Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  But still, I had heard some amazing stories.

  Supposedly, basketball fever in the Philippines ran so hot that the government once rescheduled a voter registration drive after learning that it conflicted with the telecast of an NBA finals game. According to roundball legend, Filipinos were so dedicated to basketball that the wealthy alumni of a Manila university bought the floor used in a past NBA All-Star game, had it shipped to Manila in pieces, and installed it in the school gym. And apparently, Filipinos’ devotion to the game was so absolute that fans once dressed a wooden Santo Niño statue of the boy Christ in a local superstar’s uniform during a Christmas procession.

  These tall tales were too much to resist. Here was a nation full of basketball freaks just like me! So somehow I managed to convince the Fulbright board to give me their blessing (and the American taxpayers’ money) to fund a year in Manila to document the phenomenon. The hoops culture I found there was so deeply embedded in Philippine society and so inspiring to me that I ended up staying for three years.

  1

  Hoop Epiphanies

  On my second day in Manila, I took a taxi to Quezon City to look for an apartment and found myself mired in gridlock. The diesel fumes were so thick that motorcyclists wore asbestos masks to filter the air, and I covered my face with a washcloth as I watched the jeepneys crawl past. A jeepney is a mode of public transportation taken from U.S. military vehicles that once carried GIs around the American naval and air force bases that were located on Philippine soil until the early 1990s. It’s an elongated jeep with two benches facing each other and each side seating about ten uncomfortably intimate passengers. But Filipinos have adapted the military designs to suit their own aesthetic. Today, jeepneys are adorned with longhorned bull skulls, imitation Mercedes hood ornaments, and giant bugles mounted on chrome grills. The horns don’t beep, they belch “La Cucaracha” and emit Star Trek phaser sounds, and—this is creepy—some blare talking doll voices that repeat “I love you” over and over again. The sides of jeepneys are home to a semiotic buffet of logos and decals that provide a window into the cluttered psyches of their operators. The symbols represent a mash-up of familial, religious, and pop culture references with no obvious organizing principle.

  On my way to Quezon City, I saw jeepneys painted with nativity scenes and portraits of Jesus over hot pink and neon green backgrounds. I saw cartoonish renderings of professional wrestlers, the Confederate flag, bikini-clad actresses, the Little Mermaid, Shrek, and Alfred E. Neuman. And there wasn’t a jeepney on the road that day that didn’t somehow pay homage to basketball. Many of them displayed the silhouette of Jerry West dribbling over the NBA’s logo or Michael Jordan spread-eagled in mid-air with a ball in his outstretched hand. NBA team decals were scattered on the vehicles’ sides like constellations: the New Jersey Nets, the Los Angeles Lakers, even defunct franchises like the Vancouver Grizzlies. Still other jeepneys featured portraits of a beaming Magic Johnson or a stern Larry Bird just inches away from similar paintings of the drivers’ daughters, the Virgin Mary, and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

  After the two-hour crawl to Quezon City, I viewed an apartment in a twenty-story condominium building along Katipunan Avenue, near some of the country’s top universities. My potential landlord’s nephew showed me through the dim, narrow hallways with flickering fluorescent lights. He opened the door to a gloomy studio furnished with a bed so short that I could lay on it, bend my legs over the end and rest my feet on the floor. Then I followed him to his family’s apartment, where he explained the terms of the lease. Although I had no intention of renting the place, I listened. While he held forth on security deposits and condo association dues, my attention wandered to a collection of 1990s-era basketball action figures hanging on the wall behind him.

  The plastic NBA players, kept in their original packaging like something a person dressed as Chewbacca might carry into a Star Wars convention, covered the wall from floor to ceiling. The assortment included not just superstars like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, but also several role players who only a true hoops enthusiast would recognize. The collection displayed an obvious Portland Trail Blazers theme. Clyde Drexler,1 Terry Porter, Jerome Kersey, Buck Williams, and Kevin Duckworth—the core of the Blazers’ NBA finals runner-up squads from the early Nineties—dangled from pushpins. I never would have guessed that toy versions of the late, beefy Duckworth or the rugged, goggle-clad Williams were ever produced, let alone collected and displayed in living rooms. More recent Trail Blazers like the soft-shooting, hard-punching forward Zach Randolph (now with the Memphis Grizzlies, although while in Portland he famously scuffled with Ruben Patterson and broke Patterson’s eye socket) also found their way onto the wall. By the time my host asked, “Any questions?” I was too busy cataloging the players to hear him.

  “Any questions?” he said again with an emphatic cough.

  I snapped out of it: “Yeah, whose action figures are those?” This wasn’t the kind of question he was expecting. With a whiff of annoyance, he explained that they belonged to his younger brother, a diehard Portland fan, and then he asked if I was ready to sign a lease.

  Although I fancied the idea of watching Blazers games with my prospective landlord’s brother, I didn’t take the apartment. Instead, I moved in with another Fulbright student who had found a small town house a ten minute walk from the condo building. My first night there, while my roommate was at a renewable energy conference in Beijing, I managed to knock out the electricity by plugging a 110-volt appliance into a 220-volt socket. For hours, I lay in the dark, balmy night, sweating buckets into my new sheets and cursing my unplanned crash course in tropical heat, until my landlady was able to send someone to knock the life back into my circuit breaker with a few expert cracks from a wrench.

  Over the next few days, I learned to suffer through Manila’s sweltering climate, and eventually I felt brave enough to explore my new surroundings. As I walked through the better neighborhoods, I saw the beautiful hardwood courts that had been installed in tony housing developments, but I also watched several street corner games played under far more rudimentary conditions. I hadn’t yet checked in with Sev Sarmenta at Ateneo de Manila University, where he taught in the communications department when he wasn’t calling basketball games on local television, but the pull of the courts was too strong to resist. It was time for me to play some basketball. The game was everywhere in Manila. Full- and half-courts awaited me at every turn, and at certain times of day I could listen for the hollow thud of bouncing balls and echolocate to the nearest game. That afternoon, a few hours before dusk, I laced up my sneakers and hit the streets of my new neighborhood, Loyola Heights.

  Walking past the town house complexes and airy family homes of a fairly wealthy subdivision, I followed the gentle sound of dribbling. As I drew closer I heard the siren clank of ball on rim. It was late enough in the day that the sun merely tingled on my skin instead of searing it. On the blacktop, I found a motley bunch of guys lofting casual shots and waiting for enough players to arrive for a game of five-on-five.

  The locals checked me out: at six-foot-three and almost two hundred pounds, I stood six inches to a foot taller, and twenty to fifty pounds heavier, than everyone else on the court. In my early twenties and wearing an old jersey from a New York summer tournament, I looked like a real player; and it’s quite possible that I was the whitest person some of them had ever seen face-to-face. Pastiness aside, I must have looked like a basketball vision, because a giddy tug-of-war broke out over whose team I would join. The players seemed to reflect the neighborhood’s social makeup. Relative to the abject poverty that half of the Philippines’ 90 million people endure, the local residents were wealthy, but as privileged folk go, they were the working rich. Even the biggest houses in the area looked like sties next to the opulent mansions of Forbes Park and Dasmariñas Village, where business and government oligarchs retained retinues of household cooks, launderers, and drivers, not to mention small militias to gua
rd their property. By comparison, my new neighbors and their single-servant households seemed austere.

  The players that day were a mix of teenagers and college students who lived in the neighborhood, and older men who worked there as drivers, gardeners, and handymen. The teams didn’t break down exactly according to social group, but the leader of the brat squad was definitely Dean, a lanky fifteen-year-old who was already over six feet tall and who dunked with preternatural ease. I soon found out that a local college basketball powerhouse was eyeing him for its varsity team, but even though the other well-off kids didn’t have Dean’s natural ability, their Nikes were newer than mine and they had clearly been coached since they were young. They snapped their wrists on jump shots and held their shooting hands high to display the proper duck’s neck follow-through. They threw crisp chest passes and their footwork on layups and box-outs smacked of organized basketball.

  In contrast, Team Hired Hand looked like the Filipino answer to the Bad News Bears. Half of them were playing in flip-flops, sandals, or bare feet. The oldest of them—a longtime driver for the family who owned the house next to the court—looked like he was pushing eighty, and he played in a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops without any hint of retro irony. Roger, the caretaker of a nearby pool, was conscripted to play point guard. Joseph, the youngest of the bunch, wore a pair of white Adidas shell-toes that looked suspiciously large on his four-foot-eleven frame. But the most flamboyant player was a toothless fifty-something driver with a buzz cut whose patent leather Air Jordans were of seriously dubious origin. He trotted up and down the court with his gums flapping and a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, smacking his palms together and grunting loudly whenever he wanted to call for the ball and launch a two-handed set shot.

  The ragtag crew didn’t inspire much confidence, but once we started playing, I was surprised to see that despite the young guys’ advantages in training and equipment, the teams were evenly matched. A few times, Dean caught passes on the fast break, took one dribble and then launched into the stratosphere, gliding toward the hoop with the ball raised in one hand and then dropping it through the net. But other times, a swarm of small, pudgy opponents would block Dean’s path to the basket and strip the ball away before he could jump. Roger the caretaker turned out to be a clever playmaker who could jump into a crowd of taller defenders, sense where his open teammates were, and squeeze passes to them through the human morass. Tiny Joseph started the game poorly. A few times he beat everyone downcourt and received long passes, but his layups ricocheted off the bottom of the rim. After a few embarrassing moments like this, he threw up his arms in disgust and kicked his shoes to the side. Was he quitting? No. Joseph walked to his pile of belongings in the court’s grass perimeter, stepped into a pair of flip-flops, and returned to the game. He wouldn’t miss another shot all day.

  As I watched my teammates sprint, slide, leap, and land in their thong sandals, with nothing between their feet and the ground but a thin rubber pancake, I felt like I was watching people drive blindfolded. Thinking back on the broken bones and torn ligaments I had suffered in both ankles during my college career—injuries I’d sustained despite strapping my feet into a succession of increasingly cumbersome braces—I saw imminent doom in every one of their jump stops. But there were no flip-flop-related injuries that day. Thongs, not Jordans or Lebrons, are the most common basketball shoes in the Philippines, and many players like Joseph, who have played in them their whole lives, feel more comfortable and play better without sneakers.

  Playing in flip-flops had become such an iconic feature of the Philippine game that it had been enshrined in song by the Tagalog rappers Legit Misfitz, who recorded “Air Tsinelas.”2 To many Filipinos, playing basketball in skimpy sandals and bare feet wasn’t a remarkable feat; it was just natural. Still, I couldn’t help feeling inspired by the sight of guys executing crossovers and spin moves without wearing shoes. If I didn’t own sneakers I probably would have ended up a hacky sack buff. When my teammates soared to rebound the ball or lay it in, I saw love and devotion in every injury-defying leap.

  Throughout that first game, I deferred to my teammates. On defense, they stuck me in the middle of a two-three zone and told me to guard the rim. Whenever someone drove the lane, I was there to block or challenge his shot. A few times guys drove straight at me and served up soft floaters. Blocking them was like hitting a ball off a tee. I was punching shots into the grass, which, like most of what I did, sent players on both sides into hysterics. The shooter would turn around, shrug and offer his excuse: “Laki!” Big! Since they weren’t used to competing against someone my height, they were testing out the kinds of shots they could make over me.

  At one point in the game my teammate rushed ahead with the ball and missed on a wild drive. The other team rebounded and threw a long outlet pass to a guard who was breaking toward the basket for a layup. I was the last line of defense. The guard charged into the lane, saw me waiting, and took flight. I jumped at the same time, floating backward to avoid committing a foul and holding my arms high in the air. He adjusted. Instead of approaching directly, he turned in midair so his back was facing me and the basket. I figured I had him. I wouldn’t be able to block the shot with him using his body to shield the ball, but it would take a miracle for him to score from that position. He tossed the ball over his shoulder with one hand, without even looking at the rim, and it bounced off the backboard and in. Lucky shot, I thought. But a few possessions later, in a similar situation, another player spun 360 degrees in the air and then spun the ball into the basket on a reverse layup. Later in the game, it happened again. Three different players made once- or twice-in-a-lifetime shots on me in one game. These were guys who weren’t all that adept at basics like dribbling with their off-hands or shooting from beyond ten feet, but they were dropping in highlight-reel layups like it was nothing. What was going on?

  It was my introduction to the Philippine circus layup. In the States these are the shots that you toss up when you drive into the heart of the defense, get stuck in the air between taller defenders and have to get rid of the ball before you land. You close your eyes and hope for the best, and if the shot goes in, someone congratulates you by saying, “You really pulled that one out of your ass.” Well, Filipinos have turned the circus layup into an art form. While many Filipino players are graceful leapers with hang time to spare, when they’re five-foot-six, even great hops aren’t enough to dunk. So the body-twisting, triple-clutching, no-look, seemingly impossible layup has replaced the dunk as the measuring stick of basketball artistry. Even in semipro and professional games, players will execute these tricky moves when there are no defenders around, just to please the crowd.

  While my team was on defense, a player on the opposing side tried to throw a lob pass over me. I tipped it out of bounds and the ball rolled fifty feet down a hill. I trotted through the grass, tiptoeing around the lizards that were sunning themselves in my path. Along the way, I passed several rubber footprints that had peeled off of sneakers after thousands of trips up and down the asphalt. It was like a graveyard for the sneakers’ soles. Once detached, they had been kicked to the sidelines, to their final resting place in the blacktop’s weedy outskirts. There, they lingered, mementos to all the hard fouls and fast breaks they survived. I paused to look at the black treads and the big white Swoosh, grass poking through the rubber, and thought that if I were a basketball shoe, this is how I’d want to live and die—on the feet of someone who treasured me so much that he wore me until I fell to pieces, then spending eternity with front row seats to the game that was my raison d’être. Standing there marveling at the rubber scraps, I felt like those people who claimed to see Jesus in their Cheetos. I was realizing that there was no way to exaggerate the depth of Filipinos’ connection to hoops. Everywhere I went I stumbled into some testament to this national obsession. After I stood spellbound in the grass for a couple minutes, the other players reminded me I was holding up the game.

  “
Ano ba? Ahas?” What is it? A snake?

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  “Sige na! Bilisan mo!” Come on, then! Hurry up!

  Whoops. I inbounded the ball, ran up court and streaked across the baseline, calling for the rock. It was my most practical lesson so far in the ways of Philippine hoops: don’t hold up the game.

  The next day, I walked to the post office. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, but I had studied a map before setting out and had a decent idea where I was going. The hour-long walk was, according to some of my neighbors, proof of my insanity. In a city as hot and polluted as Manila, anyone who could afford to avoid walking did so. Walking long distances suggested that you couldn’t afford a car, a taxi, or even seven-and-a-half pesos (about twenty cents) to ride a jeepney. But as a native New Yorker, I was used to learning my way around by walking, and I was eager to get my bearings in Quezon City. It also seemed like a good way to beef up my Tagalog, the regional tongue that served as a basis for the national language. I had already found a tutor to teach me grammar and structure, but without some real-life practice, I’d end up like every other clueless foreigner in Manila who claimed to understand the language but really knew nothing.

  I walked along one of the area’s main east-west byways, Kamias Road, passing gas stations, streetside restaurants with counters full of bubbling pots containing rice and various stews, a row of suspicious-looking massage parlors with names like Pick-a-Boo and Mr. Body Physique, junk shops buying and selling scrap metal, and, of course, basketball courts. Down almost every alley and side street half-courts were set up with games of three-on-three in progress. Junk shops had backboards and rims hanging from their streetfront signage, where the owners killed time between shipments by shooting around and telling jokes. On signs and billboards, basketball imagery was used to promote everything from beer and sneakers to vitamin syrup and margarine. I used my own basketball to sell myself and make friends. On nearly every block somebody stopped me for a game of impromptu one-on-one or beckoned for the ball to show me his best ball-handling trick, and no matter how old, how out-of-shape, or how sloshed they appeared, I shared the rock.