Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Welcome to the apocalypse, as imagined by Adam Sandler. Wait, scratch that. Rather, welcome to fiesta in Lapu-Lapu City! The guests at Shangri-La’s prissy five-star resort on the other side of Mactan Island had no clue what they were missing.

  For three years running, the people of Lapu-Lapu hired Aksyon Radyo to stage the Unano-Bading Showdown. The local population just couldn’t get enough of the spectacle, which combined the roundball flair of Rucker Park, the exaggerated schtick of professional wrestling, and the good taste of midget tossing. In the words of Harry Radaza, the city’s sports and recreation chief, it all added up to “great family entertainment.”

  Yet even Radaza didn’t expect to see Aksyon Radyo’s motley crew roll into town for a third straight year. The staged exhibition always followed the same storyline: The munchkin team, literal underdogs, fell behind the taller RuPaul squad, until the dwarfs surged ahead to claim an improbable comeback victory. Along the way there was taunting and dancing, midgets were lifted and tickled, skirts were pulled down and bras became unstuffed. Having watched this game twice, Radaza assumed the town would be ready for a new set of cheap thrills. Something new and fresh, like a gay talent show. Not so. Once again the people demanded Aksyon Radyo’s basketball burlesque, and the local government delivered.

  “What can I say? People just love midgets,” Radaza offered as an explanation of the game’s popularity, and, looking at the hundreds of people lined up to buy tickets, and the dozens of others who had already staked out viewpoints in the branches of surrounding trees and on top of nearby trucks, it was hard to disagree with him.

  Elmer Gonzales’s pregame routine started in the dark, semiprivacy of the van, where Team Unano’s star guard solemnly changed into his yellow Aksyon Radyo uniform. His miniature physique was so impressively muscled that even his angular cheekbones seemed chiseled in the weight room. In his final act before taking the court, Gonzales meticulously polished his kids’ size sneakers with an old rag, scrubbing every smudge like he was preparing for the biggest game of his life.

  Outside the car, leaning with his back against a tire, Ran-ran Genio was far less stoic. He was the dwarf team’s Mister Personality, and he felt particularly outgoing that night because Lapu-Lapu was his hometown. Cousins approached and greeted him by pinching his potbelly, which was large enough to weigh down Yao Ming. He high-fived them and smiled at the attention, flashing a wide grin and a sparkling, fauxdiamond stud in his left ear. But even though Genio’s disposition was all sunshine, his story was dark.

  “Is it true, where you come from, the people will respect you even if you’re like us?” he asked me in Tagalog. My country wasn’t perfect, I said, but disabled people probably have more opportunities there. Genio, it turned out, had performed in a litany of bizarre spectacles that blurred the distinction between so-called “family entertainment” and human rights violations. He played one-on-one against a man who had been electrocuted and lost both arms at the elbows. He played one-on-two against a pair of smaller midgets. He competed in backward foot-races against drunks pulled from the crowd. And he boxed another midget who was paid to sucker punch him before the opening bell and then bite his ear in homage to Mike Tyson. Thankfully, Genio’s opponent did not chew as forcefully as Iron Mike.

  While Genio recounted his entertainment career, he was interrupted by a child, maybe nine years old, who darted from a crowd to poke his shoulder and then vanish back into the mob. Genio said the boy was probably dared to touch him, to see if he was a real person. And that, along with the money, was one of the reasons Genio played in these games: to show people, especially kids who didn’t know better, that they needn’t be afraid of little people. Philippine folklore was full of stories about duwende, impish gnomes with magic powers, and tiyanak , vicious changelings that assumed children’s bodies to lure their human prey. The Aksyon Radyo exhibitions gave Ran-ran an opportunity to demonstrate that he wasn’t some kind of mystical troll but in fact a basketball-crazy Filipino like most of his countrymen.

  The transvestites played under stage names like Beyoncé and Mother Nature and walked the well-trodden ground of gay entertainers in Philippine society. For decades male diva impersonators, showbiz reporters, and Miss Gay hopefuls have been vamping and prancing to please their audiences. While the drag queen dream team vogued for a group of local men who acted repulsed but couldn’t stop staring, I thought of Danton Remoto, the gay rights activist and English professor. Remoto once explained for me the niche Filipino homosexuals occupied: “In a society like this—very hierarchical and patriarchal—gays were traditionally seen as like women, and therefore inferior. In short, being inferior, they can serve you, which means either food or entertainment.”

  Samantha was the prettiest man on the team. With full lips, soft, almond eyes, and a small red scar on his chest, he confirmed Remoto’s analysis. Samantha told me that the Unano-Bading game was one of the few places where he felt accepted while wearing a silver bikini top and denim miniskirt. Who cared if the people in the crowd laughed and jeered? All he wanted was to put on a good show and make people happy.

  Like any basketball game, the Unano-Bading Showdown began with a jump ball. And from the moment that Castro, the shortest midget, waddled into the circle at center court and measured eye-to-knee against Samantha, the crowd let out an ecstatic howl that wouldn’t subside for ten minutes.

  To no one’s surprise and everyone’s delight, Samantha won the tip and sent the ball to Beyoncé, who looked like a bodybuilder under his halter top. The drag queens stampeded up and down the court, slapping the ball rather than dribbling it and chucking spastic overhead heaves at the rim. Sometimes they shot five or ten times in one possession and hit nothing but backboard. With each miss, the crowd laughed harder, until people were writhing on the sidelines in fits of hysteria.

  The midgets looked like a real basketball team. Genio dribbled around Mother Nature and then passed to Gonzales, who drove the lane. He was headed for a finger roll until Beyoncé scooped him off the ground and shook Gonzales until he dropped the ball. Mother Nature collected it and scored an easy layup, then ran up the sideline taunting the crowd with cartwheels that exposed the manly bulge beneath his ruffled miniskirt. Mother Nature continued the victory celebration by singling out an unfortunate man in the front row and forcing a triumphant lap-dance on him, and the fan reacted like he’d been set on fire. Again, the crowd let out a delirious “Eeeeeee!” loud enough to move the Earth off its axis.

  Beyoncé seemed poised to score when he caught the ball a few feet from the basket. That is, until the midget defense arrived. Because of Beyoncé’s height advantage, they made no attempt to disrupt his shot. Instead, three midgets grabbed hold of their opponent’s frilly skirt. Beyoncé jumped and his hips went up but the skirt stayed down. When he realized his G-string was exposed, he dropped the ball and fell to the ground, covering his junk while the midgets stormed off to score. At this point some unwitting grandfather in my row had seen too much. Still chuckling and shaking his head, the old man covered his face with a washcloth and rested his head in his daughter’s lap.

  Nothing got the crowd more worked up, however, than the midgets’ actual basketball talent. Watching Castro, whose tiny hands looked like marshmallows, hoist the ball from his waist and through the hoop seemed like the human equivalent of ants lifting fifty times their body weight. When Genio sank a shot from the foul line, teenage boys grabbed each other by the shoulders and pointed to the basket. The younger kids reenacted the shot the same way awestruck PBA fans once mimicked Billy Ray Bates’s spectacular dunks.

  After the game(as expected, the midgets won) Dugaduga approached me. “I’m interested in bringing Unano-Bading to the States,” he said. “Do you think we can find a sponsor?”

  Could he see the horror spread through my eyes? I could only imagine the mob of activists and do-gooders waiting to crucify Dexter and Dugaduga if they took their show to the United States. The truth was that I had almost as much troubl
e watching the game as the man with the towel over his face. During the first five minutes, while the 1,500 onlookers shrieked to high heavens, the air of mass hysteria mingled with the event’s absurdity to suck me into the enjoyable mayhem. Soon thereafter, however, a lump of doom formed in my throat. This comedic take on basketball hit the same unfunny note—desperate people pulling each other’s pants down—over and over again. Yet everyone around me remained doubled over in laughter, and Dexter, the guy who had invited me to church with his family and given me a Ten Commandments booklet, was riling up the unruly masses. I had been living in the Philippines for two years already, but I never felt more American, or more outraged for that matter. I loved Philippine basketball and its excesses, but the Unano-Bading Showdown was too much. It was wrong. Yet somehow the performers didn’t feel demeaned and fans enjoyed themselves with no apparent malice. I couldn’t understand it. Later that night, when I lay down to sleep in a grungy Cebu City pension house, I heard the howling Lapu-Lapu crowd. I felt guilty. I couldn’t rest. The best I could do was accept that there was no intended cruelty behind Aksyon Radyo’s spectacle.

  Back in Manila, I sought out Remoto to help me reconcile what I saw in Cebu with the country and basketball tradition that I loved. He revealed his own inner struggle over amusements like the Unano-Bading game. “One half of me would be laughing and laughing, and the other half would say, ‘They’ve consigned us again to the carnival!’” Remoto told me. “The side of me that’s a westernized gay rights activist, who went to Rutgers and who studied in the U.K., says, ‘Oh no, fucking hell!’ and the other half says, ‘Uy! How funny!’ These are gay men who dress up female and play basketball, which is a man’s game in the Philippines. It’s so postmodern. There are layers and layers of references and subreferences. We’re the first po-mo in the world without even meaning it!” Maybe so, but if the Unano-Bading showdown was somehow avantgarde, I was looking forward to banishing it from my mind and focusing on something old-fashioned, like Alaska’s goal of winning a PBA championship.

  14

  Powers that Be

  Aside from the occasional Cebu flashback, I was eager to see how Alaska would respond to the greater stresses of the playoffs. I’m afraid, however, that somewhere in my subconscious I will always carry the image of Elmer Gonzales’s petite body playing dead while receiving overenthusiastic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and gratuitous dry humping from a chubby transvestite.

  When practice resumed after the break, the Aces seemed focused. So did the coaches. And the trainers. Even the ball boys seemed intent on finding the extra gear that championship teams ride to titles. There was one problem, however. The team had no specific adversary to prepare for. It would be another week before Ginebra and San Miguel wrapped up their quarterfinal series, and a few days after that Alaska would face one of them in the semifinals. The coaches, especially Cone and Joel Banal, seemed elated to have this respite from the usual formula of scouting and game-planning. Their eyes lit up and they spoke faster, like they had been liberated from mundane practicalities like deciding whether to double-team an import or have Roe guard him one-on-one. Instead, they returned to teaching pure basketball—honing Alaska’s press break, tinkering with rotations in Banal’s match-up zone, and rehearsing every imaginable permutation of Cone’s triangle offense.

  For the players these drills were the hoops equivalent of homework. Someday the team would be better off for having spent an extra hour perfecting their box-out positions and listening to Cone and Banal recite treatises on the importance of basketball possession-by-possession. In the playoffs, Cone reminded his players, one turnover could cost them a series. However, when the coach unveiled lines like, “You want to treat each possession as its own, singular possession,” the players shot furtive glances at each other, gestured for ball boys to bring them Gatorade, and stared longingly at the wall clock. The coaches, unfazed by their tuned-out audience, continued in their strategic ecstasy.

  In one such moment, Cone stopped a five-on-five scrimmage to share some observations on the NBA’s pinnacle of staid execution, the San Antonio Spurs. That week, the Spurs had swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals and made the league’s best player, Lebron James, look ordinary. “That’s precision, fellas,” Cone said. “Think about that word: precision. The Spurs knew exactly what they wanted to do, exactly where on the floor they wanted to push Lebron, and they executed it on every possession. Precision.” Banal piped in, “Another word for precision is accuracy,” and repeated Cone’s speech almost word for word while substituting “accuracy” for “precision.”

  Even Roe, a player who prided himself in taking practice seriously and paying attention to his coaches’ instructions, started to lose his patience. He rolled his eyes and made the “Yap, yap, yap” sign with one hand. Dale Singson, who was standing next to Roe, noticed and placed a palm on the small of his back as if to say, “I know, big guy. Hang in there.”

  Throughout the season, I had enjoyed Cone and Banal’s tag-team seminars. Cone always had the first and last word, and he spoke with urgency. “Guys, if we don’t push San Miguel’s big men out of the low post, we’re going to lose! We can’t give them position. So big guys, when their guards run off screens on the baseline, don’t help too much. They’re not looking for the guards. They want you to step away and help, because when you do, their bigs will retake the post.” In the middle of Cone’s instructions, Banal would chime in to reinforce the plan, sometimes restating it in pure Tagalog for the local players who might not be as attentive in English. Finally, before relinquishing the spotlight to Cone, Coach Joel would toss in some spiritual guidance. Banal regularly shared his reflective, meditative side with the team. He was Alaska’s roundball Confucius; his best aphorisms—equal parts sage insight and mumbo jumbo—sounded like they were pulled out of basketball-themed fortune cookies. “Winning to me is not selfishness,” Banal told the team. “Winning is like the fulfillment of a man.”

  That was a good line, but he couldn’t stop there. Banal, feeling righteous, told the players to consider the sport their “earthly master” and to honor him with victory: “Please your earthly master as unto the Lord. If you please your earthly master, you’re also pleasing the Lord. And we please them by winning.” The players, not so easily stricken by whimsy, formed a bewildered column of furrowed brows. Mike Cortez turned to Roe and mouthed, Huh? Roe just shrugged.

  Normally, I appreciated Coach Joel’s musings. He had the warm, even canter of a hypnotist, and his conviction was infectious. Hearing him talk about basketball reminded me of watching Bob Ross, the serene, afroed landscape painter who discussed “happy trees” on public television. Not to mention, I could be equally guilty of sporadic, maudlin ruminations on basketball as the meaning of life; that Banal had the aplomb to share his ideas with twenty macho ballplayers was brave and refreshing. But even my tolerance for hoops gibberish wore thin during the first week of preplayoff practice. Cone and Banal’s instruction and inspiration, repeated over and over again, became ambient noise not much different from the rain that pounded the gym’s metal roof like thousands of tiny mallets.

  One afternoon while the coaches held class on one end of the court, I kept busy by dribbling a ball in low figure-eights through my legs. I heard Roe hiss at me and felt ashamed. I had been around the game long enough to know that handling the ball—even the quiet patter of my low dribble—while a coach talked was taboo. I expected Roe, who could be a Boy Scout when it came to basketball etiquette, to set me straight. Instead, he wanted the ball. He caught it and started shooting around on the far end of the court, while Cone lectured on the other side. If dribbling was a taboo, this was outright defiance. I chased Roe’s rebounds and passed to him while he launched baseline jumpers. The coaches didn’t seem to mind our breach of protocol. Perhaps they understood how antsy the players were feeling, or maybe they knew better than to pick a fight with their import this late in the season, especially a player like Roe, who always came prepare
d for games and ran himself ragged on the court. “I wanna tell him to put that clipboard down,” Roe said after banking a shot from the left wing. “This week has been the hardest since I got out here. I’m ready to go home, and not to Makati, I mean Seattle. My mental fatigue—” his voice trailed off. “I wish we just had a game.”

  When the players weren’t listening to their newly verbose coaches during the run-up to the semifinals, they devoted their time to defense. All season long the Aces had been known as a stout defensive team that relied on classic man-to-man principles—stay between your man and the basket; play defense with your feet, not your hands; deny passes to the post; away from the ball, always be able to see the ball and your man. But Cone saw room for improvement. He thought the team owed its stopper reputation to its collection of gritty individual defenders. Starters like Roe, Nic Belasco and Jeff Cariaso were among the league’s best all-around defenders at their positions, and certain reserves brought specialty skills to the floor. Eddie Laure could smother perimeter players with his go-go gadget arms and manic pursuit of the ball. John Ferriols was scarcely a hair taller than six-foot-three, but he had the heft and experience to outwork most big men for low-post position. Even when he got beat, John had quick hands and could strip the ball from an opponent who was going up for a shot.