In that first Crispa game and throughout his career in the Philippines, Bates was an elemental force on the basketball court. Like the annual typhoons that blasted through the archipelago, he laid waste to anything that crossed his path. He was faster than the quickest local point guards, bulkier than the most brutish centers, and springier than the highest leapers. Against Great Taste, Bates scored 64 points while making five of six three-pointers, seventeen of twenty-five two-point shots, and fifteen of sixteen free throws. He dunked seven times and also managed to collect 12 rebounds, 5 assists, a steal, and a block. During one stretch in the fourth quarter he scored eleven straight points, nine of them on consecutive three-pointers, each a step farther from the basket than the last. The virtuoso display—a few commentators noted that Bates scored on every kind of shot imaginable—had fans’ eyes rolling back in their heads. He brought the Jordan brand of high-flying, acrobatic basketball to the Philippines two years before Jordan perfected it in the NBA.
The fact that the Crispa-Great Taste game came down to the wire and included two lead changes in the final ten seconds has been eclipsed by the story of Bates’s performance. Great Taste, however, gave Crispa all they could handle, and the great Redmanizers needed every one of Bates’s 64 points to win. Adornado torched his former team throughout the game to keep Great Taste close, and after Bates completed his eleven-point explosion in the fourth quarter, Norman Black responded by scoring nine straight points of his own. Black, in fact, nearly stole the thunder from Bates’s “fantasmogorical” debut, as local writer Romy Kintanar called it, by scoring off a spin move in the post that gave Great Taste a one-point lead with seven seconds remaining. As it turned out, seven seconds was more than Bates needed to seal the win. With Black guarding him close to deny a game-winning jumper, Bates drove past the rival import and lured Black into committing a foul. He went to the free throw line, calmly sank both foul shots, and ran to the Crispa bench, where his teammates mobbed him and Bates lifted team manager Danny Floro in a massive bear hug that made the diminutive Crispa honcho look like a Cabbage Patch doll.
Any other night, Black’s game would have been remembered as a masterpiece. He scored 56 points while making 74 percent of his shots and going a perfect six for six from the foul line, with 17 rebounds, 6 assists, 2 steals and a block. Next to the show Bates put on, however, Black’s masterwork looked pedestrian. Black, a workmanlike forward, scored mostly on short bank shots, power moves in the lane, and put-backs of offensive rebounds. Almost every one of Bates’s baskets, in contrast, came at the end of a highlight-reel move. Black was no slouch—he made it to the Detroit Pistons in 1980 on a pair of ten-day contracts. In fact, the PBA imports of the 1970s and 1980s were all impressive talents who were probably more accomplished than the league’s modern-day reinforcements. Back then, the 1992 Dream Team that spread the gospel of hoops worldwide at the Barcelona Olympics was a distant dream. Big-time basketball had not yet caught on in Western Europe or East Asia. The PBA was the world’s best-paying pro league after the NBA, and the Philippines’ roundball-obsessed masses attracted several players with NBA experience. Yet even among this elite group, Billy Ray Bates was on another level.
Bates had been on my mind for years. In fact, if unlocking the mystery of basketball’s place in the Filipino soul was the main focus of my quest, discovering what happened during Bates’s PBA career was a close second. Bates, you see, had occupied a meaty portion of my hoops imagination since I read about him in David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game. The Portland Trail Blazers signed Bates late in the 1979-80 season to fill in an injury-depleted backcourt, and over the book’s final forty pages, Bates makes an indelible impression as one of the greatest doomed, tragic heroes in the history of the sport.
Bates was eleven years younger than my father, yet his Mississippi upbringing seemed straight out of the nineteenth century Reconstruction South. I read Halberstam’s book when I was fifteen, and Bates’s life bespoke a reality opposite everything I knew about civil rights and New York’s relative racial harmony. He was the second youngest of nine children living in a sharecropper’s shack on a white millionaire’s farm in Goodman, a hamlet on the outskirts of a small town, Kosciusko, in rural Attala County—the godforsaken dot within the dot on the map. Their home had no plumbing and no electricity. Their alcoholic father died when Bates was seven years old, and Bates and his siblings worked the fields to support the family. He spent his youth picking cotton and soybeans, breaking clods of fertilizer behind tractors, and hooking logs for lumbermen; later, he credited his powerful physique to a childhood of manual labor. Bates went to school only to play basketball, and although he never learned to read full sentences in class, he was able to dunk by his sophomore year. By then, basketball had become his sole purpose in life.
In some ways it was fitting, because there was seemingly nothing he couldn’t do on a basketball court. In high school and then at Kentucky State University, if Bates wanted to dunk, he’d dunk. If he wanted to shoot from twenty-five feet out, he did it. Any move he attempted, he pulled off. He may have been one of the most naturally gifted players to ever lace up a pair of high-tops. But because he had so few other opportunities in life, he became a basketball savant. Due to the hopeless-ness of being reared in a corner of the deep South that had hardly changed since slavery, Bates was never expected to do anything but pick cotton and drink himself to death. When his athletic gifts were discovered, they offered him a ticket out of Mississippi, but without any of the preparation he would need to survive in the world. He had little more than his instincts, which served him well on the hardwood but failed him away from the sport.
Initially, Bates’s talent seemed to keep him out of the NBA. Because he’d been able to score since the moment he picked up a basketball, his high school and college coaches didn’t bother teaching him to play a team game. He averaged more than 20 points over his last two seasons at Kentucky State, but NBA scouts worried that he couldn’t be taught to play with discipline. Furthermore, they looked at his stunning athletic gifts and wondered how he ended up at a second-tier program like Kentucky State. In the scouts’ minds, if a player could look as good as Bates and still get passed over by the major schools, there had to be some irreparable, unseen flaw in his game. Instead, Bates began his professional career with the Maine Lumberjacks—a PBA-worthy name—of the CBA, where he led the league in scoring for a season and a half until Portland gave him a chance.
With the Trail Blazers, Bates showed that he could put up points against the best players in the world. For Portland, he was instant offense, and his high-wire leaping ability and against-all-odds path to the NBA made him a fan favorite. It wasn’t long before the national media got wind of his story. During halftime of one of Portland’s playoff games against Seattle, CBS ran a segment on Bates’s upbringing, and while watching him torch the Sonics for 25 points per game in the series, Brent Musberger dubbed him “the Legend.”
Yet the fissures in Bates’s dream-come-true were already widening. When he joined the Blazers, he reportedly had never heard of a checking account. Although Bates was described as good-natured and likable, some scenes from Breaks of the Game reveal how difficult it was for Bates to relate to his teammates. Many of the other Blazers also came from poor, predominately black neighborhoods, but Bates endured a deeper level of poverty and stuck out as the locker room rube. The book contains an account of a heartbreaking dinner Bates shared with fellow rookie Calvin Natt and Portland scout Stu Inman. Bates was excited to learn that Natt also hailed from the South and asked Natt if he too had grown up eating squirrel and possum. Natt burst out laughing while Inman was crestfallen. How do you save a man like that? Soon, Bates attracted hangers-on, men and women who leeched his fame and newfound cash flow. With them, he drank and partied until it began to affect his game. The Trail Blazers gave up on him after three seasons. He received second and third chances from the Washington Bullets and then the Lakers, but squandered them. After a few seasons on
top of the world, Bates checked into a Phoenix rehab facility.
Halberstam’s book ends with Portland’s season, and for years all I knew about Billy Ray Bates came from those pages. Mixed in with every heartbreaking detail, I saw a hint of inspiration in Bates’s tale. Even though I hadn’t been born when Bates played for Portland, and had never seen him dunk, I thought of him as a wonder to behold. Of course, for all of his sheer, awesome ability, he seemed doomed to failure, and his inevitable fall made him seem more legendary. Ever since I read Breaks of the Game, a wedge of my mind belonged to Bates, and every now and then I’d feel a mental itch to try and find out more about him. Back in 1999 or 2000 my Internet-savvy cousin30 told me to start using Google instead of WebCrawler or AltaVista. The first phrase I remember Googling was “Billy Ray Bates.” These days, the Web is home to a wealth of Bates-related information. Back then, however, there were no Wikipedia or Basketball-Reference.com pages to research Bates’s career. All I could find was a dinky fan page on GeoCities that said after his NBA career, Bates became one of the most celebrated players in Philippine history. At the time, I knew Manila was the capital of the Philippines, that the country had been an American colony, and hardly anything else. The idea of Bates becoming a roundball god in Southeast Asia was tantalizingly weird. I never thought that in five years I would get a chance to meet opponents who once tried vainly to guard Bates, and ex-teammates who tried—perhaps even more hopelessly—to keep up with him in drinking sessions. When I moved to Manila, I felt that Bates itch act up again. The more I discovered about him, the more I wanted to learn. Now I could begin to fill in the gaps.
I found local sports magazines that quoted an Oregonian story about Bates’s rehab stay. Sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie explained that Bates had nothing aside from hoops: “All he knows is basketball and he’s in a situation where he knows his tools are not where they were before. He is a young man who lives for the recognition and the glory. He gets his recognition from what he does with a basketball. There is a terrible danger when someone is one-dimensional. If the basketball doesn’t go well, how else can he define himself?” The man Ogilvie was describing sounded like an inside-out Shakespearean tragic hero. Bates was all fatal flaws with one saving grace—hoops. But the sport was never enough to save Bates from the poverty and racism he’d come from; it was only enough to give him a taste of the good life and set up his next fall. In Bates’s case, it was hard to tell if basketball was giving him opportunities he’d never had or giving him rope to hang himself.
There was no way Bates could maintain an NBA career while slipping into full-blown alcoholism. So what did he do? Get clean, pull himself together, and take another shot at the big leagues? Nope. By the looks of things, he found a place where he could keep playing without giving up the bottle. That place was the Philippines. In the PBA, Bates’s talent was so overwhelming that he probably could have played in a drunken stupor and averaged 30 points per game. By most accounts, he almost always dried out before tip-off. His career average of 46 points per game is the highest of any PBA player, import or local, and Bates will probably always be remembered as the best import in league history. Throughout the eighties, he was a superstar in the Philippines, one of the nation’s most famous and infamous ballers, whose legacy lives on today.
In the same breath, coming to Manila could be considered one of the worst things that ever happened to Bates. If, as Ogilvie suggested, Bates needed to find some foundation other than basketball for his sense-of-self, then he was in the wrong place. In the Philippines, all of Bates’s self-destructive habits were enabled, if not encouraged. He could score at will, average almost 50 points a game, and be worshiped by a nation of devotees who treated his ability to put the ball in the hoop like it was proof of the divine. And here’s the clincher: Bates never had to put down the bottle. Time would eventually catch up with him, but for a few wild years in the mid-1980s, he had found his proverbial free lunch. Catastrophe could wait.
I wondered if Bates ever recognized the similarities between his early years and the lives of many Filipinos. Even if he only glanced Manila’s squalid shantytowns from the window of a passing car or looked down on farmers’ bamboo homes and palm frond roofs from a descending airliner, did he ever think to himself that these people, who bathed in streams and hijacked electricity from nearby wires, knew more about the life he had come from than 95 percent of his fellow Americans? If Bates ever had this realization, it never led to much. He got along with fans, enjoyed their adulation, but never seemed to bond with the Philippine masses or demonstrate awareness that their struggles mirrored his own. Instead, he spent his time drinking, carousing, and playing ball.
Bates actually tried to stay clean when he first arrived in the country. In many of his preseason interviews with local sports columnists, the conversation touched on how alcoholism led to Bates losing his spot in the NBA and how he had become a changed man after rehab. By the end of these interviews, however, he was usually finishing off a bottle of beer. When a writer named Butch Maniego interviewed him for Champ magazine after a Crispa practice in May 1983, Bates had the team trainer bring him a couple of San Miguels. What better way to cool down than to double-fist some brews? Maniego, who’d been briefed on Bates’s newfound sobriety, asked about the booze, and Bates told him: “I don’t have those problems anymore, thanks to God. I’m a man’s man, and a man is gonna have a beer. I’m all alone and I can’t see why I can’t have a beer. I’m in complete control of myself and I don’t have no stacks of beer in my apartment. It’s just a drink between friends.” And with that, Bates fell off the wagon and into the Bacchanal.
Back then PBA players partied hard. In the eighties sports magazines I noticed almost as many pictures of teams drinking and smoking at postgame celebrations as images of them on the court. But even these seasoned drunkard-slash-athletes had never seen anyone drink like Bates. I met several of his former Crispa teammates—Atoy Co, Philip Cezar, Tito Varela—and inevitably the first word that came out of their mouths when I asked about Bates was “crazy.” Cezar said Bates downed whiskey like the rest of them drank beer. Co told a story about the squeeze bottle Bates would bring to practice. The rest of the players filled their bottles with water. Bates usually filled his with orange juice, which seemed strange to Co, since OJ is heavy and acidic. One day, on a hunch, Co opened up Bates’s bottle and took a whiff, then quickly jerked his head back and shook off a shiver. The Johnnie Walker fumes had stung his nostrils. Tommy Manotoc, Crispa’s coach in 1983, remembered the first time he went out with Bates. After watching his new import drink enough liquor to knock out a horse, Manotoc left the bar with Bates, who was feeling restless. In the street, Manotoc said he saw Bates pick up the back end of a car by its bumper and do a set of curls with it. He’s wild, the coach thought, but he’s strong.
Then there was the womanizing. Bates wasn’t just putting up Chamberlain-esque numbers on the court, but also in the bedroom. The intervening decades have no doubt led to some embellishment in the Bates mythology, but the guys who played with Bates recalled him hitting the town most nights with no fewer than four lady friends. A small-town boy who once said that the Mississippi town he grew up in only had two girls, Bates went hog-wild with Manila’s groupies. To the women, Bates was a famous, physically stunning twenty-six-year-old American who tossed pesos around like they were Monopoly bills—why not enjoy his riches?
When Bates first joined the team, Crispa’s managers tried to curtail his indulgent lifestyle. They hired drivers and bodyguards to make sure he always returned to his condo by midnight. No problem, Bates told them. And he always did ride back to the apartment before curfew. He just didn’t stay there. Bates struck deals with local taxi drivers and the security guards in his building. For a good tip they would look the other way while Bates, after sending his handlers home, slipped downstairs, left the building through a rear entrance, and hopped into a cab. The whole charade was pointless, anyway, because the idea of any six-foot-four b
lack American keeping a low profile in Manila was outlandish. Not to mention, Bates played for one of the league’s most popular teams. A polar bear would have had a better chance of cruising the streets unnoticed. On a handful of occasions Manotoc and Crispa manager Danny Floro would arrive at the Araneta Coliseum on game day to hear that Bates was spotted leaving a bar at seven in the morning. What could they do? Besides, more often than not, Bates could shake off a crushing hangover and still score fifty.
Manotoc and Floro didn’t want to worry that Bates might be tipsy every time Crispa took the floor. Eventually, Manotoc feared, the hard living and late nights would cost the team an important game. So he cut his own deal with Bates. Manotoc told him that he would weigh him before every game and pay him a hundred-dollar bonus every time Bates came in under 210 pounds. That way, Manotoc figured, Bates would have to stop drinking a day or two before games to allow himself time to sweat out the bloat. For the most part, the plan worked. Back then, PBA teams played about every five days, so Bates could drink himself silly for the first three days, then fast on the fourth day and spend sixteen hours sleeping. On the fifth day he’d suit up, tip the scales at 210, hit the court and look unstoppable. In the PBA, Bates became known as “Black Superman” for the way he swooped to the rim, peaking higher and hanging longer in the air than anyone else on the court, but his ability to recuperate from drinking marathons was nearly as superhuman as his prowess on the hardwood.
Although Bates was hardly a role model to the Philippines’ aspiring young athletes, he was beloved by teammates and fans. He was a drunk and a lothario, but he was a joyous one. When I spoke with his teammates and coaches, they all remembered their nights out with Billy Ray as the epic benders of their youth. Only once did Bates’s drinking get him into serious trouble. After a game in Naga City, the biggest town in Camarines Sur province, Bates and another import, DeWayne Scales, went drinking. They ended up in some dubious nightspot, where, according to a report in Atlas Sports Weekly, the two imports ordered beers and started enjoying the “floor show,” which is a polite term for a striptease. The story gets fuzzy here, but Bates somehow offended the other patrons. The article says his hooting and shouting at the go-go dancers offended the locals. Who knows how Bates’s behavior deviated from the accepted norms of strip club conduct, but one of the other customers threw a bottle that hit him in the head. At first Bates didn’t respond. He was having too much fun cheering on the dancers. But when the song ended, he went on a rampage, storming around the club and demanding that the bottle-tosser face him. No one owned up to the attack, so he found the biggest table in the joint and flipped it over. Glass, beer, ash-trays, and bar snacks crashed to the floor, and then the real melee broke out. Bates and Scales hid behind the table while the local customers threw everything within reach against the makeshift shield.
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