Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  That night, I met Penny in his room. Red Bull had put him up in a hotel separated from Greer’s Holiday Inn by a shopping mall. The view from Penny’s window included a panorama of nearby skyscrapers in the Ortigas Center business district, as well as Greer’s window a few hundred feet away. According to Penny, Red Bull wasn’t entirely honest about their reasons for hiring him. They led him to believe that Greer had been injured, and Penny didn’t find out until after his arrival that he’d be vying for a job against a healthy Greer. He was so suspicious of the team’s machinations that when he saw me arrive at practice that morning, he thought I was there to compete for the import position. “You might be a shooter,” Penny said.18 He felt queasy about the whole situation: “I really have no idea what I’m doing here. Usually, when something like this happens, the team is struggling. You don’t come in and try to replace somebody who’s the leading scorer in the league with his team being in second or third place. The situation is kind of iffy to me, but it’s a job, you know?”

  With that, he summed up the reason why distinguished international players willingly subject themselves to the capricious whims of PBA teams. The salaries were competitive with other leagues around the world, and PBA franchises were known for paying their imports in full and on time. This was a major draw. Almost every import I met had a story about getting ripped off by a team somewhere, but they all said that PBA teams, despite their constant scheming over replacements, were honest and fair when it came to money.

  As the tryout dragged on, Penny and Greer kept practicing together and the tension between them evaporated. During the van rides before and after practice, Penny even encouraged Greer to start acting like the vocal leader Guiao wanted. “You’ve been here working your butt off the whole time,” he told Greer. “It’s your job, man. Don’t let anyone take your job from you. If they ask you to do something like be more of a leader, then why not do it?”

  Red Bull’s final regular season game, against Coca-Cola, was critical for the team as well as for Greer. If they won, Red Bull would tie for second place and force a one-game playoff for an automatic semifinal berth. Penny had been in the country less than a week and was still recovering from jet lag. Guiao decided it was too risky to play him and penciled in Greer as the starter. It seemed like Greer’s last chance to prove he deserved to stay. The threat of replacement seemed to have an effect on Greer’s performance. He looked like he ran the court harder than in previous games, and he avoided taking the low-percentage, pull-up three-pointers that drove Guiao mad. With twenty seconds left and the game tied, he stood at the three-point line with the ball in his hands. He blew by his defender, jump-stopped a few feet away from the basket, and drew a foul when three opposing players pounced on him. He made one of two free throws to clinch the game. The win was enough to earn Greer another chance to play, this time in the one-game playoff for second place against Barangay Ginebra. He scored 37 points and grabbed 13 rebounds, but he had zero assists and Red Bull lost.

  Later that week Penny officially replaced Greer. In Red Bull’s first playoff series, he led the team to a three-game sweep of Alaska (this was the same year they lost Victor Thomas to the six-foot-six height limit). “I am more convinced now that Penny is the right import for us,” Guiao told the press after closing out Alaska. “He’s some sort of savior.” Six weeks later Penny led the team to a 4-2 win over the Purefoods Chunkee Giants in the championship series. Guiao and Red Bull’s harsh treatment of Greer was vindicated.

  Although it was easy to see Guiao as a villain, I developed an unexpected affinity for the loose-cannon coach. Guiao was the kind of character you were more likely to find in a movie than real life; he seemed to be applying the philosophy and even some of the moves of The Karate Kid’s wicked Cobra Kai dojo to professional basketball. It seemed ridiculous, yet somehow he was winning. Red Bull operated at a lower budget than rival teams and traded for lesser talents, and Guiao would whip them into a frenzy, send them onto the court, and turn overlooked players into emerging stars. He reminded me of some of the hot-blooded coaches I saw as a player in New York’s Public School Athletic League, educators who looked like bag men and spent entire games spewing invectives at their players, opposing teams, referees, scorer’s tables, crowds, even the dance teams. I never thought these characters made it to the elite ranks—the NBA was too buttoned-up to permit these shenanigans. Yet here was Guiao, consistently willing Red Bull into the semifinals and beyond. The ranting, the taunting, the occasional clothesline—Guiao had bottomless chutzpah, and I loved watching him blow his top.

  Looking forward to Alaska’s season, Roe had a few reasons to feel confident that he wouldn’t suffer Greer’s fate. The strongest factor working in Roe’s favor was the difference in coaches. It wasn’t a matter of Alaska coach Tim Cone having more integrity or feeling more sympathetic to imports than Guiao did. Every coach in the PBA had replaced imports several times before, and their attitudes toward sending players home tended to be callous, like changing parts on a car. The difference, however, was that Cone had turned the Aces into a very complicated vehicle by fine-tuning the team’s triangle offense. It took imports weeks to grasp the basics of the triangle, and it required several seasons to master. With that lengthy learning curve, Cone did his best to avoid hiring new imports in the middle of the season, when a three-game losing streak could mean the difference between a bye in the playoffs and playing a succession of knockout games against teams at the bottom of the standings. Cone was also a cerebral coach who was at his best when trying to solve problems on the court. He relished the challenge of working around an import’s faults to find ways for him to succeed; in fact, constraints like Roe’s poor shooting stroke could inspire some of Cone’s finest, most creative moments.

  Guiao, on the other hand, helmed an offense that easily accommodated interchangeable parts. Red Bull ran the same four plays over and over, and each included options for the import to catch the ball in the low or high post, on the wing or facing the basket at the three-point line, with plenty of time and space to take his man. Guiao could plug in a replacement and watch him drop 40 points in his first game.

  Guiao also seemed to enjoy tinkering with his imports and shaking up his roster to give the team a competitive edge. The shift from Greer to Penny in 2006 was a risky move (Penny was, after all, replacing the PBA’s top scorer) that caught other coaches off-guard. The Red Bull that teams had seen during the regular season was a one-man show. If they could force Greer into an off night, they stood a good chance of winning. The Penny-led team Guiao fielded in the postseason played a totally different style, with more balanced scoring, heavy contributions from the local stars, and Penny orchestrating the offense from the high post.

  That wasn’t the first time Guiao took advantage of league rules that allowed franchises to replace imports at any point in the season. He might be the only coach in league history to hire a new import midway through a championship series. After game three of the 2002 finals, Guiao deemed import Antonio Lang too inconsistent and hired Sean Lampley to bring home the title. Once again his gamble paid off and Red Bull won; Lampley went down in the books as the championship team’s import, and Lang, who’d survived the whole season, was written off as another lemon.

  Other teams that have switched imports during the postseason have been less successful. While Red Bull was unveiling Penny for the 2006 quarterfinals, the Talk ’N Text Phone Pals, who already sported one of the league’s deepest rosters of Filipino stars, stole headlines by signing former Detroit Piston Darvin Ham. Ham was a role player on the Pistons squad that trounced the Lakers in the 2004 finals, and local hoops scribes suggested that the simple fact that Ham owned an NBA championship ring guaranteed Talk ’N Text the title. It was not meant to be. Ham, playing just days after he arrived, struggled with jet lag and looked lost against sagging zone defenses that surrounded him with three opposing players every time he touched the ball. The referees seemed to take perverse delight in saddling the NBA ve
teran with dubious over-the-back and offensive foul calls, and after three games the heavily favored Phone Pals were eliminated and Ham was booked for a flight home.

  I found Ham in a hotel bar a few hours before his departure, drinking fruity cocktails at a three-per-hour clip in a last ditch effort to spend his remaining pesos and ensure a sound sleep on the flight. Even though Ham’s PBA stint was a tiny blip on a distinguished career, his week in Manila had frustrated him. Dealing with quadruple-teams, power-tripping referees, and management’s absurd expectations, he said, was like “hooping in handcuffs.” Ham had a point, but those were the exact conditions in which Roe had become accustomed to playing, and by the time he suited up for Alaska, he had nearly mastered the art of balling in bonds.

  Roe started thinking about surviving the season before he signed with Alaska. He had seen in his previous PBA seasons that certain teams and coaches were more patient with imports, and he planned to put himself in the right situation. That meant if a team like Red Bull inquired about his availability for the upcoming season, the answer was no. Roe, in fact, vowed never to play for Guiao—“that little bald-head coach”—after the 2002 Antonio Lang incident. One of Roe’s major gripes with the Philippine league was that even when coaches and local supporting casts underperformed, imports got the blame and the boot. Roe credited Chot Reyes, who coached the Swift Tigers in 2001 when Roe first played in the PBA, for standing by him after the team lost its first three games. An 0-3 start almost always spelled doom, especially for a rookie import, but Reyes blamed his local players for the losing streak. Roe’s effort was there; theirs wasn’t. The team came alive and made a deep playoff run with Roe as their import, a performance that earned him several invites to return to the PBA in subsequent seasons. If Reyes had followed the standard import playbook, Roe might never have gotten another chance in the league. When Cone spoke to Roe before the current season, he said all the right things about accountability to convince Roe to return to Manila.

  Another aspect of Roe’s PBA longevity plan was cultivating friendly and hopefully close relationships with his teammates. During his second week with the team, Roe remained in the gym after practice one day to challenge the Alaska mainstays in shooting contests. It didn’t matter that the locals were more accurate shooters than he was or that he still hadn’t found his offensive rhythm; he joined the games and tried to keep up with Alaska’s deadeye guards. Roe had one long rally with Dale Singson, a backup point guard whose in-game specialties were three-pointers and improbable running scoop shots. Here, Singson and Roe were trading baskets from a spot on the right side of the court, about seventeen feet from the basket. First, Singson would catch a pass and flick a soft parabola through the dead center of the rim. The sounds—hands catching the ball like one soft beat on a bongo, then the frozen silence of flight, then a swish and a bounce in quick succession—were basketball poetry. Roe followed, opting to launch a line-drive bank shot off the backboard. It wasn’t as mellifluous as Singson’s shot but it was just as effective. They went back and forth for a dozen shots without either player missing the mark. A handful of Alaska players who hadn’t yet hit the showers watched from the sideline. One of Singson’s shots hit iron before falling through the net, and he grimaced and clucked his tongue over the missed swish. Roe threw one off the glass that rattled around the rim, popped out, and hung on the iron before rolling back through the net.

  Neither player missed until somewhere around the twentieth shot, when Roe short-armed an attempt that glanced off the front rim. The penalty was lusutan, where the loser would have to crawl through the spread legs of his conqueror. It took a bit of jostling for Roe to squeeze his six-foot-five frame through the five-foot-eleven Singson’s legs. Meanwhile, the other Alaska players hooted with delight. Lusutan was a form of friendly stakes that the Filipino pros had been playing for since they were children. When they were too young to bet actual money, they competed for the chance to lord it over the loser while he got down on hands and knees and slithered under their legs. It was a nostalgic ritual from pickup games—like shooting hit or miss to see who gets the first possession—that reminded these pros of the days when they played for nothing but bragging rights and love of the game. Short of speaking fluent Tagalog and downing the Filipino delicacy balut, a hard-boiled egg containing a partially developed duck embryo, there was no better way for Roe to say “I’m one of you guys” than to make lusutan with Singson.

  Togetherness is one of the most rigid social norms in Philippine culture, and it played a major role in the chemistry of PBA teams. There’s a powerful urge in Philippine society to be part of the group, whether it’s a family, a bunch of classmates, or a basketball team. Being alone is a minor tragedy to many Filipinos. Often, when I’d show up at Alaska practice and greet the players, we’d make small talk and they’d ask what I did the previous night. My typical response included eating dinner and writing a bit. “You were alone?” they’d ask, and either raise their eyebrows in bewilderment or say that it must be sad to eat by myself. It wasn’t that bad for me, but to them it sounded intolerable. Likewise, many of the players were surprised to learn that I didn’t have any family in the Philippines. Even though they knew I had no Filipino relatives, they guessed that my father had remarried into a Filipino family or that I had distant Filipino in-laws to live with. To them, the real explanation—that I left my relatives behind to come learn about Philippine basketball—was the least plausible scenario. For many Filipinos, being separated from family was a trauma you only chose to inflict upon yourself when economic hardship forced you abroad to support your loved ones, as in the case of the country’s roughly 10 million overseas migrant workers. It was not something you did for a journey of self-discovery in a nation of hoops junkies.

  As part of the team and a temporary member of the Alaska family, it was important for Roe to join group customs like postpractice shoot-outs, pregame prayers, and slapping hands with every player, coach, and ball boy whenever he arrived at practice. He might have legitimate reasons to opt out. He could be too tired to shoot. Maybe he was an atheist. Perhaps he was just shy and needed time before he could give high-fives and crack jokes with his teammates. Any of these would be understandable excuses, but even so, if Roe were to set himself apart from the group and emphasize the difference between himself and his teammates, he could be labeled a snob. It sounds like a lame epithet, but in the Philippines an accusation of snootiness was a serious condemnation that had the power to turn Roe’s supporting cast against him and end his season prematurely. On the other hand, if he continued to court his teammates with small, humble gestures, they would protect him from being replaced by playing harder, winning, and making the import look better.

  Finally, Roe had an ace up his sleeve. He was already friends with several Alaska veterans, guys he had played with and against during previous seasons. Poch Juinio was the team’s lanky and jovial third-string center. Now thirty-three years old, Poch had been one of the league’s craftiest pivot men and toughest rebounders during his prime. This season his role was to teach the tricks of low post to Alaska’s younger big men, although Poch also distinguished himself by being the most prolific farter on a roster full of fart-joke connoisseurs. Poch played for Swift in 2001 during Roe’s first PBA season, and the two nearly came to blows during Roe’s first practice. Typically, when an import joins a team there is some tension; the locals want to test him and see if the foreign star is good enough to lead them, while the import wants to establish his dominance. This is doubly true of rookie imports, so when Roe and Poch matched up in 2001, they went at each other. Hard.

  Poch and Roe weighed about the same, but Poch was bulkier. At first Poch tried to overpower Roe on the block. He was bumping and banging with his hips, groping and hooking with his hands, and driving his shoulder into Roe to force him deeper into the paint. When Poch caught the ball, Roe didn’t try to return the favor and muscle him out of position. Instead, he waited for Poch to face the basket. In a blur,
Roe swiped the ball out of his hands. On the next possession, Poch caught the ball in the same position. This time, however, rather than pivot and face Roe, he tried to keep the ball far away from the import’s quick hands by spinning into a hook shot. But before Poch could release the shot, the ball disappeared. Roe stripped him again, and this time he added a snort of disrespect for emphasis. Poch glared back at him. He caught a third pass and blasted Roe in the solar plexus with a lowered shoulder. Roe absorbed the blow, then threw a vicious chop that would have knocked some air out of the ball if it hadn’t landed squarely across Poch’s wrists. Poch wheeled around and pegged the ball into Roe’s chest. Roe charged and Poch cocked his fist back, ready to swing, but the two were separated before the scuffle could escalate. Although they wanted to rip each other’s heads off in that moment, Roe’s response was actually just what Poch was looking for in an import: a player who couldn’t be pushed around. When their tempers cooled, each had earned the other’s respect. Roe was impressed that Poch had the balls to challenge him, and Poch felt secure that the team’s new import had the bayag to lead the team.