to Añejo to promote a new brand of rum.32 Bates was thirty-two, and in the six years since he first played in the Philippines, he must have put fifteen years’ worth of mileage on his body. Jaworski made him promise not to stay out drinking and partying, but the import couldn’t resist the temptations of Manila nightlife. At Añejo, Bates still managed to average a respectable 31 points, but the
team lost its first four games, and Bates, playing passive, hesitant basketball, looked like a shell of his former self. When fans saw him struggling to defend rookie guards and getting his shots blocked by local forwards, they saw the Black Superman cut down to size. Bates was spared the biggest embarrassment of his career the night of his final PBA game. He scored a career-low 17 points and looked helpless against younger, healthier competition, but few people witnessed the game because a violent storm caused a blackout in Manila. It was as if fate had intervened to prevent television audiences from seeing Bates at his humiliating nadir.

  And so, because he had already broken his sobriety pact and was no longer Superman, the best import in PBA history suffered the fate of every other lemon. Bates was sent packing after four games. On one of his last nights in Manila, in a final delusional moment, Bates called the manager of Purefoods and asked for a chance to replace their import. It was 2:00 a.m., and he was calling from a place called Faces disco. The team manager, who had been asleep, simply hung up. Columnist Ronnie Nathanielsz penned a eulogy to Bates’s career in Champ that week. “Basketball has become an integral part of our everyday lives,” he wrote, “and Bates was its most brilliant character.”

  After the Philippines, Bates’s deteriorating skills drove him deeper and deeper into the backwaters of international basketball—first Switzerland, then Mexico, and eventually Uruguay. In 1998, back in the States, the inevitable finally occurred. Bates, soused on vodka, robbed a New Jersey Texaco station at knifepoint and slashed an attendant’s ear. When he was arrested, police found that he had netted seven dollars in the heist, which earned him five years in prison. This had to be one of the world’s all-time telegraphed passes; it was the rock bottom Bates had been approaching for fifteen years. His life in ruins, he fulfilled his tragic destiny.

  Yet even at this disgraced juncture in Bates’s life, fans felt connected to him. From people who actually saw him play to those like myself, who were merely captivated by his legend, if you had a drop of compassion in your heart and you loved basketball, then part of you hurt for Billy Ray Bates. The online comment page of a 2004 Willamette Week article about him reveals a multilingual mash of nostalgia, adoration, and sorrow that reflects the complicated life of one of the sport’s great antiheroes. On one hand, there are comments like this:i am an avid fan of billy during his crispa and ginebra days here in the Philippines . . . i saw how wild he is when he was young, i saw him hanging around with some of his friends having beers, i saw him when he took a massive piss on the streets . . . those were wonderful moments of my childhood seeing an NBA great hanging around the place like an ordinary kid.

  Yet there are also comments from young women in Switzerland and the United States, claiming to be Bates’s daughters and requesting help in contacting him. Reading these, the consequences of all those amusing tales about Bates’s drunken red-light follies became evident. There’s no doubt that life dealt Bates a miserable hand, and the fact that he managed to rise from such depths, however briefly, is inspiring. Yet for all the heartbreak he endured, he caused just as much.

  Even though it had been more than twenty years since Bates played his last PBA game, and many Filipinos were aware of his criminal past, people in Manila still considered him a hero. Internet message boards devoted to the PBA were clogged with glowing remembrances of Bates, and newspaper columnists gushed over his possible return to the archipelago as late as March 2009, when a Filipino blogger found Bates online and learned that he was living in a drug-and-alcohol-treatment center in New Jersey. Before long Grosby shoes, which had been planning a comeback, offered to bring Bates back to Manila, perhaps to promote a throwback version of his signature high-tops. So far the trip hasn’t occurred, but if it ever does, Bates’s homecoming may rival that of General Douglas MacArthur, whose return to the islands in World War II was credited with liberating the Philippines from Japan. In a country with such a deeply felt, sometimes irrational passion for basketball, Bates’s hardcourt wizardry mattered almost as much as driving out the hated Japanese. He revolutionized the Philippine game by showing fans and players moves they’d never imagined, and for that he will always be the Black Superman.

  Although Bates was the man who brought the spark of change to the Philippine game, it was his rival Norman Black who remained in Manila to help implement the transformation of local basketball that Bates inspired. While Filipinos revered Bates as the best individual player in PBA history, Black, and maybe Bobby Ray Parks, who won seven best import awards, were acknowledged to have had the greatest careers.33 But no other import held his own against Bates as well as Black did. In their head-to-head match-ups, Black always kept his teams close, and through the first three games of the 1983 Finals, it looked like Black might even lead Great Taste to an upset.

  Black, known as Mr. 100 Percent throughout his ten-year playing career, earned fans’ respect for the passion and effort he brought to every game. He was not a flashy player. At six-foot-six he was a prototypical undersized power forward, with an unreliable shooting touch and so-so ballhandling skills, but Black was a tireless rebounder and defender who could score anytime he caught the ball within ten feet of the hoop. Humble, self-effacing, relying on hard work as much as talent, he was the perfect foil for the boisterous and sensational Bates. And after Bates flared out and Ginebra cut him, Black remained in the PBA. Thanks to his consistent effort and winning ways, teams just kept hiring Black. Eventually, in the late 1980s, San Miguel made him the team’s player-coach. Black would suit up during import conferences and direct the team from the sidelines during all-Filipino tournaments. In 1989, Black’s Beermen became the third team in league history to win a Grand Slam, matching Bates’s 1983 accomplishment with Crispa.

  In 1991, Black retired from playing, but he stayed in the Philippines. Little by little the nation had become his home. He continued to coach the San Miguel Beermen, then moved on to coach other PBA franchises, and at each of his stops he brought his teams to the playoffs and usually won championships. Over the years, Black coached some of the Philippines’ most brilliant individual talents like San Miguel’s Samboy “the Skywalker” Lim, who could jump, hang twist, fake, and hang some more before releasing his shots. These players were clearly inspired by Bates, but it was Black who helped them combine their breathtaking moves with the discipline it took to win championships.

  Black is still in the Philippines and has no plans of moving back to the United States. He coaches college ball now, for Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious private institutions and a hoops powerhouse. In 2008 and 2009, Black led Ateneo to back-to-back collegiate championships. He was the first American player named to the PBA Hall of Fame in 2007. Just as Bates and Black took disparate roads to success as players, their lives after basketball followed starkly different paths. In the Philippines, however, the two are forever linked by their classic 1980s battles. Moreover, they have become the basis for the prevalent archetypes of foreign stars. When I first met Tim Cone, he told me there were two kinds of imports. The first was a guy with NBA talent who was so crazy that he played himself out of the league. The second was a player who wasn’t as gifted but would work tirelessly to win every game. Sound familiar? He was explaining that he preferred workhorse imports like Roe, but Cone might as well have been talking about Norman Black and Billy Ray Bates.

  8

  A Rim in Every Baryo

  Just wait till we go out of town.” I heard this mantra dozens of times, from the Alaska ball boys on up to general manager Joaqui Trillo and owner Fred Uytengsu. When you see the team travel to the provinces, and see how fans away from Manila’s basketball-spoiled masses treat the visiting athletes, then you’ll truly understand how enthusiastically Filipinos worship basketball. A month into the season, it happened. The Aces piled into a bus headed for the former U.S. Navy base at Subic Bay, where the team was set to clash with the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants. I was psyched for some overenthusiastic, foaming-at-the-mout
h, downright scary hoops idolatry.

  A couple weeks had passed since Alaska’s loss to Red Bull, and the team recovered with two straight wins. The first was an expected blowout against the Welcoat Dragons, a first-year expansion team owned by a paint company. The second game was a ragged encounter against the Coca-Cola Tigers.34 At the time, Coke was bunched with Alaska near the top of the standings. Two of the Tigers’ local stars, Filipino-Americans