I didn’t understand the full magnitude of Wowowee’s stranglehold on Philippine TV audiences until I actually appeared on the show. When a friend of mine from Queens visited me in Manila, I wanted to make sure he’d have a funny story to share back on Bell Boulevard, so I took him to a live taping of Wowowee. The producers looked at us and saw comedy gold. We were seated in the front row. Like everyone else in the audience, we sang along with the theme song and tried to keep up with the dance steps. At some point during this orgy of forced happiness and orchestrated pelvic thrusting, a female cohost thrust a microphone in my face and asked for shout-outs. The next thing I knew, confetti was raining down on me as Revillame pointed and shouted, “Ikaw ang Bigatin!” You’re a big-timer! Along with nine other handpicked patsies, I was led backstage and told how to play Bigat 10, one of the show’s trivia games.
My Wowowee debut felt pretty insignificant. I stood on stage, recited the Bigat 10 catchphrase, spoke to Revillame in kindergarten Tagalog, and buzzed in too late to answer my trivia question. A dancer handed me a cardboard box full of miniature juice boxes and sent me back to my seat. But what seemed like an anticlimax to me had actually made quite an impression on the TV audience. After the taping, while riding Manila’s light rail train, other commuters recognized me. They slapped me five, hugged me, asked to take pictures with me. Inside a mall, a KFC diner who saw me through a window dropped his drumstick and made Wowowee’s signature gesture, a right-to-left diagonal swipe under his chin. Later that week I took my friend biking in Guimaras, a sleepy Visayan island covered with mango plantations. Somewhere in the middle of a deeply rutted livestock trail, we stopped for drinks at a thatch hut next to a dirt basketball court with a hoop nailed to a coconut tree. The store sold tiny packets of peanuts and crackers, bars of detergent for hand-washing laundry, and sachets of shampoo draped over the window bars in long, perforated chains. They had no mineral water for sale, only warm bottles of Pepsi. I paid for the soda with a twenty peso bill, and the teenage girl who took my money studied my face. “Are you the foreigners from Wowowee?” Once our identities were established, the girl ran into a cinder-block house behind the hut and returned with her mother and a gaggle of younger siblings. “We’ve never met a celebrity!” she said.
The recognition continued for months. In my neighborhood it became permanent. Whenever I walked from my house to the train station, tricycle drivers buzzed by and yelped, “Wowowee!” This might sound strange, but the show was often compared to basketball because of its devoted following and fast-paced action.78 When I asked sports journalists and basketball old hands why Filipinos adored hoops, many of them mentioned Wowowee. According to their theory, people loved the game show for the same reasons they loved the game: There wasn’t a dull moment. There was drama in every Revillame trivia question and every hardwood lead change; there were laughs behind each geriatric undulation and each contorted layup. Both noontime shows and hoops appealed to Filipinos’ short attention spans.
One major difference, however, was that basketball hadn’t attracted as many detractors as Wowowee. Sure, there was plenty to bemoan about the excessive side of Filipinos’ basketball jones. But to many opinion makers, Wowowee was the bête noire of Philippine society. The show’s cynical trade-off with its mostly impoverished guests—cash prizes for dignity—has been likened to dangling meat in front of wolves. In February 2006 that desperation turned fatal when the show’s producers offered free tickets for Wowowee’s anniversary show to a crowd of 40,000 people waiting outside an arena in Pasig City. Much of the mob had been sleeping on the street outside the entrance for days, and when word spread that a limited number of tickets were being given away, a stampede broke out. More than seventy people, mostly elderly women, were trampled to death.
Less than a week later, investigative journalist Sheila Coronel took a stand against Wowowee in a speech to Philippine advertisers:Shows like these offer a way out of poverty through the magic, the razzmatazz of television. Never mind hard work or social reforms. The key lies in the luck in the draw, the promise of salvation provided by a celebrity entertainer. Is it any wonder that the following of TV programs like Wowowee resembles that of a messianic cult? And isn’t Willie Revillame some sort of messiah of the idiot box?
Coronel’s criticism was measured compared to the bloodthirsty rhetoric of politicians and columnists who called for Revillame’s head, but Wowowee weathered that public relations storm and others that followed. Yet despite the program’s rollicking debasement of the most vulnerable Filipinos, watching Wowowee remained a hypnotic, almost unavoidable experience, and the show continued to lure rubberneckers from the tricycle driver hangouts along Katipunan to the Alaska players lounge.
“Let’s go, fellas. Time to work.” Tim Cone breezed out of his office, cast a disdainful eye at Wowowee, and shut off the TV. The coach’s legs were a little wobbly as he wheeled a dry-erase board in front of the television. His hair seemed unwashed and matted down, and his cheeks sagged a little lower than usual. The kidney-shaped bags under Cone’s eyes were puffier and more purple. If Alaska lost its tiebreak to Ginebra, it wouldn’t be due to Cone’s lack of effort. Yet the trickiest part of the coach’s strategy—instilling his game plan so the players could execute it in tomorrow’s game—was just beginning. “We’ve got to stop Nealy,” Cone was referring to Rod Nealy, Ginebra’s prolific southpaw import. “No one’s gonna stop him one-on-one. The only guy in the league who could even do it on a fifty-fifty basis would be Rosell.”
Roe rolled his eyes at the backhanded compliment but kept listening to Cone. The coach seemed propelled through his exhaustion by a final adrenaline rush, a coach’s high. In Nealy and Ginebra coach Jong Uichico, Cone had found worthy adversaries, and he’d spent much of the previous forty-eight hours devising a scheme to shut down the Gin-King import. For Cone, who relished the cerebral side of hoops, this was an opportunity to turn the basketball court into a chessboard. Nealy was Ginebra’s queen. He was their primary ballhandler, scorer, playmaker, and rebounder. Nealy did it all, and Cone was ready to spring a trap on him. “When you have a dominant, dominant import like they do,” he told the team, “you’ve got to have a disciplined game plan. You can’t approach him lightly.”
Ginebra was a throwback to the import-dominated teams of the early and mid-nineties, when Cone was crafting his coaching style and leading Alaska to its first championships. Back then he had to think up ways to contain players like Bobby Parks, a seven-time PBA best import who routinely put up 50- and 60-point games, and Tony Harris, who scored 105 points in a game. “Every night we had to go against a Michael Jordan,” Cone reminded the team about the old days. “Every game there was a Michael out there that we had to stop.” Over the years, imports receded into more subdued roles—if scoring just 30 points per game could ever be considered “subdued”—as coaches learned to slow the game down and attack foreign gunners with double teams and match-up zones. Modern PBA teams favored more balanced scoring, with roughly equal contributions from their imports and locals.
A mix of circumstance and patriotism forced Ginebra to revert to the one-man-team model. The Gin-Kings owned the league’s most talent-laden roster that year, starting with Jayjay Helterbrand and Mark Caguioa, two American-bred guards who had been unstoppable while leading Ginebra to the most recent all-Filipino championship. Like Alaska forward Tony dela Cruz, Helterbrand and Caguioa had been called to duty for the Philippine national team and weren’t playing in this conference. Ginebra began the current season with Rudy Hatfield, a chiseled six-foot-three Fil-Am who was the league’s preeminent garbage man, a human perpetual motion machine who could average 15 to 20 points on offensive rebounds and broken plays alone. But the same relentless energy that made Hatfield a terror on the court made him impulsive away from the game. He had already gone AWOL once in the aftermath of the Fil-sham scandal. After the Senate hearings, the Department of Justice ordered Hatfield and a handful of other players deported. In Hatfield’s case, the or
der was reversed, but by the time he was cleared to play, Hatfield wanted nothing to do with Philippine basketball. He returned to Michigan, where he pursued various flights of fancy, first exploring a professional wrestling career, then training to become a firefighter because, as he later told Philippine Star columnist Quinito Henson, “chicks dig guys in suspenders.” At the end of 2006, Ginebra was able to lure Hatfield back to the PBA, and he helped the Gin-Kings win the all-Filipino title while also enchanting fans with his brand of Rodmanian lunacy.79 Hatfield played for Ginebra when Roe and Alaska beat them in the second game of the season, but a few weeks later he drifted away again, this time to provide moral support for his Stateside fiancée, who was embroiled in a child-custody suit.
Without Hatfield and their all-star backcourt, Ginebra’s roster read like a basketball contingency plan, all journeymen and backups. Uichico’s decision to use Nealy as an old-fashioned “me against the world” import was the coach’s way of making the most of his options. The outdated strategy proved effective, and Ginebra finished with one of the league’s best records because Nealy was, in Cone’s estimation, one of the best imports the league had seen in years, a player capable of scoring 30 or 40 points per game and creating shots for teammates who couldn’t get free on their own. Also, opposing coaches got so used to preparing team-oriented game plans that they seemed to have forgotten the decades-old tricks for handcuffing Godzilla imports like Nealy. But Cone remembered Tony Harris and Bobby Parks, and he unveiled his plot with a hint of nostalgic glee.
“We’re gonna scheme him, fellas,” Cone announced while drawing a full-court rectangle on the whiteboard. “Nic, Rey, it’s gonna be one of you two guarding Nealy.” Cone looked at his import-stoppers, Belasco and Hugnatan. “You have to play him baseline to baseline: ninety feet of defense.” Ginebra liked to have Nealy handle the ball as a point-forward so other teams couldn’t deny passes to him on the wing. Cone wanted the ball out of Nealy’s hands, so he planned to sic his defenders on him full-court. “Then Willie, Mike, Dale—you guys are gonna play the backcourt chasers,” Cone said. To make sure Nealy passed before he crossed half-court, Alaska would send one of its guards—the quickest on-ball defenders—to pester him into getting rid of the ball. “If he doesn’t pick up that ball, then tuloy, tuloy, tuloy until he picks it up and passes,” Cone said, injecting a little Tagalog to emphasize that the guards should pursue Nealy until he gave up the ball. “Rule number one is he never crosses half court with a dribble.”
As soon as Nealy passed, the chaser would scramble back to cover his man, and Nealy’s defender would jump into a full denial defensive stance, staying between Nealy and the ball at all times and hopefully preventing him from receiving it again. “When they see you’re denying him, they’re probably gonna send him down to the right block and look to post him up,” Cone instructed Nic and Rey. “If he gets it, Roe is going to leave his man and double. When he passes out of the double, Roe is going to stay on Nealy, and Nic or Rey, you guys are going to rotate back to Roe’s man.” By then, Cone reasoned, the twenty-four-second shot clock would be winding down, so if Ginebra “reposted”—passed back to Nealy after the double team—he would have at most eight seconds to score against the league’s best one-on-one defender. “We want to cut his touches from sixty or sixty-five to thirty,” Cone said. “We want him to either score under 20 because he has to give the ball up or score 30 and shoot 30 percent because he has to force shots.”
Before dismissing the players, Cone took a deep breath and looked at his team. “Remember, fellas,” his voice became grave. “We got a Ginebra crowd waiting for us tomorrow.”
12
Hee-neh-bra!
For more than twenty years the Ginebra crowd has been the PBA’s most intimidating force. Before facing Ginebra in a recent playoff series, Air 21 Express 80 Coach Bo Perasol described the match-up as his team “versus the Philippines.” The Gin-Kings seemed to have more fans than the league’s other nine teams combined, and opponents knew that playing Ginebra meant confronting an overflow crowd of tens of thousands of fans, 90 percent of whom would be Gin-King fanatics. Wherever Ginebra played, they claimed the home-court advantage. The team’s full name, Barangay Ginebra, alluded to a neighborhood; a nationwide community of working-class fans who supported the Gin-Kings as if their lives depended on it. The mob’s constant din was impressive, but even that clamor paled in comparison to the impact of its signature chant, pronounced with a Spanish G: “Hee-neh-bra! Hee-neh-bra!”
That one voice, many thousands strong, could swing the momentum of games in Ginebra’s favor. Referees couldn’t help but be influenced by the crowd’s energy, so borderline calls favored the Kings. Some opposing players, determined to silence the horde, submitted their best efforts against Ginebra. Others turned into cowering pill bugs. For the Ginebra players, the crowd was like a drug. Chito Loyzaga, a Ginebra mainstay of the eighties and nineties, once told me about the chant’s ability to lift the players’ performance: “When you hear them, you’re in Heaven. You’re not standing on solid ground.” Altogether, coaches guessed that Ginebra’s crowd advantage was worth about seven extra points per game.
The crowd’s passion had a menacing side. During Alaska’s 1990s glory days, the road to the title often went through Ginebra. Cone remembered heated playoff games when the referees waited in the arena until three or four in the morning after Ginebra losses, time enough for the team’s vengeful militia to disperse. Only then could the officials go home safely. The benchwarmers’ habit of wearing hand towels on their heads had its origins in the rugged Ginebra crowd of old. The cloth, players found, took the sting out of falling coins.81 During those years, Alaska made the mistake of printing promotional bumper stickers, which the players and coaches pasted on their cars. The bumper sticker era ended promptly after the team played Ginebra, when Cone and the Aces walked to the parking lot and found their vehicles keyed.
Ginebra consciously cultivated its flock. While the tradition of fans mingling closely with players after practices and games reached back years before the PBA existed, Ginebra was among the first pro teams to make community outreach a staple of its public image. In the eighties and nineties, Ginebra scheduled practices in the late afternoon so supporters could visit on the way home from work. Gin-King players brought pastries and the noodle dish pancit to practices to throw surprise birthday parties for longtime fans. Between conferences and during lulls in the season, Ginebra sent players to town fiestas across the archipelago to give far-flung devotees a chance to meet the athletes they adored. Ginebra wasn’t the only team that catered to its fans. After all, such generosity was a standard facet of Filipinos’ renowned hospitality; but Ginebra made the custom team policy. Beyond that, Ginebra had been one of the Philippines’ leading gin brands for decades. Throughout its existence the liquor has been among the cheapest routes to sloppy drunkenness the country has to offer. During my time in Manila a third of a liter cost less than a dollar, and one-ounce shots in plastic packets sold for less than a quarter. In rural areas it wasn’t uncommon for men to finish work in the fields and then slowly drink themselves to sleep by passing around a bottle of Ginebra.82 The problem of chronic alcohol abuse aside, the gin and the team reinforced each other’s popularity and generated profits for their owner, the San Miguel Corporation.
Imagine if NBA or NFL franchises planned practices around their fans’ schedules? Or if the Lakers baked cupcakes and cooked spaghetti for their season ticket holders? If basketball were so vital to our daily routines that we stopped by our favorite teams’ practices after work? Life in the States felt too cluttered to make a beloved hobby such a large part of my daily routine. In the Philippines, I encountered basketball everywhere, even when I wasn’t looking for it. The game was woven into nearly all aspects of everyday life. Such an existence probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but for me it was ideal. Ginebra fanaticism was a prime example of how deeply basketball was embedded in Filipinos’ lives. But open practices and
birthday cake weren’t enough to explain the irrational passion of Gin-King fans. For the Ginebra mystique, there was another answer. His name is Robert Jaworski.
Over the course of Jaworski’s thirty-some years at the highest levels of Philippine basketball, the fiery point guard inspired a cult of personality that remains the heart of Ginebra mania more than a decade after he left the team in 1998. He was the most charismatic athlete in the nation’s history. On the court, Jaworski was beyond intense; he was driven by a violent need to win. The moment the final buzzer sounded, however, he became gentle, amicable, and willing to grant practically any request a fan might ask of him. His dual personality was perfectly suited to woo Filipino hoops lovers. Even Tim Cone, whose technical philosophy of basketball could not have been more different from Jaworski’s battle-of-wills approach, remembered worshiping Jaworski. “He was my absolute hero,” Cone told me in the days before the Ginebra game. “I was a die-hard fan. He doesn’t remember this, but I used to go to their practices when I was eleven or twelve years old.”
A barrel-chested six-foot-one point guard, Jaworski wasn’t particularly graceful, but he possessed uncanny basketball instincts. He could survey the court and see the future. He sensed where teammates would be and how defenses would react a couple seconds before they moved. Jaworski’s Polish-American father didn’t play much of a role in his son’s life, but by the looks of things, the younger Jaworski inherited a brawny physique not uncommon in certain pirogi-loving precincts in Chicago. Jaworski’s compact frame may not have been the prototypical basketball body, but he used it to great effect against the skeletal players of the seventies and eighties. His bullish drives to the hoop were famous for leaving trails of aching defenders scattered in his wake. Still, even in his prime, Jaworski wasn’t his generation’s premier talent. He wasn’t even the best on the Toyota team; that player was Ramon “El Presidente” Fernandez, a four-time MVP who owns the PBA all-time scoring record.
Pacific Rims Page 30
