Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  A sliver of Alaska supporters sitting behind the basket closest to the Aces’ bench put up token resistance, matching the Ginebra chant with “Ee-skwa-ter! Ee-skwa-ter!” Calling the lumpen Gin-King fans squatters—slum dwellers who lived in improvised shacks—was insensitive and not necessarily accurate. But the Alaska die-hards, led by Hector the aging ladyboy and his mildly disabled sidekick who punctuated the rallying cry by thrusting his wooden crutch into the air, hailed from the same rungs of society as the Ginebra masa, so their off-color retort wasn’t mistaken for elitism. Besides, hardly anyone could hear Hector and his band of misfits, since they were outnumbered almost two hundred to one. Even though I was with the undermanned Alaska posse, I found the Ginebra crowd intoxicating. The chant made my hair stand on end, and I remembered Chito Loyzaga describing the way players became addicted to it. Once you heard the booming voice of 20,000 people cajoling you to victory, how could you play without it? But I also recalled what Nic Belasco told me about playing against the crowd—when you hear that chant, you want to beat Ginebra even more just to shut them up.

  Alaska had beaten Ginebra twice already, but when this third match began the Aces looked rattled. Early in the game Willie penetrated and found Sonny Thoss alone in front of the rim. All season Sonny had finished these plays with two-handed dunks, yet this time he tried to finger-roll the ball. It clunked off the back of the rim. Sonny was able to grab his own rebound and salvage the play with a layup, but the mishap was a sign of the Aces’ hesitant play. Ginebra was steamrolling them. A few possessions later Sonny caught a pass in the low post, faced up to the basket and saw his defender playing two steps off him. He rose for a simple seven-foot jumper and badly short-armed the shot, which dropped into Ginebra hands without touching the rim. Sonny wasn’t the only player having a hard time finding his range. All of Alaska’s outside shots were short. The team scored on a few offensive rebounds, but they mostly relied on Roe’s willpower to put points on the board. A few times in the first quarter Roe caught outlet passes or took defensive rebounds, then dropped his shoulder and plowed through the whole Ginebra defense to flip in lefty half hooks. It was an unsightly rendition of basketball gridiron, but it was Alaska’s only way of staying close.

  One of the Ginebra players doing the most first-quarter damage was Johnny Abarrientos, the thirty-six-year-old point guard beloved within the Alaska organization for leading the Aces to the 1996 grand slam. To Cone, the assistant coaches, and their loved ones, Abarrientos was literally family—a perennial guest at birthday parties, a sponsor at their weddings, and a godfather to their children. When Abarrientos poked a crossover out of Willie’s hands and cruised downcourt for a layup, Bong Hawkins’s teenage daughter, sitting a few seats away from me, covered her eyes and said, “Oh crap! My ninong!” Her godfather was abusing his former team.

  Cone’s plan to contain Rod Nealy had run into a major hiccup. Keeping the ball out of Nealy’s hands was turning out to be much easier said than done. The backcourt chaser had been effective. Whenever Nealy saw a double team coming, he passed the ball to an open teammate. From there, Nic or Rey was supposed to deny any passes back to him. In theory, they would do this by keeping a hand in the passing lane between Nealy and the ball and shadowing the import’s every move. The problem, however, was that Nealy was too shifty for Alaska’s defenders, whose feet seemed tangled as they tried to follow his barrage of jab steps and head-and-body fakes. Once he had them off balance, he’d pop out, receive the ball, and create scoring opportunities for himself and other Ginebra players. By the end of the first quarter Nealy’s penetrations and Alaska’s ensuing defensive rotations had created openings for a trio of Ginebra three-pointers and a nine-point lead for the Gin Kings.

  Nealy also had a knack for turning Alaska’s best defensive possessions into disheartening failures. Early in the second quarter, Rey guarded Nealy so tight that his hand was momentarily caught inside Nealy’s jersey. The Ginebra import just shrugged Rey off, caught a pass near half-court, dribbled twice toward the key, then crossed over into a step-back three-pointer that splashed through the net. Meanwhile, Cone was substituting new players after almost every dead ball, trying to find someone on his bench who could hit a shot. He came up empty. The Aces were en route to missing their first twenty-five outside shots. The team’s only baskets came from Roe, who saved the team from a near shutout in the second quarter with his steady mix of push shots in the lane and assists to teammates cutting along the baseline for layups.

  But Roe’s point production couldn’t keep pace with the entire Ginebra team, especially Nealy. Near the end of the second quarter Jeff Cariaso tried to foul the import on a fast break. He wrapped both arms around Nealy to prevent him from attempting a shot, but all it took for Nealy to break free was a simple jump to the hoop. Jeff tumbled away like a rag doll, and Nealy got the score and the foul. Nealy converted another and-one on his team’s next possession, this time wresting an offensive rebound from three Alaska players before head-faking them into the rafters. Just as Eddie Laure landed on Nealy’s back, the import launched through the knot of defenders and scored. Nealy’s bonus free throw put Alaska in a seventeen-point hole.

  Alaska called time-out and Cone earned a technical foul for chasing a referee onto the court to argue that a hand-check foul the ref neglected to call led to a Ginebra steal. A thunderous “Hee-neh-bra” chorus welcomed Cone as he stomped back to the bench. The tiny island of Alaska fans were cowed into silence, with one exception. Nic’s wife, a beauty queen and model who represented the Philippines in the 2003 Miss World pageant, cocked back a half-full water bottle and sent it skidding across the hardwood. In a country where the shy, modest woman is a gender ideal, and mahinhin, which translates loosely as “demure,” is among the highest compliments a woman can receive, the sight of Miss Philippines winging debris at the court meant that Jaworski’s spirit was very much alive inside the Araneta Coliseum. Nobody, not even a woman chosen to embody Philippine femininity, could avoid the Big J’s hotheaded legacy.

  The Aces didn’t score from the perimeter until midway through the third quarter. The shot that broke the seal was a Nic Belasco baseline jumper from sixteen feet. A minute later Eddie Laure connected on a three-pointer. Shots began to fall, and with each make a little energy returned to the browbeaten Aces. By the end of the third quarter they were chasing the ball out of Nealy’s hands and recovering to Ginebra’s shooters with more vigor than they had all game. Ginebra’s lead shrunk to seven points. Somehow, Alaska was in the game.

  The Aces kept surging in the final period, but Ginebra never folded. Roe began to pull ahead in his duel with Nealy, knocking the ball away from him with an uppercut swipe and forcing Nealy to give up his fifth foul. On the ensuing possession, Roe drove into Ginebra’s zone, absorbed a foul and scored. His three-point play cut the lead to four. Minutes later Willie’s three-pointer from the left wing, his first of the game, brought Alaska within three points. The teams traded baskets, with Roe cutting the lead to one, then Nealy engineering a basket to push Ginebra’s margin back to three. With about three minutes to play, Alaska finally got a stop when Ginebra’s Ronald Tubid lofted a reckless eighteen-foot runner from the baseline that soared clear over the rim. Willie responded with a jump shot that pushed Alaska ahead 93-92.

  The Alaska bench celebrated Willie’s go-ahead shot like it was a playoff buzzer-beater. The comeback was complete. They were still jumping up and down when Nealy swished a three-pointer over Roe’s fingertips. The Aces had spent most of the game clawing back from that seventeen-point deficit, only to have Nealy coolly erase their short-lived lead. The bench sunk back into their seats. Alaska might have given up after Nealy’s three if it weren’t for Mike Cortez. He caught a pass on the next trip downcourt, shot-faked a defender into flying past, then reclaimed the lead with his own triple. With Alaska up a point and less than two minutes to play, Mike intercepted a pass to the wing. Mike and Willie ran a two-on-one fast break, shuffling the ball back and fo
rth and then dishing to Roe, who trailed the play and finished with a two-handed dunk that put Alaska up three with about 90 seconds left to play.

  To seal the win, Alaska needed a stop. Ginebra ran a play to get Nealy the ball in the low post. Roe, Nic, and Sonny swarmed him with their arms high above their heads. Nealy managed to wheel into the paint and attempt a floater, and this time the ball struck backboard and nothing else. The miss seemed like his first of the game. After an Alaska timeout, the Aces worked the ball around the perimeter until the ball landed again in Mike’s hands. His second three-ball in less than a minute gave Alaska a six-point lead. The crowd fell silent except for Alaska’s pocket of fans, who filled the void with a new take on Ginebra’s mantra: “U-wi na! U-wi na!” Go home.

  Alaska owner Fred Uytengsu followed his euphoric players into the locker room after the win. When the boss stepped inside, all the players’ hooting and hugging ceased. They sat down and watched the breakfast magnate, tan and impeccably coiffed with a neat pompadour. “I think that’s one of the greatest comebacks I’ve seen us do,” he said. “We didn’t give up. If we play like this the rest of the conference, we’ve got big things in store for us.” As Uytengsu turned to leave the locker room, the players all chanted, “Bo-nus! Bo-nus!” The owner grinned, flashed his empty wallet, and walked out. Alaska was in the semis.

  13

  Skirts Versus Squirts

  With two weeks to rest and prepare while the league’s lower ranked teams contended for the remaining semifinal berths, Cone gave Alaska three days off, and the players scattered across the nation to relax and visit family in the provinces or unwind at hot springs and surfing resorts. Jeff Cariaso, still playing more than thirty minutes per game in his thirteenth PBA season, started his playoff ice-bath regimen. During the regular season, generous five-day buffers between games were the norm. Once the semifinals began, Alaska would play Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday every week until they won the championship or lost trying. In recent years Jeff, bearing down on his thirty-fifth birthday, readied his body for the playoffs and recuperated after games with a dip in ice water. Every day, he would submerge his body from the neck down in a frigid bathtub and emerge twenty minutes later, blue but refreshed.

  I also took a trip, although not really a vacation, during this respite from Alaska’s day-to-day grind. I flew to Cebu, the regional hub of the Visayan islands south of Manila. Cebu City had a reputation for being the Philippines’ most feverish basketball madhouse. The city was a regional gateway to the universe of elite college and professional basketball, so hoops talent from the Visayas and Mindanao bottlenecked there. Players proved themselves in Cebu City before making the leap to Manila. Of the many pro players who followed this path, two of the greatest were Ramon Fernandez and Abet Guidaben, dominant centers from the Toyota-Crispa days. Another was Alaska assistant coach Jojo Lastimosa, who grew up in northern Mindanao but began his career in Cebu with Mama’s Love, a cosmetics company-owned semipro team that played under various skin care-related names like the Lotion Makers. But I wasn’t headed to Cebu to learn about the city’s proud basketball tradition. I was searching for something I’d heard rumors about; a twisted, outlandish take on hoops.

  The whispers started with a drunken Peace Corps volunteer at a karaoke parlor. The American lived in a fishing town north of Cebu City, where he advised the local government on coastal resource management; that is, he encouraged anglers not to fish by dropping dynamite and cyanide into the water, but rather to preserve coral reefs and promote them as ecotourism destinations. He was visiting Manila for an annual meeting with Peace Corps administrators, and I met him with some volunteers who I previously helped conduct writing workshops in southeastern Luzon. Someone in the group mentioned my interest in basketball, and the Cebu volunteer peeled his eyes away from the Bon Jovi lyrics scrolling across the karaoke screen. “Come to Cebu,” he said. “We’ve got midgets playing against transvestites at the town fiestas.” He shared this tip in the jovial manner appropriate to our surroundings of Red Horse “Extra Strong” beer and synthesized monster ballads. Then, however, he seemed to reconsider as his voice turned grim. “Seriously,” he continued, “that game is intense.”

  The mere existence of a “skirts versus squirts” basketball game was not that outrageous. I had already watched a provincial Miss Gay pageant;88 in fact, I was selected from the crowd to present a bouquet to the winner of the national outfit competition. These events seemed in tune with other beloved rituals of mass humiliation like Wowowee, so grafting a strain of demented humor onto basketball seemed within reason. No one in the PBA hoops establishment had heard of Cebu’s midget-transvestite five-on-five, but it was all over the Internet in jittery handheld YouTube chronicles and on the home page of Aksyon Radyo, the Cebu-based talk and public affairs AM station that organized and promoted the exhibitions. Before long I was chatting online with Dexter Ligan, one of Aksyon’s on-air hosts. By the end of our conversation, I had finalized my plans to visit Cebu and witness a scintillating cement-court encounter. Little people versus ladyboys! The misunderstood against the maligned! This is where amazing happens.

  A few weeks later I was crammed into the passenger seat of Dexter’s sputtering, fire engine red Volkswagen Beetle, with his wife Margie riding in the backseat. Dexter and Margie filled me in on the basics of the Unano-Bading Showdown89 as we rambled past the Cebu provincial capital’s Romanesque facade on the way to an evening game in Lapu-Lapu, a small city on nearby Mactan Island. Dexter, the station’s earnest, mustachioed anchorman and play-by-play announcer for the Unano-Bading games, proudly noted that the midget-gay basketball sensation was hardly confined to Cebu City or even the whole of Cebu province. Adopting the model of a traveling carnival, Aksyon Radyo had taken the game all over the Visayas, from Leyte, site of MacArthur’s landing in WWII, to Siquijor, an island reputedly overrun by witches, and most provinces in between. The station charged flat rates on a sliding scale from about $400 to $1000, depending on the amount of travel required, to bring the game to a town near you. From there, the local sponsors, usually municipal governments or Catholic parishes, would set ticket prices and use the profits however they saw fit. The game had already broken into Mindanao with games as far away as Cagayan de Oro and Surigao City, and Dexter said the organizers had further plans of conquering audiences in Manila and Filipino migrant communities across the globe.

  The game’s origins, according to Dexter, were altruistic. Carlo Dugaduga, the station manager of Aksyon Radyo and Ligan’s coannouncer, came up with the idea as a livelihood project for midgets who couldn’t find regular work. The first games featured midget-on-midget action, and although spectators seemed impressed with the diminutive players’ ability to execute reverse layups and shoot three-pointers using regulation-size balls and baskets, the novelty wore off fast. By the third and fourth quarters the spectacle of exhausted little people summoning the strength to hurl air balls lost its charm. Then Dugaduga had a eureka moment that is to midget sports entertainment what Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment was to electricity. To keep the show from dragging, Dugaduga added drag queens to the mix. The formula was a hit; as Dexter said, “We found that this format was much funnier.” Margie chimed in from the back: “People really enjoy the halflings!”

  The cross-dressing players were brought in as stock villains, to be the Washington Generals to the midgets’ Harlem Globetrotters. For most people, community service means writing a check to the Red Cross or creating a mentoring program for troubled youth; for Dugaduga, it meant recruiting people who, due to physical disabilities or their sexual orientations, had been relegated to the margins of Philippine society, then convincing them to let hundreds of people mock them in a basketball-themed freak show. Although my instinct was to condemn Dugaduga’s Mother Teresa by way of P. T. Barnum scheme, I have to admit that it had been successful. Depending on how long they had been with the troupe, the performers earned between eight and twenty dollars for each game. It sounds like a
paltry sum, but in a country where almost half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, fifteen bucks is nothing to sneeze at. For many of the midgets, it was their only opportunity to contribute income to the families who supported them. Allan Castro, the shortest midget and the Showdown’s brightest success story, had been discovered during a game and cast in a local TV sitcom, Tres Metros, about the lives of three midgets who were each one meter tall.

  For Dexter, this was simply too much inspiration to bear. While the Bug idled at a red light, with missionary spirit pulsing through his veins, he reached into his knapsack and retrieved a pocket version of the Ten Commandments.

  “Have you heard of this book, Rafe?” he asked me.

  Believe it or not, I had. I even saw the movie. And, although I already knew the Ten Commandments, I accepted the gift, not only to be polite, but also because I thought to myself, What better way to prepare for a two-hour basketball drag show than by brushing up on the central tenets of Judeo-Christian theology?

  “Rafe, look on your right,” Dexter said as we approached the bridge to Mactan. “That used to be the biggest shabu”—Philippine slang for methamphetamines—“factory in the Philippines.”

  We pulled into a gravel parking lot behind Lapu-Lapu’s central basketball court just as the fading sun was giving way to the amber glow of sixty-watt lightbulbs rigged above vendors’ carts of fried fish balls and peanuts shot through with garlic and chili peppers. Jeepneys cruising the town plaza had the destination LAPU 2x painted on their sides, shorthand for the city named after Lapu-Lapu, the native chief credited with slaying Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 and temporarily repelling the Spanish conquistadors. Maybe an hour after we arrived, a battered green van rumbled into the parking lot. A dented loudspeaker was lashed to the roof with extension cords and the vehicle’s pocked metal shell looked like a soda can that had been crushed and then bent back into shape. It nudged through the dark, crowded streets and settled into a spot next to the court, where seven men dressed in various permutations of miniskirts, booty shorts, baby tees, and halter tops emerged from the back and began unloading midgets, some of whom were too short to climb down from the van.