Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

John Arigo and Ali Peek, had been Alaska’s team leaders until 2004, when the team traded them to begin the rebuilding effort that Cone hoped would culminate in a championship. With Coke, Peek and Arigo had been talented but inconsistent, yet they reliably saved their best efforts for revenge games against Alaska. On top of that, Coke’s import, Anthony Johnson, was a deadly scorer who had so far carried the team to a promising start. In the game, many of Cone’s worries came true. Coke got inspired low-post play from Peek, a six-foot-two center whose bodybuilder physique made him look more like the Philippine entrant in a World’s Strongest Man competition than a basketball player. Johnson, the import, was unstoppable in stretches. Yet Alaska held Coke off with balanced scoring from Roe, Willie Miller, Jeff Cariaso, Sonny Thoss, and backup guard Rensy Bajar, all of whom hit double figures. A win in Subic would return Alaska to a first-place tie with Red Bull.

  Early in the morning on the day before the game, the team met in the parking lot outside their practice facility. Shuffling around the pavement in their flip-flops or sitting on their Alaska duffel bags, the players looked into the cloudy distance with droopy eyelids and expressionless faces. While everyone waited for the bus, the ball boys handed out plastic McDonald’s boxes. The containers held the fast food chain’s take on Filipino breakfast, a meal that typically includes a mound of rice, a fried egg, and some kind of meat. In a restaurant, the options would include longganisa, sweet pork sausages; tapa, strips of beef marinated in sugar and vinegar; tocino, sweet cured pork; and daing na bangus, milkfish marinated in vinegar and garlic, then fried hard. At McDo, as it’s called in the Philippines, there’s only one traditional choice—longganisa. Other than that, they serve standard McMuffin fare. Longganisa are little red sausages. Some are fat and short, others are like lumpy, irregular hot dogs, but almost all variants come in the form of a tube encased in skin. Except at McDonald’s, that is. When I popped open my container, I saw two pale brown meat slugs bracketing a cup of rice and a fried egg. I looked at the players. They were mashing pieces of egg and composite meat into their rice and scarfing it down. I tried it, and found that like other McDonald’s meat products—the immortal McRib and its bone-shaped mold come to mind—the longganisa looked foul but tasted pretty normal. Just when a trash bag had been passed around and the empty receptacles stuffed inside, our ride pulled into the lot.

  The bus offered surprisingly few frills. It was a rented version of the passenger liners that plied the Manila-Subic route every day, and came equipped with air-conditioning, cushioned seats, and a DVD player. This was one of the high-end buses; thrifty commuters had the option of riding forty-year-old diesel belchers with passengers stuffed five per side into wooden benches and gritty air rushing through the vehicle’s open windows as the only cooling system. My most unforgettable ride occurred in Catanduanes, an island province off the southeastern coast of Luzon, where I sat next to the driver of a ramshackle, partly homemade bus headed to a small beach on the Pacific Ocean. Before I boarded, porters loaded the bus with a boatload of cement sacks that just arrived from the mainland. I squeezed into a sliver of open space and stared at a three-foot stick shift sprouting from a gaping crevice in the thin metal floor. To keep the engine from overheating, the driver rigged a system of rubber hoses leading from the top of the bus through a window and down into the engine pit. Whenever we passed a rainwater-filled ditch, the driver would pull over and bark instructions at a pair of teenage helpers perched on the roof, one of whom would leap to the ground and fill buckets of water for the cooling system. When one of the tires blew out, the teens climbed down the side of the vehicle with shovels and sledgehammers to dig a hole under the wheel that would provide space to change the flat (believe it or not, this was easier than unloading all the cement and using a jack). Not bad for a two-dollar ride.

  Alaska’s tidy, efficient bus couldn’t match those thrills, although that was surely how the team wanted it. Aside from the fact that the Aces had the bus to themselves, the vehicle wasn’t different from a standard “luxury” model. The privacy was key, however, because it allowed the players to spread out and avoid being jammed into tiny seats built for average-height Filipinos. The first hour of the ride was sleepy. Most of the players nodded out against their windows. The lone exceptions were Willie Miller and rookie forward Christian Luanzon, who split the ear buds on an iPod to sing along to “I Believe I Can Fly.”

  The driver dug into his collection of pirated DVDs. First he played Turistas, a cautionary slasher film about fratty American bozos lured into an organ-smuggling ring while vacationing in Brazil. Next came the first season of Heroes, which Poch Juinio requested. To me, these choices were a bit of a letdown, as previous trips had taught me to look forward to the bus drivers’ gonzo cinematic sensibilities. During one twelve-hour drive I watched the first three installments of Chuck Norris’s Delta Force series,35 followed by The Chronicles of Narnia. On another half-day slog to northern Luzon’s Mountain Province, I managed to fall asleep despite the high-decibel pyrotechnics of Rambo: First Blood Part II, but was roused a few hours later by the excruciating techno theme music of Mortal Kombat. Perhaps I should have been more worried that the man steering our bus through hairpin turns and mountain passes had the same taste in movies as my old college suite mates after they’d been drinking forties of malt liquor, but finding a nation that loved schlock cinema as I did helped tamp down my visions of bus-plunge doom.

  With no Norris to captivate me on Alaska’s bus, my attention drifted instead to the view from my window. Outside of Manila, the landscape abruptly turned rural. Solitary farmers were bent over in rice paddies the size of football fields, some brown and muddy and others green and lush. Massive water buffaloes plodded along, their slate muscles shining with muck. I caught glimpses of three-on-three games being played beneath the elevated highway. In the shade of the underpass where a local road crossed the northbound expressway, shirtless players juked and shimmied their way to rims hung from the tunnel walls. In Pampanga province, we passed a sign urging voters to reelect Vice Governor Yeng Guiao, the Red Bull coach who dabbled in dynastic politics. Guiao’s father Bren had been governor of the province for nearly a decade starting in 1986, and its flagship public gym and convention center still bore the elder Guiao’s name. The cheerful campaign image of Guiao the politician was a far cry from the scowling coach whose Red Bull team handed Alaska its first loss.

  After a couple hours the bus pulled into the Double Happiness rest stop in Lubao, Pampanga. Almost every bus headed north from Manila made a stop at this snack and restroom depot. There were no other buses in the parking lot when we arrived; business was slow, and the employees—hamburger vendors roaming a phalanx of empty picnic tables, women ladling noodle soup and rice porridge into take-out bowls, bathroom attendants—seemed half asleep. That is, until they realized that a PBA team had arrived. Cue shrieking. “Willie!” “Hi Poch!” “Idol! Jeffrey! Da Jet! Idol!” The workers abandoned their posts and followed the players to the men’s room door, where many of them peeked around the corner at the queue of famous athletes peeing into an aluminum trough. They lined up to slap five with the players as they emerged from the bathroom, a gauntlet that resembled the line Alaska’s players formed when the starters were announced before games, only with more urine exchanging hands. Willie found himself on the receiving end of a few kamikaze hugs as he walked back to the bus, while other players signed autographs and made small talk with the employees.

  I wondered if twenty years ago, before Twitter became the closest way to interact with NBA players, casual fans in the United States were able to rub elbows with professional athletes like this. Before every team had a private jet and a public relations staff that tried to orchestrate the players’ every move, might I have bumped into A. C. Green or Vinnie “the Microwave” Johnson at a TCBY along the highway? Players may have been more accessible then, but the situation still seemed far-fetched. In the Philippines, however, it was reality. This was partly due to the economic re
alities and infrastructure deficits of a developing nation. The cost of a private jet would probably eclipse the Aces’ entire payroll, and the bus stopped at Double Happiness because it was the biggest rest stop on the only major road headed north. But familiar relations between fans and players were longstanding in Philippine basketball. Athletes had chance encounters with the public in malls, at church, at the movies, and just about any other gathering place you could imagine. As the price of gasoline skyrocketed in 2007, I even spotted a few PBA bench players riding commuter trains to save money. Fans didn’t merely gawk at the players they encountered; they asked questions, sought autographs, talked hoops, demanded warm embraces, and requested cell phone numbers to become players “textmates.” It was hard to imagine a Miami Heat fan getting close enough to Dwyane Wade to surprise him with a bear hug, and perhaps Dwyane prefers it that way, but there was something touching about the way Double Happiness employees lined up to wrap their arms around Nic Belasco’s shoulder—or his waist, for those who couldn’t reach beyond the six-foot-six forward’s chest.

  The word “fans” also seemed inadequate to describe the Double Happiness throng. Not just a few fans among the workers rushed to greet the players. Everyone—from burger boys to bathroom attendants to soup ladies—reacted with the same utter joy. We tend to think of fans as people with an above-average interest in a team or sport, but here at the rest stop and indeed throughout the Philippines, there was nothing exceptional about following and loving basketball. This was a hoops nation and these were just a few of its millions of patriots.

  Of all the people who stepped off the Alaska bus, I may have been the only one the PBA disciples didn’t recognize. That doesn’t mean, however, that people didn’t notice me. In fact, my role on the team inspired much confusion and disbelief. I was tall enough to be a basketball player, and I was traveling with the team. But I wasn’t actually a baller? This story, although true, did not pass muster with the Double Happiness crowd. They cornered me with beaming faces and held out napkins to sign. “Idol! Idol!” I posed for cell phone pictures with a hawker and his tray of burgers, who then turned to one of the ball boys and asked if I was John Arigo, the former Alaska guard whose height and build were similar to mine. Suddenly, the rumor spread that I was Arigo, and more napkins were thrust at me, now forcefully, as if to say I wouldn’t be able to leave if they didn’t get their John Arigo signatures. By now the actual players had finished their courtesy calls and returned to the bus, where Jeff, Nic, Poch, and John Ferriols watched my humiliation with delight. I wasn’t trying to impersonate a real professional athlete. Really. It just happened. I gave the people what they wanted. After a dozen or so Arigo autographs, I was on my way back to the bus. When I climbed the stairs, I faced a crowd of hysterical, chanting players and ball boys: “A-ri-go! A-ri-go!”

  As the bus got closer to Subic, the pastoral farm scenes and homemade hoops began to vanish. First, we passed through Olongapo, a city of 220,000 residents that grew alongside the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay. Billboards and campaign posters for members of the Gordon clan—Senator Dick, Mayor Bong, and Zambales vice governor Anne, whose family had run Olongapo since the U.S. Navy relinquished the town to Philippine rule in 1959—were plastered everywhere. In many ways, Olongapo resembled other provincial hubs. The main drag, Rizal Avenue, formed a backbone for the entire city. The road was choked with jeepneys and tricycles that carried locals down side streets and away from the banks, restaurants, and department stores along the central axis. The big difference in Olongapo, and the cause of its ignominy, is the sex industry that grew in tandem with the base, which by the time of its closure in 1992 had become the U.S. military’s largest overseas installation. In fact, Olongapo and prostitution had been linked since the turn of the twentieth century, when America first occupied the Philippines. In 1904 an ex-Marine named John Jacob Gordon settled in Olongapo and opened Gordon’s Farm, a watering hole for off-duty servicemen that Americans called “Gordon’s Chicken Farm” because of the loose women who hung out there. More than a hundred years later one of Gordon’s grandsons was a senator and the other was Olongapo’s mayor.

  Driving through Olongapo on the way to Alaska’s hotel in Subic, the bus passed clusters of girlie bars with names like Geisha Club, Gentleman’s Paradise, Girlfriend Bar, and Girlfriend II. Elsewhere in the country, red light districts contained clubs with names like Classmates and Dimples—seamy, no doubt, but with a kitschy side that left room for a speck of dark humor. There was no such levity in Olongapo, just one pitifully named, dilapidated shack after another—neon-clad houses of desperation. The austere lifestyle and pure love of hoops I’d been promised on this provincial jaunt was nowhere to be found.

  This was Willie’s hometown. He’s the product of a relationship between an African-American military man and a local woman, although his parents met under innocent circumstances and his father kept in touch with the family after he returned to the States. Aside from that skeletal outline, Willie demurred whenever I asked about his family and experiences growing up near the base. He insisted that there was nothing exceptional about it, just kids shooting hoops like they did everywhere else. Willie’s restraint was a drastic departure from his playful norm. This was, after all, a guy who routinely flashed his teammates for laughs. He had an uncanny ability to sense people’s eyes on him, and he always rewarded their attention with a maniacal grin or goofball raised eyebrow. The never-ending act could have been Willie’s way of deflecting outsiders’ focus to his clowning, and if so, his teammates respected his privacy by keeping mum about the star guard’s serious side.

  Alaska’s hotel and the gym where the game would be played the next day were inside the confines of the old naval base, which had been renamed the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. In an attempt to replace some of the jobs lost when the base closed, the Philippine government created tax incentives for foreign businesses to operate in the area, and some companies had moved in, although the post-base Subic Bay was known mostly for Sea World-type attractions and duty-free shops that sold five-pound hunks of Toblerone. The wide, empty boulevards looked nothing like the Philippines I knew—no traffic, no crowds, no vendors hawking fried quail eggs on the sidewalk. Nor was there anything provincial about the area. It might as well have been an underdeveloped Florida suburb.

  After checking into the hotel, Cone was eager to practice. It took longer than expected to extract the players from the comfort of their rooms and load them onto the bus, and by the time the Aces arrived at the gym, Cone was tapping an exasperated beat with his foot. He let out a hoarse sigh. “We’re here?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “I can’t believe this. Let’s practice. Just get out and go.”

  Sensing Cone’s frustration, the players and assistant coaches hustled to a set of double glass doors that served as the gym’s main entrance. Assistant coach Bong Hawkins was the first to the door. He pulled on the handle and it didn’t budge. He tightened his grip, bent his knees, and yanked with his whole body. Nothing. Cone found a young woman sitting in the box office and rattled off a list of questions and demands. Who runs this arena? Why aren’t they here? Why are the doors locked? Did you know we were coming? It’s the middle of the afternoon! It’s damn hot out here. Do you understand that we need to prepare for a game tomorrow? We have a job to do, and you’re keeping us from it. When will you let us in?

  The flummoxed girl probably had nothing to do with the lockout, but when Cone confronted her, she absorbed all of the shame for the mistake. She reacted by going catatonic behind the window and staring wordlessly at her desk. Her lack of a response further incensed Cone, who looked like he was about to ram his head through the glass, when a janitor unlocked the doors and scampered down a dark hallway before the coach could scold him. For a moment, it looked like Cone might follow the custodian, but he thought better of it and led the team into the gym.

  With the players stretching at center court, Mang Tom, Alaska’s elderly practice referee and sta
t keeper, struck up a conversation with head trainer Gus Vargas on the sideline. While Tom wasn’t looking, Sonny Thoss crept behind him and pinched the old man’s butt cheek. Tom leaped and spun and cursed Gus, who had purposely distracted Tom while Sonny approached. When Gus and Sonny apologized to Tom, Willie circled behind and goosed him again. Tom yelped and hopped and grabbed his ass. Minutes later, when Tom relaxed, Jeff Cariaso jumped up and tweaked his nipple. With one arm covering his chest and the other guarding his rump, Tom backed away from the players, vowing to make them all pay.

  No one knew for sure when the team started poking Tom—usually in the ass—but it had become one of the Aces’ favorite pastimes. Whenever someone was bored or needed to blow off steam, he snuck behind Tom and took a fistful of sixty-seven-year-old butt. Violating Tom had become as much a part of Alaska’s routine as taping ankles and drinking Gatorade. Some teams smacked a poster with an inspirational message like THE TEAM ITSELF LEADS THE TEAM on their way out of the locker room; this team smacked a senior citizen’s booty. Tom thought they did it because his reactions were so spasmodic. They loved to see the old man squirm.

  After Tom’s retreat, the players turned their attention to me. I was shooting on a side basket, and each time I made a shot, one of the Acess would yell, “John Arigo!” Mang Tom sensed a connection and sat down to impart some wisdom. On this team everybody makes fun of everyone else. Some days it was Willie the robberman. Other times it was Lolo Poch, when his teammates called the creaky center “Grandpa” in Tagalog. Today, with the Arigo wisecracks on me and the coordinated ambush on Tom’s ass, was our turn. Tom grabbed my elbow and shot me a broad smile—it’s a good thing he was wearing his dentures. He explained his country’s love for look-alikes36 and practical jokes.

  “I hope you don’t mind us calling you that name. It is a very Filipino thing. Once you have a name of someone you look like, you are stuck with it. It’s the same with them always touching my butt. I don’t know why it started, but now I am stuck with everyone doing it. Even my children are touching my butt to laugh at me.”