I asked around, and the PBA never produced a Muhammad Ali- type athlete who used his platform to decry political injustice. This was likely due to the fact that under martial law, dissidents weren’t merely harassed, discriminated against, or, as in Ali’s case, arrested and banned from boxing. Filipinos who spoke out against the Marcos regime risked being tortured, detained indefinitely, or murdered. Also, basketball players in that era felt little political consciousness or moral imperative to speak out. For starters, their bosses were all devoted Marcos toadies; at the time, there was no way to own a major corporation and a PBA franchise without supporting the regime. Second, Philippine society’s still-operational patronage system, where personal debts could take precedence over broader ethical concerns, was particularly strong in the Marcos years. Many players lived in team dorms during the season and remained loyal to the businessmen who cut their checks and gave them free meals, vacations, and sometimes even cars. Today, many of those players, although aware of Marcos’s excesses, couldn’t help but look back on this dark period in Philippine history as the best time of their lives. Their families were secure, they earned money hand over fist, and every time they donned a uniform the nation’s adoring eyes focused on them. With a setup so sweet, athletes didn’t ponder social justice, they just went with the flow.
The linked personal debts created a chain of command from Marcos to team owners to players, so when the president called on the PBA for political favors, the teams obliged. In the months leading up to the 1978 parliamentary election—a stage-managed sham to demonstrate Marcos’s respect for democratic rule—Crispa and Tanduay wore special uniforms bearing the initials of Marcos’s party—KBL, for Kilusang Bagong Lipunan or New Society Movement—and played outdoor exhibition games around Metro Manila to promote the establishment cause. Naturally, these free spectacles drew enthusiastic crowds numbering in the hundreds and sometimes thousands, depending on the venue. The fans probably could have cared less about the election, which the KBL was certain to sweep, but they scaled trees and stood on top of trucks to catch a glimpse of the PBA stars competing on their neighborhood blacktops. After the games, each player gave a short spiel praising Marcos and encouraging fans to support the KBL slate. For Redmanizers like Atoy Co, Tito Varela, and Philip Cezar, all of whom held office after their PBA careers, the rallies may have introduced them to the sport’s political value.66
Marcos also used PBA teams to reward regions for their loyalty. In February 1983 he sent Crispa and the San Miguel Beermen to Paoay, Ilocos Norte, a ten minute ride from the strongman’s boyhood home, as a Valentine’s gift for his fellow Ilocanos. That year Crispa’s connection to Marcos became even stronger, when the team hired Tommy Manotoc as head coach. Manotoc, a champion golfer, had recently married Marcos’s eldest daughter, Imee. Crispa, a textile manufacturer, outfitted its coaching staff in custom T-shirts for the occasion. That night, playing in an outdoor game with Marcos himself in attendance, Manotoc and his assistants wore shirts that professed a common emotion in a region that often found itself the beneficiary of the dictator’s largesse: I ♥ MARCOS.
Not long after the elections, as Alaska’s season was beginning to wind down, hype was building for the country’s preeminent collision of hoops, politics, and business. Ever since the students returned to my neighborhood at the end of May (the academic year began in June), I noticed a change in the way female students at Ateneo de Manila University looked at me. When I passed groups of coeds, they would hide behind their textbooks and follow me with their eyes. After I passed, I would hear a chorus of giggles. What was going on? Weeks later I stopped at a local bakery to buy some chocolate cookies, and the guy working the counter wouldn’t let me pay for them. “No, sir, we cannot accept that,” he said, arms folded across his chest and shaking his head at the crumpled twenty-peso bills in my hand. “We are very big fans of the Blue Eagles.” I took the sweets but left confused. What did I have to do with Ateneo sports?
A few days later the answer was revealed when a student riding side-saddle on a motorcycle wiggled her fingers at me and yelled, “Hi Kirk!” They thought I was Kirk Long, the Ateneo basketball team’s prize recruit. Like me, Long was white and above six feet tall. He came to Ateneo from a high school for foreign missionaries’ children on the outskirts of Metro Manila. Never mind that I was more than five years older than Long and a couple inches taller; being a pale beanpole and wearing a pair of long nylon shorts was enough to convince Ateneo boosters that I was the Blue Eagles’ new white knight. For one glorious, ethically dicey month, I high-fived autograph seekers, gorged on free confections, and returned the ladies’ smiles. Maybe I should have tried harder to correct them, but the way I saw it, I had earned the right to enjoy a case of mistaken identity. The previous year, I could hardly step outside without hearing some horrified matron shriek “Daniel Smith!” Apparently, I also resembled Smith, a U.S. Marine who had been convicted of raping a Filipina at the former Subic Bay naval base. It was unlikely that anyone actually mistook me for Smith, since at the time he was locked inside the U.S. Embassy, but my whiteness alone made the comparison fair game. Needless to say, no one ever fed me sweets because I reminded them of a sex criminal.
Throughout the seventies, eighties, and most of the nineties, college basketball trailed the PBA in popularity. Fans preferred the more glamorous professional league because it employed the biggest and most talented players. Over the past decade, however, the popularity of college ball had skyrocketed, and by the time I found myself posing as an Ateneo heartbreaker, the country’s two major leagues, the NCAA and University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP), were on almost equal footing with the PBA. Some sports commentators believed this occurred in response to the PBA’s influx of Filipino-American players. When the PBA lost its local flavor, fans migrated to the college game. Others suggested the amateurs played with more passion than the avaricious pros. Both arguments had the familiar ring of stateside NCAA platitudes, and they were similarly hollow. College teams in the Philippines recruited Fil-foreigners and even players without any Filipino blood, like Long and a host of other import-slash-students from Australia, Eastern Europe, and various African nations. Most of the players couldn’t even be called amateurs in the United States, since they already received payment in cash and goods as paid endorsers of Nike, Adidas and other products.
New technology and niche markets contributed to a more plausible explanation for college basketball’s recent prominence. Throughout most of the PBA’s existence, Filipinos had scant access to other professional basketball leagues. As late as the mid-1990s, local television stations only broadcast a doubleheader of tape delayed NBA games on weekends, and fans who wanted more had to visit flea markets where predigital VHS pirates sold videotaped NBA games shipped from abroad. In recent years the introduction of satellite cable granted widespread access to the NBA, especially among upper class Filipinos. Not long after I arrived in the country, a new channel, Basketball TV, began showing live NBA games every morning, with nightly replays.67
The PBA was no longer the only game in town, and the TV audience for basketball became fragmented. Many wealthy Filipinos who could now watch Lebron James and Kobe Bryant stopped paying attention to Willie Miller and Jeff Cariaso, and the PBA lost a chunk of its elite audience. Moneyed Filipinos did, however, remain engaged in college ball, with many prominent alumni becoming vociferous supporters of their alma maters. The advertisements during PBA and college broadcasts illustrated the leagues’ changing fortunes. PBA commercial breaks tended to be filled with spots directed at working-class Filipinos like pig farmers, construction workers, and cockfighting breeders. Some memorable ads included cockers singing about their roosters’ fortitude and farmers injecting vitamin formula into the necks of squealing hogs. Ads during college games, on the other hand, reflected their viewers’ high disposable incomes: imported sportswear, digital cameras, sport utility vehicles.
The main events of the college season, and argua
bly the grandest occasions in all of Philippine sports, were the two bouts between Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle universities. These were the nation’s most elite private institutions.68 Their combined roster of distinguished alumni read like a list of Metro Manila’s major roads: Rizal, Epifanio de los Santos, Recto, Osmeña, Chino Roces. When the schools’ basketball teams met at the Araneta Coliseum, an arena owned by La Salle loyalists, the metropolis shut down. The schools’ rancor was born of similarities—the affluent, educated Jesuits of Ateneo versus the wealthy, sophisticated La Salle Brothers. With so much in common, basketball became the tiebreaker that students, professors, and luminaries from each school used to distinguish themselves from the other. The victors earned the right to call themselves—always a tad too pompously—richer, smarter, and holier. They were the true cream of Philippine society.
Months before I got to witness the rivalry, I heard about the legendary milieu drawn to Ateneo-La Salle matches: equal parts joint session of Congress, PBA all-star game, diplomatic summit, the Luna Awards (the Philippine equivalent to the Oscars), and a Miss Philippines pageant, with a sprinkling of Forbes’ forty richest Filipinos in attendance. Call it an alignment of stars, an eclectic brew of dignitaries, or a bloodthirsty madhouse. It was a uniquely Filipino throng that only basketball could bring together. I couldn’t think of an event in the States that could summon such an all-encompassing cross section of the American power structure. Even the Harvard-Yale game wouldn’t come close; not to mention that such a contest would never have national championship implications. Yet La Salle and Ateneo had won five titles in the previous ten years. Before the teams’ first encounter of the season, I bumped into La Salle coach Franz Pumaren shortly after he’d been reelected to the Quezon City council. Even Pumaren, who had led the Green Archers to several titles, sounded starstruck when he described the crowd: “The janitors in Araneta always say if there’s an Ateneo-La Salle game, once everybody’s out of the coliseum, it still smells good because of all the socialites watching.”
On the day of the big game, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get in. The staff at Araneta knew me from the PBA, but this event required a higher level of security clearance. Two armed guards stood outside the coliseum service entrance, checking names off a list of credentialed media guests. I wasn’t on the list, but I carried a handful of expired IDs and media lanyards from the PBA, the Malacañang Palace press corps, even my local ATM card. These were basically useless, but I planned to use them as subterfuge, something to flash at inquisitive officials while I smiled and disappeared into the crowd. I passed the first checkpoint by telling both guards that my name was on the other one’s list. On the other side of the green metal gate three women sat behind a desk checking names on yet more lists. These gatekeepers worked all the PBA games; when I saw them I figured I was in the clear. Not so fast. The dowager of the lists, after scouring her spreadsheets, looked at me and shook her head. “This is UAAP,” she said. “Not PBA.”
I had to see this game. In my mind, I had built it up as the pinnacle of Philippine enthusiasm for basketball, and a positive counterpoint to the manipulative hoops politics I’d discussed with Aries Arugay. Yes, business moguls and government officials attended Ateneo-La Salle matches for reasons—school spirit, networking opportunities, to flaunt their status—that had little to do with the sport, but the fact that only hoops could unite these people buoyed my spirit. I wasn’t going to miss it. I kept pleading my case with the gatekeeper while she checked credentials. I tried to charm my way in with Tagalog. Her icy response: “You speak well.” I tried various American accents—Brooklyn, southern, midwestern—at different speeds and volumes, hoping that a Yankee imbecile act might exasperate her to the point that she’d wave me through just to get rid of me. She was unflappable: “I’m sorry, sir.” I got desperate. When the name-checkers were all occupied, I snatched the red access stamp from the table and pressed it against my wrist. I tossed the stamp back on the desk and strolled through the final turn-style. The beefy security guard there knew me from PBA games. “My friend!” he said, and slapped me on the back. “You made it!”
About forty-five minutes before tip-off, the arena began to fill. The students, infantry on this hoops battleground, arrived first. Ateneans sporting blue and La Salle fans donning emerald swarmed through the upper deck, then gradually segregated themselves into opposing semicircles. This was the “ocean of green and blue” that local writers romanticized, with each half of the venue wholly colonized by a color. Long before the players took the court, the students started working themselves into a lather with opposing chants punctuated by the school bands’ thundering kettle drums.
“An-i-mo La Salle! An-i-mo La Salle!”
“One! Big! Fight!”
Next, the well-heeled alumni trickled in to take their courtside seats. They arrived fresh from corporate boardrooms and government ministries, still crisp in their blue or green button-down shirts and matching ties. Their patrician air, however, was a charade. Even the most highfalutin fans had to pull every available string to get those seats; some bribed media pals for press passes, some flew in from Jakarta and New York, and some paid scalpers more than a hundred bucks for tickets with a five-dollar face value. For Pumaren, this was one of the occasions when life as a coach-cum-politician wasn’t so sweet. He only received four comp tickets but had to pay steep premiums on scalped passes for campaign donors and business partners. Due to the travails of obtaining tickets, fans defended their seats like hyenas guarding a juicy carcass, and the handful of interlopers who arrived early with hopes of squatting on front-row real estate were swiftly removed. Still, amid all the glamour and pomp, I was pleased to see a couple of the same gaunt drag queens who attended every PBA game wandering the stands. It lent a hint of oddball social justice to the proceedings, a reminder that Araneta was usually the capital of cockfighting, the habitat of Ginebra, and the home court of the hoi polloi.
Soon the entire arena was packed except for one row behind the Ateneo bench. There, alone, sat Ateneo alumnus Manuel V. Pangilinan, chairman of the Philippines’ largest phone and Internet conglomerate, which also owned the Talk ‘N Text franchise. It was hard to figure out what mattered most to Pangilinan, who was known throughout Manila as MVP: being a telecommunications mogul or the godfather of Philippine basketball. The basketball programs at Ateneo and another school he attended, San Beda College, would have been in the poorhouse if not for Pangilinan’s beneficence.69 He also served as president of the Philippine national basketball federation, and his mobile phone company, Smart, sponsored the developmental team that hoped to qualify for the 2012 Olympics.
Pangilinan was the ringleader of a group of donors who restored Ateneo’s basketball program from a UAAP laughingstock to a national championship contender. Their money sent the team on overseas training jaunts to the same gyms NBA players used during the off-season, and it allowed Ateneo to hire the gold standard in Philippine coaching, PBA Hall of Famer Norman Black. Blue Eagle benefactors even paid a six-figure fee to have the floor used at the 2000 NBA All-Star Game installed at Ateneo’s university gym, a purchase that was supposedly made to provide athletes with a first-class playing surface but was probably also inspired by the alums’ desire to play pickup games on hardwood that once absorbed sweat droplets from Karl Malone and Kevin Garnett.
At the game, Pangilinan occupied his solitary row, surveying the court through small oval glasses with his arms folded across his chest—the empty seats around him like a gesture of deference. When the teams emerged from the tunnel and both sides of the crowd erupted, Pangilinan peered a little more intently at the layup lines; the Blue Eagles, after all, were his investment, and beating La Salle was the payoff. Before long a conga line of unctuous hustlers approached Pangilinan. Some chose to beam their widest smile and chance a quick embrace, while others opted for a steely, professional demeanor. They wished each other good luck, paid their respects, and disappeared to their seats. Commentators liked to sa
y that business flatlined on afternoons when Ateneo and La Salle played, but instead the deal-making just migrated to Araneta’s lower deck. Pangilinan’s procession of suitors continued for ten minutes, until the coaches put the finishing touches on their pregame rhetoric and the referees’ whistles heralded the start of the game. Finally, Pangilinan was joined by an Atenean of equal stature, Senator Jinggoy Estrada, and soon there were no more empty seats.
Across the court, La Salle’s alumni sugar daddies—men like shipping mogul Enrique Razon Jr., who donated about $1 million to refurbish La Salle’s sports center and finance athletic scholarships—blended into the green expanse. Fronting the La Salle side was U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney, guest of La Salle devotees José T. Pardo, a former finance secretary, and the Araneta clan. At first glance it didn’t look very diplomatic, but when I took time to decode Madame Ambassador’s symbolic attire, I could see that although Kenney sat with the La Salle crowd, she wore a modest blue blouse and held a pair of Ateneo balloons. Kenney may have been serving the Bush administration, but the way she played both sides smacked of Clintonian triangulation. With her cropped blond hair, perky composure, and clever neutrality, she brought to mind the woman who would become America’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Naturally, the ambassador’s aides professed that attending Ateneo-La Salle games had nothing to do with her diplomatic agenda. Kenney, they said, had been a basketball fan since her college days at Clemson University. Perhaps that was the case, but I suspect the ambassador also didn’t want to miss the country’s most politicized and commercialized sporting event.
Pacific Rims Page 27
