Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  “Puta,” Bachmann would mutter in between wheezes, while de Leon eased his thwacking and massaged circles into the boss’s back.

  Bachmann was not a shy storyteller. His most grandiose yarn involved an encounter with the young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—then Lew Alcindor—at UCLA in the early 1960s when the Philippine team swung through California on a training trip before an upcoming tournament. They scrimmaged against Alcindor’s Bruins, and Bachmann, as his team’s starting center, was matched up with the legendary pivot man. According to Bachmann, Alcindor wasn’t able to block his shots despite towering almost nine inches above the Filipino center. That’s because Bachmann used his hook to create the distance that kept Alcindor from swatting his shots across the gym. Alcindor was inspired to perfect his own unblockable shot, and the sky hook was born. Or so Bachmann would have you believe. Having a legitimate claim on the genesis of one of basketball’s iconic moves would be a feather in the cap of Philippine basketball, so it’s with a heavy heart that I admit Bachmann’s claim is pure bunk. Bachmann was always hazy about the precise year he played Alcindor, but since Mr. Hook Shot retired due to a knee injury in 1963, when Alcindor was sixteen years old and playing high school basketball at Power Memorial Academy in New York, Bachmann’s story can’t be true.

  Although Bachmann had invented the myth about teaching Abdul-Jabbar the Sky Hook, the old coot was similar to Kareem in that he was his country’s last true master of the hook shot, an art that in today’s PBA and NBA only survives in diluted forms like the half hook, baby hook, and jump hook. Bachmann taught himself the shot by tying his right arm to an eight-foot ladder and lofting lefty hooks over it. He passed this draconian method on to Dickie, who told me that he spent time strapped to the ladder almost every day until he was thirteen. Dickie also remembered his father calling Alaska coach Tim Cone when the younger Bachmann was a backup forward in the mid-nineties to complain that Dickie wasn’t getting enough playing time. Cone called the conversation with Bachmann “terrifying.” The coach said it was like hearing Bill Russell tell him he couldn’t coach his way out of a paper bag and then call him an asshole in six different ways.

  Bachmann’s other immortal tale, which is actually true, says more about overprotective Filipino parenting than basketball. When he played for De La Salle University in the late fifties, during a game against the Mapua Institute of Technology, a Mapua player waited until Bachmann wasn’t looking and then socked him in the solar plexus. The chop knocked the wind out of Bachmann, who doubled over and began rolling on the floor while La Salle fans in the crowd screamed bloody murder and stood up to point at the perpetrator.10 Watching her son writhe in pain, Bachmann’s mother snapped. She bum-rushed the court and started swinging her umbrella at the nearest Mapua player. It wasn’t the guy who hit her son, but that detail didn’t stop her from exacting revenge on Bachmann’s behalf. Bachmann went on to a storied career with the national team and in the commercial leagues that preceded the PBA, but in many basketball circles the first story that comes to mind when Kurt Bachmann is mentioned is his umbrella-wielding mother and her notion of hardwood vigilante justice.

  Bachmann played during the period in Philippine history when basketball was most closely associated with Filipino patriotism and identity. This was partly due to the national team’s myriad successes in the 1950s and 1960s—they were regular participants in international competitions like the Olympics and world championships, and perennial champions of regional tournaments—but it also had to do with healing the nation’s psychic wounds after World War II. Filipinos suffered greatly in the war. Japanese invaders seized control of the islands in 1942. The Japanese despised Filipinos, whom they considered lesser Asians for submitting to centuries of Western rule, and their wartime conduct was marked by the wanton murder of civilians and the kidnapping of young Filipinas to become “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers to rape. When the United States drove out the Japanese in 1945, Filipino civilians suffered as much as any soldier in the final battle for Manila, a gruesome house-to-house campaign that leveled much of the city. The Japanese, facing sure defeat, chose to fight to the death rather than dishonor the Emperor by surrendering. They set fires in Manila’s port area that quickly spread to people’s flimsy bamboo homes. They shot fleeing civilians and invaded homes to kill and mutilate their inhabitants. Between the Japanese massacres and the American bombing and artillery campaign that blew the Japanese out of hiding, nearly all of Manila’s prewar architecture was destroyed and more than 100,000 Filipino civilians were killed.

  Bachmann, born in 1936, lived through the atrocities of wartime Manila. It left him with a mind packed with horrific childhood memories and an enduring hatred of the Japanese. He told me about his uncle, a former basketball player for Letran College. Watching his older relative from the sidelines at NCAA games inspired the five-year-old Bachmann’s love for the sport. A few years later Japanese soldiers shot and killed that uncle. During the American siege of Manila, he remembered walking from his family’s home in the city proper to Santa Mesa, a safer area on the eastern outskirts of Manila, and seeing the dead bodies of hundreds of Filipino civilians, murdered by the Japanese or caught in American artillery blasts, piled along the sides of the roads. Bachmann still experienced flashbacks of the war’s gore and destruction, and he still blamed the Japanese.

  For players of Bachmann’s generation, basketball in the postwar years became a way to reassert the Philippines’ worthiness as a nation. The United States relinquished colonial rule of the Philippines after the war, and, although American military and commercial interests remained unduly powerful in the Philippines for decades (many Filipinos would argue that the United States is still an unequal partner in the countries’ relationship today), the Philippines could finally call itself an independent nation. Similar to the virulent heckling in postwar soccer matches between European nations and West Germany, the Philippine national basketball team offered the country a chance to exact cathartic revenge on Japanese athletes.

  When Bachmann told me stories about competing against the Japanese, he always called them “Japs.” He remembered one occasion, at a tournament during his first year on the national team, when he and Loyzaga found themselves alone in an elevator with Takashi Itoyama, the Japanese center.

  “Hey Itoyama, you remember me?” Loyzaga smiled and patted him on the back. Then he pointed his elbow at the Japanese player’s Adam’s apple. “You remember last time we played? I hit you here; you couldn’t breathe?” Then Loyzaga pointed to Bachmann and continued: “New player. Philippine team. Bachmann. Meet Mr. Itoyama. I hit him in the throat the last time.” Loyzaga turned again to Itoyama and said, “Be careful. He plays hook shot, but when he plays hook shot, he also stands like this.” Loyzaga stood sideways like he was getting ready to release a hook and aimed the elbow of his nonshooting arm at Itoyama’s neck. When the teams played the next day, Loyzaga and Bachmann found that the Japanese defenders gave them plenty of room to operate in the low post. As in Bachmann’s other tales, I sensed a veneer of revisionism, but the pride underlying his narration wasn’t self-aggrandizing swagger, but fierce patriotism as sharp and real as an elbow to the esophagus.

  The honor that players like Loyzaga and Bachmann brought to the national team was reflected in the Filipino population and played a major role in cementing the game’s hegemonic status in the country’s sports scene. The Philippines’ success in international play inspired athletes to take up basketball and fans to follow the sport, and college and semipro commercial leagues thrived off the ever-growing interest in hoops. Back in Ateneo’s American Historical Collection, articles from the Philippines Free Press showed how basketball had metastasized into the country’s preeminent sport. One story, written by F. V. Tutay in 1949, asked if basketball was too pervasive in the athletics scene, a question that still consumes reams of newsprint today. The writer mentioned a talented swimmer, on track to become an Olympian, who left the pool for good and decided to shoot hoops inste
ad. “Perhaps the boy believes that there is not as much glamour in being an aquatic star as in being a basketball hero,” Tutay wrote, although it’s more likely the talented young athlete saw the MICAA players earning salaries to play for local corporations and recognized that basketball offered more opportunities to make a living. “Basketball has ceased to be a mere athletic contest,” Tutay continued, citing that the wife of Senator Claro Recto paid twenty-five times face value for a pair of scalped tickets to the opening day games of the 1948 NCAA season. “It has become a full-fledged social affair, where socialites go to see and be seen.”

  The post-World War II generation of Filipinos came of age in the same basketball-saturated environment I witnessed all over the country sixty years later. Of course, people knew about volleyball, baseball, and soccer, but the country was already fixated on hoops. The country’s prowess on the international stage stoked Philippine patriotism, while the social caché of college and semiprofessional leagues put the sport on radio airwaves and the front pages of newspapers. The government built courts in the central plazas of towns throughout Manila and the rest of the country, so that everywhere you visited, you could expect to find a municipal hall, church, public market, and basketball court within steps of each other. Playing and watching the sport became one of the corner-stones of Philippine social life.

  At the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, just fifteen minutes from Ateneo and my town house, I met Michael Tan, chairman of the anthropology department and a newspaper columnist whose twice-weekly “Pinoy Kasi”11 examined Philippine culture. U.P. Diliman is known for being not only the most prestigious, but also the most grueling academic institution in the country, and much of this reputation comes from its professors, who are infamous for writing tests with the expectation that half of their students will fail. U.P. Diliman’s approach to higher education sounded like the complete opposite of the way American universities prepared students. Most of my college professors seemed primarily concerned with transferring knowledge to students, and I imagine they felt a sense of achievement when their students aced exams. U.P. professors appeared to treat their relationship with students in a more adversarial manner. They were like gatekeepers of intellectual achievement, presenting students with ever more difficult academic trials to ensure that whoever passed the class truly earned it.

  The professors’ fearsome reputation always put me on guard when I visited the campus. Basketball, despite its oversize role in Philippine society, had been almost completely ignored by local scholars. I once spent an afternoon flipping through Ateneo’s entire collection of the journal Philippine Studies, hoping I’d stumble upon a basketball-related article that somehow didn’t make it into the electronic card catalog. It never happened. I found several articles on native dance and even one about spider wrestling, but nothing about basketball. Before meeting a U.P. intellectual, I always feared the worst—that I would explain my interest in basketball and he or she would first frown, then laugh at my banal research and banish me to a campus dungeon, where I’d be forced to read his or her thousand-page magnum opus on pre-Spanish agriculture on Marinduque island. My worries, however, never amounted to much. No matter the school, whenever I met professors to discuss Philippine basketball from an academic perspective, they were helpful and enthusiastic, and Michael Tan was no exception.

  Tan’s research focuses on gender, sexuality, and public health in the Philippines, so although our plan was to talk about basketball and Filipino identity, he led me on several detours through the labyrinthine world of transgender and homosexual culture. Other than Tan, few academics had made an effort to understand the lives of Philippine homosexuals, and he’d made discoveries that, although fascinating, put me in place as the prude I truly am. After Tan had introduced me to terms like tsupit—a Tagalog contraction of tsupa, “to suck,” and gupit, a “haircut,” which referred to the practice among poor teenage boys of getting a free haircut from a gay barber in exchange for allowing the haircutter to perform oral sex on the teen—I was grateful when the conversation turned finally to basketball.

  The sport had become not just a pastime for young Filipino men, Tan explained, but a rite of passage. When boys reach adolescence, they receive privileges. Their mothers begin to allow them to roam their neighborhoods freely, getting into trouble but also learning how to carry themselves as men. Inevitably, these boys end up playing basketball, first in their own neighborhood, but then branching out to compete against kids from other areas. These early trials teach them masculine virtues like teamwork, aggression, and machismo. “That’s the male entry into a larger public sphere,” Tan told me. “And it’s part of Filipino masculinity. The wider your sphere of influence, the better. So basketball is there to make friends, build alliances. It even crosses class barriers.”12 This sounded a lot like my adolescence, in which my father first brought me to the local recreation center, then I started going on my own to play three-on-three after school, until finally I was chosen for a traveling team that played all over New York City. The majority of my cherished early memories come from basketball courts, and those experiences formed the foundation of my love for the sport, which led me across two oceans to Manila.

  Basketball had become more than just a pastime for Filipinos; it was a social norm, something that young boys were expected to do. As subsequent generations came of age playing and watching hoops, the sport’s grasp on society strengthened to the point where it is now impossible for many Filipinos to imagine their lives without basketball. This process continued during the reign of Ferdinand Marcos, which started when he was elected president in 1965 and ended in the 1986 People Power revolution, when millions of Filipinos gathered in the streets and forced the Marcos family into exile. The Marcos regime is best known for its plunder of billions of dollars in public funds and international aid money, first lady Imelda Marcos’s expansive shoe collection, and a bloodcurdling record of human rights abuses. But the dictator’s policies gave a huge boost to basketball’s already powerful place in Philippine culture. Under martial law, Marcos exercised strict control over the nation’s broadcast and print media. There were only a handful of television channels, and Marcos cronies controlled nearly all of them. Any channel that wasn’t an outright propaganda mouthpiece for the regime was cowed into submission by the threat of government takeover. Open political debate and dissident messages were strictly forbidden, so instead broadcasters flooded the airwaves with syndicated American schlock like Charlie’s Angels and Donnie & Marie. The few local productions that weren’t banned tended to be corny variety shows, musicals filled with saccharine love songs, and the nascent PBA.

  Many middle-age Filipinos can remember walking down the street in the late seventies during PBA broadcasts and not missing a single moment of the games because they could hear the play-by-play emanating from their neighbors’ windows. It’s tempting for me, as a hoops lover, to romanticize this image as some kind of earthly basketball paradise; that’s when I need a kick in the shin (or the temple) to remind me that under martial law, after the game ended I wouldn’t have been allowed outside because of curfew, and that if I publicly criticized a government that embezzled funds like it was a biological imperative, I could end up salvaged, a Marcos-era euphemism for being killed by authorities and dumped in the Pasig River. Nevertheless, hoops penetrated ever more deeply into the fabric of Philippine society during the 1970s and 1980s because people had hardly any choice but to watch the PBA, which broadcast games three times a week.

  The government’s de facto imposition of basketball on the Philippine masses ensured that the sport penetrated every level of society, to the point that a 1997 survey conducted by the Manila-based Social Weather Stations found that 83 percent of men and 64 percent of women named basketball their favorite sport to watch, and 58 percent of men also called it their favorite sport to play. Even people who might not be expected to follow hoops ended up being impacted by the game. Danton Remoto, a poet and gay rights activist,
told me he learned to count by keeping a score sheet during televised games for his father, a diehard fan of the Toyota Tamaraws. Three nights a week the family watched PBA doubleheaders. “Basketball was like dessert,” Remoto explained. “We would eat at 6:00 p.m. They showed basketball at seven. By then the dishes were cleaned and we would all gather around this black-and-white TV set. Imagine that replicated in many—I’m sure all—Philippine households in the seventies and you can see the effect of basketball. There is a national obsession with a sport that was the only thing you could watch other than a musical.”

  There was one last wrinkle of the basketball mystery that needed to be explored: soccer. Why hadn’t the Philippines fallen under soccer’s spell, like most of the rest of the world? Japan developed a deep love for baseball in the early twentieth century, at the same time as basketball was sweeping the Philippines, but soccer eventually gained a foothold and became popular in Japan while it remained an afterthought in the Philippines. Yet soccer seems to fit Filipinos so well—their diminutive stature wouldn’t be a disadvantage, and the country’s top athletes have the speed, creativity, and agility that make it easy to imagine them playing the “Beautiful Game” à la Brazilians.

  This might sound put-on and corny, but I actually lost sleep over this question. I perused the libraries and asked everyone from sports journalists to my neighbors why soccer never caught on in the country. The conventional wisdom was that soccer was too slow for Filipinos, who love the high scores, seesaw lead changes, and sheer unpredictability of basketball. The idea that a soccer match could end in a tie appalled many Filipinos, whose primary sporting passion besides basketball was cockfighting, a contest in which there is always a winner and the loser gets killed and eaten. This explanation was tempting but too simple. Deep in the night, I’d still find myself tossing and turning, watching palm branches blow against my bedroom window, and listening to the fighting cocks crow in my neighbor’s backyard. The slow game theory was weak. Countries throughout Central and South America adored soccer, and they shared a similar cultural heritage with the Philippines. Latin Americans had also been colonized by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and converted to Catholicism; their cities were sweaty, fast-paced, and chaotic, like Manila; they too relished telenovelas and beauty pageants. I had never been to Rio de Janeiro, but Brazilians certainly didn’t seem dull, and they didn’t find soccer boring. Favelas, the dense slums whose claustrophobic alleys inspired some of Brazil’s best footballers’ most creative moves, shot down the idea that there was not enough open space in Philippine cities to play soccer. The ingenuity Filipinos employed to jerry-rig hoops in what seemed like every nook and cranny of Manila proved that if people cared about soccer, they would have found ways to play the sport.