Pacific Rims Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Hoop Epiphanies

  Chapter 2 - Alaska in the Philippines

  Chapter 3 - A Career Reborn

  Chapter 4 - A Head Start Becomes Destiny

  Chapter 5 - From Savior to Lemon, in 48 Minutes

  Chapter 6 - The Birth of Paeng Bartolome and Other Initiations

  Chapter 7 - The Legend of the Black Superman

  Chapter 8 - A Rim in Every Baryo

  Chapter 9 - Fil-Am or Fil-Sham?

  Chapter 10 - Courts of Public Opinion

  Chapter 11 - My Big Break

  Chapter 12 - Hee-neh-bra!

  Chapter 13 - Skirts Versus Squirts

  Chapter 14 - Powers that Be

  Chapter 15 - The Gift of Basketball

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  First published by New American Library,

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  First Printing, June 2010

  Copyright © Rafe Bartholomew, 2010 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Bartholomew, Rafe.

  Pacific rims: beermen ballin’ in flip-flops and the Philippines’ unlikely love affair with basketball/Rafe Bartholomew.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18791-3

  1. Basketball—Philippines—History. 2. Basketball—Social aspects—Philippines. 3. Filipinos—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  GV885.8.P5B37 2010

  796.32309599—dc22 2010003851

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For my parents, Patricia and Geoffrey Bartholomew

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Hundreds of people deserve thanks and credit for bringing this book into existence. To those whom I can’t mention in this short space, I’m grateful for your help and sorry for the omission.

  I never would have made it to Manila without help from Chris Hager, Sara Anson Vaux and Rick Gaber from the Fellowships Office at Northwestern University. Also at NU, Richard Roth, Bob McClory, Alex Kotlowitz and Charles Whitaker at the Medill School of Journalism prepared me to report and write this book. Every page contains something I’ve learned from them.

  The Philippine American Educational Foundation in Makati City supported me throughout my time in the Philippines, and I owe a large debt of gratitude to their helpful and professional staff: Dr. Esmeralda Cunanan, Con Valdecañas, Marj Tolentino, Gigi Dizon and Yolly Casas.

  Thanks to Mollie Glick at Foundry and Mark Chait at NAL, who have done more than anyone else to make this dream a reality. To all the editors I’ve worked with over the years: Tom Jolly at the New York Times, Mike Seely at Seattle Weekly, Josh Levin at Slate and Alison True at the Chicago Reader. Thank you for believing in the story of Philippine basketball.

  To the journalists who made my research possible: Sev Sarmenta, Bill Velasco, Quinito Henson, Jaemark Tordecilla, Ronnie Nathanielsz, Reuel Vidal, Peter Atencio, Beth Celis, Boyet Sison and Jinno Rufino; and to the professors at Ateneo de Manila University and UP Diliman who taught me so much about Philippine history and society: Michael Tan, Benjie Tolosa, Jojo Hofileña, Aries Arugay, Danton Remoto, Lou Antolihao and many more.

  Of course, I’m most thankful to the Philippine Basketball Association and the Alaska Aces for granting me access to the league and the team. In the PBA, commissioners Noli Eala and then Sonny Barrios, as well as Ricky Santos, Fidel Mangonon and Botong Chavez opened many doors for me. I cannot thank the Alaska Milk Corporation and the Aces franchise enough, from Sir Wilfred Steven Uytengsu, Jr., and Joaqui Trillo, to Coach Tim Cone and all of the players, assistant coaches and team staff. You are the biggest part of this book. Thanks to Rosell Ellis for being so generous with his time and basketball wisdom.

  To the hundred-plus players, coaches and others I interviewed over the past four years, thanks for sharing your stories with me.

  To all the people I played basketball with in the Philippines: Coach Ronnie Magsanoc and the SMC All-Star pickup crew; the regulars at the Xavierville Phase II clubhouse and Loyola Heights barangay hall; Jutes Templo and his Wednesday night group; and especially the La Salle Greenhills group—Ravi Chulani, Matt Makalintal, Darvin Tuason, Chris Tan, Coach Norman, Banjo Albano and Sarah Meier Albano, Aki Aquino, Renz, Sam and Sherwin Dona, Chris Viardo and so many more.

  My friends and loved ones on both sides of the Pacific—Lauren Manalang, who has had my back in so many ways and whose work on this book gave me one more reason to love her; Ricardo Bernard, Pat Michels, Birju Shah, Brian Fuchs, Josh Centor, Mike Paulson, Michael and Kathy Huang, Charlene Dy, Chris Lanning, Ryan Guzman, Becca Dizon, Alex Compton, Kelly Williams, mga kabarkada ko from LP TODA (Drew’s terminal), and many others—I couldn’t have done this without you.

  At sa mga mambabasang Pilipino, sana’y matutuwa kayo sa sinulat ko. Ibinuhos ko ang lahat dito. Maraming maraming salamat.

  Introduction

  Back in the summer of 2005, when I was preparing to move to the Philippines for a year on a government-funded academic grant, I heard a lot of unwelcome advice. At the time, I was filling in as a bartender at McSorley’s Old Ale House, the landma
rk New York pub where my father had been a barman my entire life. During slow shifts, customers from McSorley’s curious demographic mix would sidle up to the 151-year-old bar to chat. Sooner or later I’d divulge my Philippine plans, and people’s sundry responses painted a discomforting picture of my future home. Japanese tourists, mindful of the Muslim insurgency in the country’s far south, said it was better to be blown up in a terrorist attack than kidnapped and beheaded. A genial, red-cheeked midwestern retiree shared, with great joy, that he’d met his twenty-something wife there. A group of Filipino-Americans advised me to hire a private driver and beware razor-toting pickpockets who would slash open my backpack and bolt with its contents. A U.S. Marine who’d recently returned from a mission in the island nation bragged that he’d parlayed a hot hand at a craps table into an “eight-some,” and said I shouldn’t board my Manila-bound flight without first packing a suitcase full of rubbers.

  When I explained that I was going to the Philippines to study the country’s devotion to basketball, most of the time the customers’ faces just went blank. The idea that I’d travel from New York, a self-proclaimed mecca of hoops, to Southeast Asia in order to learn something about the sport was usually met by a few seconds of confused silence and then the dubious rejoinder: “They play basketball there?” When I answered, “Yes,” typical follow-up questions ranged from “Aren’t they too short?” to “Do they play on ten-foot rims?” I wanted to feel pissed-off, but even I wasn’t sure that the country’s reputed passion for hoops could live up to the hype. By then, however, it didn’t matter. I was locked in—I’d convinced a panel of academic judges that Philippine hoops was worth studying, received a grant, and bought my plane ticket. And on November 5, 2005, I was flying to Manila to find out for myself if Filipinos did indeed love basketball more than any other people on the planet.

  Still half asleep when the twenty-two-hour flight touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, I trudged through immigration and into the hectic baggage claim area. As passengers filtered into the room’s fluorescent yellow light, they began staking out territory around the carousel. A siren let out a long, plaintive note that set people scrambling for the final spots in front of the conveyor belt. The crowd was three deep at the coveted spaces close to the hatch where bags emerged from the basement, and weary travelers jostled for the best positions. There was something oddly familiar about their movements. When a tall American woman tried to squeeze into a gap no more than a few inches wide between the two people in front of her, one of the guys with inside position bent his knees, spread his legs, pushed his butt out and made it impossible for her to get around. She backed off and began maneuvering through the tangle to find another sliver of open space. Again, she was denied.

  In the back of my mind I heard my father, who set a rebounding record on his high school basketball team in early 1960s Ohio, barking commands from the sidelines at my own high school games: “Box out, Rafe! Box out!” I thought back to the one-on-one games we’d played when I was still half his size and I could feel his powerful forearm pressing against my back while the ball was on the rim, forcing me to crouch and stay balanced while pushing the heavier man away from the basket. I looked again at the airline passengers using their bodies to seal off space in front of the conveyor, performing the same rugged waltz, sliding from side to side and shuffling backward. No way, I thought. It can’t be.

  It was. The Filipino passengers were boxing out for position in front of the baggage carousel. I kept waiting for the American woman to execute a spin move around one of the guys’ backs to steal his position, but it never happened. No one was manhandling the female passenger, and this was a more civilized form of boxing out than what takes place beneath the backboards, but all the fundamentals were there. When it dawned on the woman that her attempts to worm her way to the front stood little chance against the other passengers’ exquisite defensive positioning, she rolled her eyes in frustration and settled into the second row. I, on the other hand, was all smiles. This was an auspicious sign. I’d been in the Philippines less than an hour and already I’d found what I was looking for.

  This is probably a good time for me to come clean about a dirty little secret: I, Rafe Bartholomew, am a basketball fanatic. Phew, that felt so good I almost want to say it again: Hello, my name is Rafe Bartholomew. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old former Fulbright scholar, and I am a basketball freak. Growing up in downtown New York City, I spent every weekday afternoon playing at the Carmine Street Recreation Center in Greenwich Village. Years passed during my teens when I wore basketball shorts at all times except in the shower. I slept in them, wore them around my family’s apartment, and kept them on under my jeans to be prepared anytime a game broke out. In college I built the reputation of some kind of hoops zealot, someone more interested in playing solid defense against a varsity player in a pickup game than finding a decent party, and someone who once played ninety-five consecutive days at the university gym.

  I know that my strange behavior is beyond my control. You see, basketball is in my genes. Sired by a former college player who passed along his lanky build and passion for the game, basketball called to me from an early age. In fact, even before I picked up a ball there were signs of my future calling. A year before I was born, the Episcopal church in my neighborhood nearly burned down, so I was baptized next door in a school gymnasium. I grew up playing against my father. He was gracious enough to let me beat him one-on-one, but he always saw to it that I had a fresh collection of bruises by the time I pumped my fists in victory. My father’s aim wasn’t to win those games but to toughen me up. He instilled in me the hard-nosed basketball ethics he’d developed during his scrappy upbringing in a steel town on the outskirts of Cleveland. To my father, defense was next to godliness, and there was nothing more shameful than letting your man score.

  When I was nine years old, I finally got my first chance to put these principles into play when my father deposited me at the Carmine Street gym. There, I learned to combine my father’s gritty approach with the flash of the city game. Soon, I was playing on youth teams alongside New York playground legend William “Smush” Parker, who started at point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2005 and 2006 NBA seasons, as well as a crop of other young dynamos whose careers never amounted to much but whose daring forays to the hoop remained in my mind as the Platonic ideal of how the game should be played—with generous helpings of derring-do.

  By the time I finished high school I had developed enough skill and versatility to draw the attention of small college teams—but I wasn’t big enough to play at the Big Ten university I attended, where six-foot-three white boys like me were more suited to playing Ultimate Frisbee. Instead, I joined a club team and became a dedicated gym rat. I spent so much time playing pickup games at the university gym that I could deliver scouting reports on the ballhandling tendencies of business school yuppies, favorite post-up spots of football linemen, and defensive liabilities of Taiwanese Ph.D. candidates. And I’m proud to say that I can count on one hand the number of times I threw a Frisbee. During those years, when I wasn’t playing ball, I was studying the game. Earlier in life, basketball books about New York like Darcy Frey’s The Last Shot and Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground were the first books I bothered reading for a reason besides class. Since then I’ve had a soft spot for hoops lit, and during college I ran across a pair of hardcovers that introduced me to some mind-blowing stories about Philippine basketball.

  The first of these was The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam’s chronicle of the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers’ season. The book never mentions the Philippines, but its last forty pages are dominated by a player named Billy Ray Bates, an amalgamation of every long-shot, hard-luck, Cinderella story in the inspirational-but-ultimately-tragic sports handbook. After finishing the book, I looked Bates up on the Internet and read that he became a brief sensation in the Philippine pro league after he washed out of the NBA. Intriguing. That planted t
he seed in my mind. The second book was Big Game, Small World by Alexander Wolff, a hardwood travelogue filled with dispatches from almost twenty countries. The chapter on Wolff’s trip to Manila stirred something inside me. Apparently, in this country halfway around the world, basketball was the only team sport that registered in the populace’s hearts and minds; baseball and football were afterthoughts. In this overwhelmingly Christian country, basketball was a cultural force on par with the Catholic Church. This was a world where the local dedication to roundball would give my own fanaticism a run for its money. The Philippines.

  The truth is, before I boarded my flight to Manila, I knew very little about Philippine basketball. Sure, I’d studied the country’s history and politics—but no one on either side of the Pacific offered any real insights into basketball’s role in the nation, and online editions of Philippine newspapers offered little more than game recaps from the local pro league and occasional gossip columns about players cheating on their celebrity wives. Aside from Wolff’s chapter and the assurances of Sev Sarmenta, a Filipino broadcaster I had contacted via e-mail, I had found little hard evidence that the hoops mania I planned to study actually existed.

  The dearth of confirmable facts about Philippine basketball gave my imagination space to run wild, and in the months before I left for Manila, I marveled about the twists of fate and historical anomalies that could have caused Filipinos to fall so hard for a sport that—on the surface, at least—didn’t seem to suit them. With an average height of five-foot-five, Filipino men are some of the shortest in the world, giving them a natural disadvantage in the sport’s most non-negotiable requirement. Of their Asian neighbors, only the Chinese have any international reputation for basketball, and that notoriety is based mostly on Yao Ming. The Philippines, meanwhile, hasn’t sent a basketball team to the Olympics since 1972, and the country’s last significant achievement in world basketball was a bronze medal in the 1998 Asian Games. Compared to the Olympics, that’s like being runner-up in the Greater Mongolia Shuffleboard Classic.