Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  There was no way to know the nature of Neil’s scam. Roe guessed that Neil offered to set the women up with Roe for a finder’s fee. It didn’t matter that Roe never requested Neil’s matchmaking services and even ordered Neil to stop; Neil would still show up at the apartment with unknown females, and Roe would turn them away. Yet Roe didn’t have the heart to report Neil’s deceits to Alaska management. If they found out, Neil would be fired in a heartbeat, and although Roe was fed up with his driver’s stunts, he didn’t want to be responsible for Neil losing his job.

  Finally, Roe had long since tired of the constant, sometimes unwelcome and often bizarre attention he received as a six-foot-five black celebrity in Manila. When he walked through a mall food court with his brother, people stared like a pair of pterodactyls just flew past. Their eyes would widen and their jaws would gape, sometimes with rice tumbling out of their mouths. Most Manileños had seen black tourists before, but African-Americans were still novel enough to inspire some pretty ugly behavior. For Roe, the staring was bearable. So was the pointing. The whispering of “Negro!” was bad; but worst were the people who treated him like an attraction in a petting zoo. They’d hold their forearm next to his and compare the difference in skin tone, or sneak behind him while he was shopping to measure how tall they were against his back. If he leaned down to shuffle through a stack of pirated DVDs, the dealer might reach out to touch his hair, just to see how it felt.

  Roe could handle it: The racial insensitivity, Neil’s swindling, Jojo’s tinkering with his shot, the grind of an endless season, giving up his scoring to favor his teammates, even Willie’s infectious clowning. Roe knew he could take it. But to feel like the decisions and compromises he made weren’t mistakes, he had to win a title.

  The Ellis brothers were able to hold their afternoon summit because it was Election Day in the Philippines and Cone canceled practice. The coach wanted to drag all his players into the gym and run them ragged after losing to Coke. He even announced that practice would push through, but then the Aces began murmuring and looking to Jeff Cariaso to speak up for them. Jeff squinted at assistant coach Dickie Bachmann. “Dick,” he pleaded. “Tomorrow? Come on.” Dickie followed Cone out of the locker room, then returned a couple minutes later. “Tuesday tayo.” A sigh of relief swept the room. John Ferriols rapped on Poch Juinio’s back in approval. “Vote tomorrow,” Dickie said. “Be safe.”

  Civic duty had nothing to do with the coaches’ decision to cancel practice. Half of the Senate and all the seats in the House of Representatives were up for grabs in the national election, as well as governor, vice governor, and local government positions throughout the country. Cone determined that the safest plan would be for the players to stay home when they weren’t voting. The Philippines had a long history of political killings, and anyone who had lived through a few national elections took the threat very seriously. In the months leading up to the 2007 election, more than a hundred people were killed in poll-related violence, and more murders were expected as candidates vied for control over the vote-counting process.62

  Philippine elections were literally power struggles. The candidates, often from political clans whose bloody rivalries went back generations, competed for access to government riches. The winner gained control of a slice of the pie for the next three or six years. Many, perhaps most, Filipino candidates entered politics not because of their devotion to public service, but because it was seen as the most effective way to get rich. Philippine political parties hardly bothered creating ideological platforms; instead, they formed convoluted alliances designed to control the vote in enough disparate regions to capture victory at the national level. The zero-sum nature of Philippine politics made it fairly easy to predict the targets of election violence—candidates, their operatives, and the journalists who covered them. Average voters with little stake in the outcome were generally safe, and PBA players fell into this category. Still, there was always the chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—sitting in traffic when the armed henchmen of rival candidates started spraying shots—and because of this Cone and the Alaska coaching staff gave the team a day off and encouraged the players to stay home.

  Aside from the scant chance of being peppered with buckshot, the campaign period was a festive time in Metro Manila. Candidates for positions from kagawad, the neighborhood council, to senator sent van convoys through neighborhoods to drum up grassroots support. The two principal means of impressing voters in these processions were campaign jingles and handouts. The vans were plastered with beach-ball-size images of candidates’ smiling faces and giant hands giving thumbs-up signs. They crawled through nearly every street of every barangay, blasting political theme songs from loudspeakers strapped to the vehicles’ roofs. Each jingle tried to repeat its candidate’s name as many times as possible in thirty seconds or a minute. No definition of torture would be complete without these tunes.

  One incumbent senator, Joker Arroyo, had a ditty that was nothing but his name repeated over a synthesized clamor of game show sound effects. He was reelected. Miguel Zubiri, another Senate hopeful, melded his name to the melody of “Boom Tarat Tarat,” a ubiquitous tune that was normally accompanied by rhythmic pelvic thrusting. He also won a seat. For office-seekers, it didn’t much matter if listening to these looped monstrosities inspired hatred for the men behind the music. What mattered was that people remembered their names. Because Philippine voters were required to write the names of their preferred candidates, name recognition was a key to electoral success.63 Once voters were alone with their ballots, it was better to be Zubiri, the Senate bet with the irksome song, than what’s his name, the other contender who seemed nice on television.

  During the cacophonous motorcades, staffers would stroll alongside the vans and hand out branded tchotchkes to sear the aspirants’ names even deeper into voters’ minds. Before the election, I watched people in my neighborhood eagerly glom umbrellas, backpacks, calendars, shoulder bags, hats, T-shirts, and even sponges. The goal, apparently, was to accumulate so much poll-related swag that you wouldn’t have to buy new clothes until the next election rolled around and the politicians returned with their goodie bags. The cherry red shirts distributed sometime during Mel Mathay’s stint as Quezon City mayor, which ended in 2001, were still worn daily by local tricycle drivers. Basketball seemed to occupy its own category of promotional merchandise. Politicians handed out numbered jerseys, multicolored miniballs, and plastic backboard-and-rim sets small enough for bedroom walls, all emblazoned with the candidates’ names. I sensed something sinister in this basketball-for-votes quid pro quo. The roundball love that awed me every time I spotted a homemade basket also had a dark side.

  For decades, Philippine politicians have manipulated the nation’s hoops passion for electoral gains. Take, for example, the legions of ex-players who parlayed their celebrity status into elected office. The practice went as far back as Ambrosio Padilla, captain of the 1936 Olympic team. Padilla won a Senate seat in 1957 and held it for fifteen years until Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and dissolved the legislative body. After the 1986 People Power revolution ousted Marcos, President Corazon Aquino reinstated the Senate and, within five years, the chamber welcomed Freddie Webb, another ex-baller. Webb played for the 1972 Olympic team and became one of the PBA’s quickest, highest scoring guards while playing for the Tanduay Rhum Makers in the seventies. Webb worked his way up the political ladder, serving as a councilor in southern Metro Manila’s Pasay City during his playing career, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives in the late eighties. Robert Jaworski jumped from the hardwood to the Senate in 1998 without any government experience. Fifty-two years old at the time and still manning the sidelines for Ginebra, Jaworski was only able to win the election by promising fans he would not retire.64

  Because senators in the Philippines are elected in nationwide polls, not province-by-province or state-by-state as they are in the United States, celebrities like basketball players h
ad a natural advantage in name recognition. Many conventional candidates (often called trapo, a double entendre that is short for “traditional politician” and a Tagalog word meaning “dirty rag”) came from dynasties that controlled certain regions but weren’t known outside their spheres of influence. Webb and Jaworski were household names before their Senate runs. And, even though they came to the legislature with fewer credentials than many trapos, who had studied at top U.S. universities and served in high positions of the Philippine military and academic establishment, the hoop-it-up senators were hardly the most preposterous members of the group. That honor belonged to the actors, action movie icons like Ramon Revilla Sr., who served from 1992 to 2004 and was known for having sired forty-five to eighty illegitimate children; or Joseph Estrada, another cinematic tough guy who reinvented himself as a populist politician and served a term in the Senate before being elected vice president and eventually president.

  Even more former PBA stars found their way into local politics. The ranks of city councilors, mayors, vice mayors, and governors were thick with basketball players. Franz Pumaren, coach of college powerhouse De La Salle University and a former guard for the San Miguel Beermen, represented my neighborhood as the District Three councilor in Quezon City. When I walked to the corner store and passed freshly paved sidewalks that had been outfitted with new underground drainage cylinders, I had Pumaren to thank. Months later, when segments of the new road caved in and became murky cesspools, I had Pumaren to blame. Who could forget Yeng Guiao, the Red Bull coach who pulled double duty as vice governor of Pampanga province? Elsewhere in Metro Manila, former PBA guards Yoyong Martirez and Luis Varela were vice mayors in Pasig and Caloocan cities, respectively. In the recent past, Crispa greats Atoy Co and Philip Cezar completed terms as Pasig City councilor and vice mayor of San Juan; Jaworski helped his son Dodot win a seat in the House of Representatives, and onetime Great Taste guard Joey Marquez had been mayor of Parañaque City. The NBA has also had its share of players turned politicians, like Bill Bradley in the Senate and Dave Bing as mayor of Detroit. But the pro-basketball-to-elected-office career track is still a novelty in American politics. In the Philippines, government service had become a logical, even expected, career move for retired PBA stars.

  Politicians didn’t need to be able to sink a reverse layup to exploit basketball. Government officials who never played organized hoops were just as likely as ex-Olympians to use the sport for electoral gain. Every candidate’s political bag of tricks included stunts like attending PBA and college games to receive face time on television, or sponsoring local tournaments where players received uniforms branded with the donor’s name. When Senator Robert Barbers investigated Fil-shams, critics assailed the hearings as a ploy to gain media attention. Stirring the pot of basketball and Philippine nationalism allowed Barbers and his fellow senators to portray themselves as crusaders fighting to restore honor to Philippine hoops. But the hearings, supposedly “in aid of legislation,” produced no new laws and failed to banish several alleged Fil-shams from the league.

  More than publicity stunts and sponsoring teams, the go-to tactic in politicians’ hoops playbook—the pick-and-roll, so to speak—was constructing basketball courts. Like the neighborhood court where I took my first jump shot in Manila, and the concrete roundball fortress I discovered in Adams, Ilocos Norte, most of the nation’s full courts—tens of thousands of them—were built by politicians. The public officials who built them argued that courts were worthy investments. They insisted that basketball gave communities an enormous boost in esteem, kept teenagers away from drugs, and instilled disciplined, healthy lifestyles in children. In addition, courts were used for more than just basketball games. They became community centers—surfaces where farmers dried rice and stages where towns hosted singing competitions and coronations during annual fiestas. For politicians, courts were cheap, easy to build, and easy to claim credit for with painted murals: A gift to the people from Mayor Santos!

  Critics of basketball’s role in politics pointed to opportunity costs. Too often the most modern structure in a town whose health clinic badly needed improvements would be a state-of-the-art outdoor court. Occasionally, a newly elected mayor wanted to impress his constituents, but the municipal plaza already had a functional court. So he made his mark with nonessential add-ons like spring-loaded rims and fiberglass backboards; sometimes, defying all logic, politicians built new courts right next to perfectly good ones, as if they couldn’t think of any other use for public funds. At the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Aries Arugay, a lecturer in political science, told me that basketball courts offered good bang for the politicians’ bucks: they were cheaper to build and more popular with constituents than projects like roads and hospitals. Aries, in his late twenties, was only a few years older than me, but he had already seen enough craven hoops-related politicking to have the outlook of a cynical campaign veteran. “The politician merely wants it so he can put his name on it and collect brownie points,” Aries said. “With a government that fails to provide for their basic needs, Filipinos are easy to please. If they feel any government presence, they appreciate it.” I felt queasy listening to him. It sounded like the sport I adored had been used to bamboozle people and deny them the better lives their elected leaders should have worked to provide.

  The same week in 1983 that Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was assassinated upon his return to the Philippines, the Crispa Redmanizers and Great Taste Coffee Makers met in a storied PBA finals. For the first time, Billy Ray Bates and Norman Black went head-to-head in a series, and judging by write-ups of the games, the avid fans who poured into the Araneta Coliseum that week were more captivated by the clash between two great imports than the event that would change the course of Philippine history. Juaniyo Arcellana wrote in Atlas Sports Weekly: “Ninoy Aquino’s assassination notwithstanding, the world remains the same inside the coliseum during the heat of a PBA championship game . . . Basketball as escapism, who would have dreamed?”

  Marcos, maybe? Few Philippine leaders have been as adept at manipulating basketball to serve their political ends. The PBA, after all, was founded during the heyday of martial law, when the Marcos government exercised near total control of media and clamped down on individual freedoms through curfews and the persecution of dissidents. Basketball was promoted as clean, wholesome entertainment, and the PBA rose to heights of popularity that the league probably never would have reached in an open society. Hoops, however, served as more than just a diversion during martial law; the fierce competition and occasionally downright violent action on the court provided a government-sanctioned release valve for the frustration simmering within the masses, who rarely had such opportunities to blow off steam in Marcos’s police state.

  The two dominant teams of the era, the Crispa Redmanizers and Toyota Tamaraws, spent the PBA’s first decade locked in one of the most heated rivalries in Philippine sports history. Whenever they clashed, crowds upward of 20,000 fans jammed every seat, catwalk, and staircase in the Araneta Coliseum. At the very least, fans knew they’d be treated to a seesaw battle played by the country’s finest ballers; and, if the spectators were lucky, they might witness a brawl.

  Rough play was a hallmark of the early PBA, which Bill Velasco liked to call a “street fight in shorts.” Forearm shivers, Muay Thai elbows, and running clotheslines were essential skills, just like bounce passes and bank shots. When blows started flying during Crispa-Toyota games, the crowd felt a vicarious jolt of adrenaline. Fans booed and cursed the thuggish fouls committed by the opposite side and celebrated when their heroes mauled the opponents. The fans shrieked themselves hoarse with the filthiest obscenities Tagalog, English, Cebuano, and other Philippine tongues had to offer. If the referees missed a particularly dirty foul, bedlam followed, as fans pelted the court with as much debris as could be dredged from their pockets, handbags, and backpacks. The peso coin was the projectile-of-choice, but bottles, beer cans, and batteries were also lobbed at the har
dwood. Unruly behavior that would have gotten spectators arrested in public was tolerated inside the arena, and even fans who only watched on television felt cathartic thrills.

  Marcos also used the Crispa-Toyota rumbles to demonstrate his control over Philippine society. In 1977, after the Redmanizers defeated Toyota 122-121 on opening day, Crispa guard Atoy Co saw Toyota center Ramon Fernandez bump Crispa coach Baby Dalupan as the teams walked off the court. Co rushed to defend Dalupan and tagged Fernandez with a punch to the chin, sparking a free-for-all between both teams. The donnybrook began in the tunnel leading to the locker rooms and then surged back onto the court, where frenzied supporters threw chairs and whatever else they could lift off the ground at the grappling horde. The small-scale riot lasted until the police arrived to restore order. A few days later, both teams were invited to Camp Crame, headquarters of the Philippine National Police, who were then called the Philippine Constabulary. There, General Prospero Olivas chastised the players for setting a bad example. As athletes, the general said, they had to be role models for the masses and exhibit the discipline that was central to President Marcos’s governing philosophy. The jingoistic speech inspired snickers in at least one player, and that was enough to convince Olivas to send both teams to Fort Bonifacio, the military base where political prisoners—including Ninoy Aquino—were detained. The players spent the night in a holding cell and were released the next day, but the legend—the country’s biggest sports superstars, the Kobe Bryants and Dwight Howards of their day, jailed for fighting—endures to this day. The message was clear: no one received special treatment in Marcos’s New Society.65