Pacific Rims Read online

  When I reached EDSA, the giant highway that cuts north-south through most of Metro Manila, I turned right and headed toward the post office. It was on NIA Road, fronting a sizable squatter community that was tucked behind EDSA’s government office buildings. The plywood and corrugated iron shanties piled on top of each other resembled a human hive, with its residents overflowing into the street. Children rolled tires down the street with sticks. Women hawked fish set up on plastic tables, waving minimops over the catch to shoo away flies. Competing karaoke machines contributed to an unharmonious din, punctuated by the horns of cars nudging through the chaos. More kids set fire to a pile of trash on one corner. Young men on bicycles zigged and zagged in every direction. Another corner was hosting a wake,3 and the mourners played cards on plastic tables set up next to the coffin. The area was teeming with basketball courts that revealed themselves like a set of Chinese boxes. The barangay court was the largest and best-equipped. It was a full-court with ten-foot rims and stanchions made of metal. The longer I scanned the neighborhood, the more courts I noticed. A succession of smaller, jerry-rigged hoops claimed almost every pocket of free space: a portable, nine-foot hoop and backboard made from salvaged two-by-fours and moved from corner to corner to avoid traffic; some rebar twisted into a rim and nailed to a board, then tied to a gasping, leafless tree; a toy rim and backboard stuck on the side of a dilapidated bus with suction cups.

  I went to the post office, mailed my letters, and when I emerged, the portable hoop had been moved right across the street from me. “Hey Joe, you wanna play?” a guy about my age called out. “Joe,” as in GI Joe, is the standard, if anachronistic name many Filipinos use to refer to American or American-looking men. I was wearing cargo shorts, running sneakers, and a polo shirt, but this Joe couldn’t say no to a game of three-on-three.

  We played on the southbound side of NIA Road, and moments after one of my teammates shouted “Game na!” to start play, a crowd of a couple dozen people materialized in the street and behind the basket. Three guys sat on the base of the hoop to keep the structure from keeling over. We used a striped, black and blue miniball that barely fit through an equally tiny hoop. This made shooting pretty difficult, but with a baby ball and a rim hanging just nine feet above the ground, I could suddenly dunk like Shawn Kemp. As soon as a teammate passed me the ball, someone shouted “Dunk! Dunk!” Instead, I fumbled the undersized ball, which was slippery smooth from the wear of thousands of bounces. My first shot squirted out of my hands and flew up one side of the backboard and off the other without hitting the rim. The delighted mob let out a roar of laughter and more chants advising me to dunk. Before I could stuff the ball, however, we had to pause and let some taxis pass.

  When we reclaimed the street as our half-court, I rebounded a teammate’s miss and jammed it back through the hoop. The crowd erupted. One boy shouted the Jerry Maguire catchphrase: “Show me the money!” A cluster of kids formed an impromptu Soul Train line while the boy in the middle performed the Harlem Shake, a high-octane gyration that went out of style about eight years ago. I seized the moment with some pop culture mimicry of my own, running through the throng and pumping my fist like Michael Jordan while high-fiving everyone within reach. The game turned out to be close. A pint-sized guard on the other team, who played in a powder blue jersey and a snow-white, faux-fur bucket hat, proved to be the only player capable of making long-range shots. Our team kept pace by waiting for me to rebound misses and slam putbacks through the hoop. With the score tied and both teams a point away from victory, I had the ball about ten feet from the basket and a chance to win the game. Perhaps I was enjoying the star treatment a little too much, because I really wanted to end with a flourish. I faked my man to the right, then blew by him with one dribble to the left. After that, I was airborne.

  In that moment, I lost awareness of my surroundings. As a player who could never put down more than the simplest one-hand stuff—and even that only happened a couple times—the change in the basket’s dimensions had an intoxicating effect on me. I was no longer an exchange student playing with squatters on an undersized, homemade hoop. I was a big-time college player, competing for a Final Four berth, and I was about to stuff my way to victory. Two defenders jumped to stop me, but I went over them and slammed the ball so hard that I almost brought the backboard down with me. The splintered two-by-fours let out a desperate creak and I felt the structure give under my weight as I released the rim. As I returned to the ground, the faces of a thousand pissed-off locals flashed in my mind. Luckily, the shrieking wood was just a warning and the basket survived; the people watching didn’t want to tear me limb-from-limb for destroying their hoop, they only wanted to share high-fives and a postgame snack of Skyflakes crackers and RC Cola poured into plastic bags and sipped through straws. I sheepishly accepted the hugs of a few dozen children and thanked God that I hadn’t destroyed their rim.

  Later that week, when I checked out the barangay basketball court in my neighborhood, I discovered that it wasn’t unusual for pickup games in Manila to draw crowds of onlookers. The barangay is the Philippines’ smallest unit of government, and all over the country you will find basketball courts standing side-by-side with barangay halls.

  The first time I strolled, ball in hand, to the Loyola Heights court for a morning shootaround, I could hardly believe my eyes: this wasn’t some playground hoop. It was the Taj Mahal of public courts. Of course, it wasn’t Madison Square Garden—the floor was cement and one of the rims was tilted an inch off-center. But back in New York going to a public court usually meant shooting on a half-court blacktop with an aluminum backboard wired to a chain-link fence. The court in Loyola Heights offered much more than rims with nets. A pavilion-style roof sheltered the court from the elements. The backboards were made of fiberglass, an upgrade from wood or metal, and lights dangled from the ceiling for night games. The rims were spring-loaded, breakaway models built to withstand powerful dunks, so that 230-pound athletes could hang on the rims without tearing them down or shattering backboards. Never mind that here in Quezon City they were being used mostly by 140-pound guys who played without sneakers and rejoiced on the rare occasions that they jumped high enough to tap the backboard.

  My first thought after laying eyes on my humble neighborhood arena was: Jackpot! I saw myself spending hour after hour working on pull-up jumpers and spin moves in the weeks and months ahead. And, on the off-chance I could find a magic elixir that would add six inches to my vertical leap and turn me into a rim-rattling dunk artist, I knew the breakaways had me covered. I started working out. It was around ten in the morning, already too hot for sane players to want to run, so I had the court to myself. I began a practice routine I developed in college, tossing the ball to spots around the basket, then stepping into these simulated passes and shooting jumpers or driving to the hoop. I had to push through the sodden tropical air and the sweat came easy. The rims were soft and broken-in from the volume of shots (millions, I guessed) hoisted at them. The ball never clanked off the hoop; rather, it met the iron, embraced it for a split second, and if I had the right touch, it rolled in. Man, it felt good.

  But then I saw the kids. A group of street kids clung to the fence next to the court, cheering “Kuya Raphael! Dunk! Dunk!” It was the first time I had seen them do something other than put their fingers to their lips and moan the words “hungry” or “coins.” Although I’d only been in the neighborhood a week, they already knew me. They’d seen me scouting restaurants on Katipunan Avenue and lugging groceries back from the store, and they milked me for loose change and leftover grub. They called me kuya, which means “big brother” in Tagalog but is widely used as a friendly title in the street, like “man” or “bro.” I obliged the dunk request, or at least I tried. When I got up in the air, the ball slipped out of my hand and I just grabbed the rim and hung for a moment instead of dunking. It was a sad attempt, but the kids applauded anyway. Eight-year-olds didn’t make a very demanding audience.

  Bu
t when I thought back on the crowd who’d watched me play outside the shantytown earlier that week, I wondered if it wasn’t just kids who could be awed and pacified by basketball, but whole communities. There I was, in a poor, developing nation, standing on a public basketball court that put most outdoor courts in New York to shame. If I walked a few minutes from my neighborhood, with its beautiful court and solid apartment complexes, I could find myself in any of three different squatter settlements, where people’s roofs were built with scrapped sheets of corrugated iron and patched with newspaper. In these communities, access to clean water, consistent electricity, and affordable medicine was a distant fantasy. The kids’ parents were the neighborhood denizens who drove motorcycle-sidecar taxis called tricycles, or sold single cigarettes and sticks of gum outside of coffee shops, or collected five-peso (about twelve cents) tips to guard parked cars. They earned enough each day to buy rice and canned sardines for the family, and maybe a bottle of dirt-cheap gin for themselves, only to wake up and start over the next day.

  My young fans were tiny, not only because Filipinos tend to be short, but because years of poor nutrition had stunted their growth. When I asked their age, kids who looked six said they were ten. The smallest girl, due to a birth defect, had one arm that ended in a nub at her elbow, while the other ended in a three-fingered claw. When it rained and the water of Diliman Creek ran high, I saw these kids toss their mealy clothes into the bushes and dive into the gray slurry, gleefully dodging plastic bags and broken bottles floating in the current. At night the creek smelled like pestilence, yet it was the kids’ favorite bathing hole.

  In a community as impoverished as this one—and there were many other places far worse off—how did public money end up being poured into a basketball court? It was too early for me to understand how Filipino politicians used hoops to appease constituents without providing urgently needed public services. I hadn’t been around long enough to know if the spending on basketball courts was a symptom or cause of the problems facing the Philippines’ notoriously corrupt and irresponsible government. But the upside-down priorities were plain to see. You can’t drink fiberglass backboards. Breakaway rims don’t cure ear infections. Instead of medicine, instead of drinking water, the people got basketball.

  But even if there was a dark side to the basketball fanaticism I’d encountered on the streets of Manila, the sport obviously brought people joy. I was amazed by how many games I’d encountered in my first week—and I hadn’t even attended a professional match yet.

  As soon as I got settled, I reconnected with Sev Sarmenta, the broadcaster who promised to guide me through Manila’s elite basketball world. He turned out to be short and a little chubby, with a wide, welcoming face and a wave of black hair. In addition to calling basketball at all levels of the Philippine game, Sev had covered the Olympics and boxing hero Manny Pacquiao’s bouts. He had been a male cheerleader while attending Ateneo de Manila University in the 1970s, and he still carried himself with the jovial intensity of a pep squad captain. Sev never seemed to be off the air. His voice was deep and bold and, depending on the situation, it could sound bawdy and gregarious or grave and authoritative. When I met him for the first time, at a mall in Quezon City, he made the words “Do you like Taco Bell?” sound like “Havlicek stole the ball!”

  Two beef soft tacos later, Sev took me to a doubleheader of the Philippine Basketball League, a minor league that served as a feeder for the more prestigious PBA. The first game pitted the snack-food sponsored Granny Goose Tortillos against the Complete Protectors, a team named not for its defensive prowess but for the first-rate cavity protection of Hapee toothpaste. This was my first encounter with the bizarre, corporate-themed nomenclature of Philippine basketball teams.

  The PBL gym was dark and stuffy and the action was rough—players shoved and scratched each other and the referees allowed all but the most vicious hacking. During that first game I met Alex Compton, a blue-eyed, blond-haired American who had been playing in the Philippines for eight years. Although Compton had no Filipino blood, he was born in Manila and returned to play in 1998 at the invitation of an upstart professional league with loose eligibility requirements. That league folded after five years, but by then Compton couldn’t leave the country behind. He had become fluent in Tagalog and was now an A-list celebrity. He appeared in Nestlé Coffee-Mate commercials and modeled men’s underwear on billboards—and apparently Manileños thought he resembled Leonardo DiCaprio so strongly that a local magazine once included Compton and the Titanic actor in a separated-at-birth spread. Compton was so popular that even though PBA rules specified that players couldn’t participate in the league unless they had Philippine lineage, the minor league PBL made an exception to keep Compton on the court.

  During a lull in my conversation with Alex, I glanced at the court and saw a defender send his man crashing into the scorer’s table with a double forearm shiver. I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe this no-stitches, no-foul style of basketball could attract enough spectators to fill the bleachers. And the games were televised! Compton told me that anything hoops-related could draw an audience here. And apparently the commissioner, a former PBA broadcaster named Chino Trinidad, preferred this brutal style because the fans got an extra thrill out of the flagrant fouls, angry stare-downs, and chest-to-chest confrontations. The PBA, with its higher talent level, could afford to play it straight, but here in the lower tiers of Philippine basketball, stirring up some bad blood—and occasionally some actual blood—was a good way to keep crowds entertained. Compton laughed as he told me that he’d learned to run up and down the court with his abdominal muscles clenched, because he never knew when an opponent might chop him in the gut.

  Between games Sev introduced me to Trinidad, whose bubbly enthusiasm and pointy, waxed hair reminded me of a Filipino Pee-Wee Herman who spent a lot of time in the weight room. Trinidad small-talked circles around me, suggesting a roll call of people that I ought to meet and inviting me to games in places I didn’t know existed. Had I seen Ginebra play in the PBA yet? No, but I had heard of them. Would I be able to join his PBL teams for their games in Cavite next weekend? Uh, sure. Where’s Cavite? Had I met his dad, award-winning poet and sportswriter, Recah Trinidad? Sorry, not yet. I’d been feeling pretty proud of myself for finding a place to live, a grocery store, and a few pickup games my first week in the country, but Commissioner Trinidad had bigger plans for me.

  When Trinidad’s cell phone rang I was granted a respite long enough to catch my breath, and when I heard the ring tone, I couldn’t help but smile. It was the old NBA on NBC playoff jingle. While Trinidad gabbed in Tagalog, images of the Knicks’ John Starks fearlessly dunking over Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley releasing a game-winning shot over David Robinson flashed in my mind. It may have been the first and only time that a John Tesh song was ever taken as a good omen, but since I had barely been in the country a week and had already witnessed acts of hoops devotion I never before imagined, I felt confident that these basketball revelations would continue as long as I remained in the Philippines. Hearing that NBA melody, I sensed that I’d stepped into a country where people held hoops as close to their hearts as I did, and it felt like home.

  2

  Alaska in the Philippines

  The Philippine Basketball League was the training ground for the Philippine Basketball Association, and by my second week in Manila, I was ready for the big league. The PBA is the world’s second-oldest professional basketball league, after the NBA. It opened in 1975 and has been a prime mover in Philippine pop culture ever since. The league’s all-time greats have gone on to become senators, mayors, and city councilors, while other stars retired and settled into television and movie careers. Franchise owners are among the Philippines’ most powerful businessmen, and they use their teams not only to promote their businesses, but also to compete with each other for bragging rights as the owners of championship squads and all-star players. The athletes and coaches who have devoted their liv
es to the sport have seen how basketball touches all levels of Philippine society, from their tycoon bosses to the urban poor who wait in parking lots after games to squeeze players’ hands and pose for grainy cell phone pictures. I was eager to see these fanatics—who made my own basketball obsession look reasonable by comparison—in action, so on the Friday of my second week in Manila I spent the peso equivalent of eight dollars (fifteen bucks would have gotten me courtside) to check out a PBA doubleheader.

  The games were held at the Araneta Coliseum, the same arena that hosted Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier for the Thrilla in Manila in 1975. The Big Dome, in local parlance, is the country’s biggest arena, with seating for more than 14,000 people, although during big games the coliseum has been known to accommodate thousands more spectators sitting in the aisles and packed in the hallways. Araneta also has the most reliable air-conditioning of any venue in the capital. A beefy security guard in a commando beret frisked me at the gate, and I wandered past Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, and a local chain called Café Bola on the way to my seat, which was about a dozen rows back from the hardwood. The imitation leather seats were worn and a little rickety, but thanks to a 1999 renovation, the court was state-of-the-art. The starters from each team were lining up around half-court for the jump ball, and the game was about to begin.