Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  It didn’t look like I’d be able to learn much about basketball’s role in the rural Philippines during the team trip to Subic. There was more to gain in hanging around Mang Tom, who hailed from Bicol, a region of southeastern Luzon where the coastline lurches in and out like it was drawn by a blindfolded drunk in the back of a rickety jeepney. Tomas Urbano was born in Daet, the provincial capital of Camarines Norte. The region sits dead center in the Philippines’ hurricane alley and catches the business end of about a dozen typhoons every year. The destructive storms, combined with the unfriendliness of Bicol’s volcanic, mountainous terrain, have made it one of the most poverty-stricken parts of the country. It seemed like every year a batch of farmers lost their homes and land to natural disasters and were forced to start from scratch or migrate to Manila and chance it in the slums. A few months before Alaska’s season began, Typhoon Durian lashed Bicol with 155 mile-per-hour winds and dumped more than eighteen inches of rain on the region, which sent layers of mud and boulders cascading down Mount Mayon, the area’s iconic volcano, whose name means beauty in Bicolano. More than seven hundred people died in landslides, and hundreds more were entombed in the mud. They’re still missing, their deaths confirmed by the passage of time.

  I began hearing the story of Mang Tom’s journey from Daet to the PBA one evening on my way home from practice. While walking home from the train station, I heard someone yell from across the street. There was nothing inherently strange about this. The neighborhood had adopted me as their foreign mascot, and anytime I left my house, I expected to pay respects to everyone from street urchins to bank security guards. Everyone had a different name for me. Some called me Raphael, others used the generic “Joe,” and the tricycle drivers reveled in naming me Wowowee, after a local variety show where I once got pulled from the audience to answer trivia questions on national television. But there was something different on this occasion.

  “Shit, man! Is that Raf Bartholomew?”

  Who here knew my last name? The voice was coming from the back room of a streetside eatery. I crossed the street, ducked through an opening in the yellow gate and peered inside. Mang Tom was sitting with his back to the wall and a mountain of rice in front of him. It turned out that Tom was my neighbor. Aside from being one of the Aces’ longest-serving employees, Tom operated this turo-turo37 restaurant and lived in the adjoining back room with his wife, married children, and a herd of toddler grandkids. I had actually eaten there, before I started following Alaska and met Tom. The price—about a dollar for your choice of main course, plus a cup of rice and a small mug of beef stock—was tough to beat, and Tom’s ginisang monggo—stewed mung beans with pork—was charged with a smoky aftertaste that made it the best in the barangay. Tom, it turned out, did most of the cooking himself. He didn’t trust his employees with anything other than the simplest dishes like fried fish and pork adobo. After that night, I ate dinner with Tom a couple times each month, and over all those meals he spun the story of a life in basketball that spanned generations and brought him into contact with just about every important figure in the game’s post-WWII history, like the Leonard Zelig of Philippine basketball.

  Growing up in Daet, the harsh realities of life in Bicol were the least of Tom’s problems. By the time he turned eight he was an orphan. Both his parents died of illness within two years of each other, leaving him to be raised by an older sister. In the late forties the country was still recovering from the ravages of World War II. Medical care was hard to come by, and contracting a serious illness in the provinces was often a death sentence. When Tom finished sixth grade, his sister sent him to Manila to live with their brother, who could afford to put him through high school. But when he arrived in the capital, the eleven-year-old Tom didn’t cotton to the idea of being a charity case. “I had relatives here but I was too ashamed to stay with them,” he told me between spoonfuls of rice drizzled with a pungent yellow broth. “I don’t want to be a burden to them. So instead of staying, I ran away, you know?”

  Tom waved over one of his daughters, who carried a pot bubbling with more of the jaundiced-looking brew. It was papaitan, an infamous soup that I had been dreading ever since I heard about its ingredients—a chopped medley of lung, intestine, and assorted innards, cooked in water, garlic, ginger, and goat bile. Now, I’m no skittish eater. Pig face and ears, chicken and pork intestines, balut—I breezed through these. Assistant coach Bong Hawkins had even showed me how to bite the head off a roasted pigeon at a Chinese wedding. It was a cakewalk; hold it by the beak and bite off the head. But papaitan seemed uncomfortably close to sipping vomit. At the same time, when Tom offered me a taste, my fear of bile made me more eager to conquer it. In the gross-out food kingdom, this was big-game hunting.

  “Come on, Raf! You try this papaitan.” Mang Tom plucked a winged ant out of the bowl and ladled the soup over my rice. Once inside my mouth, the sour and bitter tastes mingled with the acrid smell, and soon I was gagging. My cheeks blew up with air and bile (at this point, I wasn’t sure if it was the goat’s or my own), but I took a breath and swallowed it, then smiled and told Tom how great it tasted.

  “I was one of the best wash-your-car boys in Manila,” Tom said, jabbing the air to emphasize how skillfully he performed as a 1950s precursor to the squeegee man. To hear him tell it, Tom was a Pinoy Odysseus, skilled in all ways of contending, from scrubbing windshields and cleaning pork intestines for papaitan to handling the rock and refereeing basketball games. After he left his brother’s home and took to the streets, polishing cars earned him enough money for rice porridge and siopao, a Filipinized version of Chinese steamed buns. Tom’s childhood sounded terrifying—an adolescent eking out a subsistence living without knowing where he’d sleep each night. Fairly often, his bed was a patch of concrete. But he sounded almost exhilarated while describing the same kind of youth that had doomed millions of Filipino kids to lives of poverty. For Tom, who would eventually let basketball carry him to a comfortable life that would be out-of-reach for many of his countrymen, a childhood on the brink was an adventurous i nterlude.

  Tom only lasted a couple months on the street before he was picked up by a government paddy wagon and taken to a state reform school for wayward boys. Once again his recollection of what sounded like a nightmare scenario was rosy. At the group home, he could count on three meals a day. The school had a basketball court, and when Tom wasn’t doing schoolwork or chores, he spent every moment shooting hoops and playing against the other boys. After a year he was released to his brother’s custody in a Manila suburb. When Tom started high school, he found that his games of three-on-three with other street kids gave him an edge against his new classmates—he was faster to loose balls and a little more ruthless on defense.38 With coaching, he began to show talent. Tom wasn’t much of a shooter, but he had an elastic body with long arms and sharp elbows. He learned to use shot fakes and jab steps to get his defender off balance and then slash to the rim. “I was flexi,” he bragged. It was a word that only Mang Tom used, with no firm definition in English or Tagalog. “Flexi” had little to do with flexibility and more with being quick and shifty, a high scorer with pretty moves. Often, when Willie made a breathtaking drive during Alaska workouts, Tom could be heard clucking his tongue in appreciation and saying “flexi” to himself.

  “I could move, evade the guard doing some acrobatic shots,” he said. “When I noticed your footing is the wrong way, it’s done. You’re finished. Oh shit, maybe you think I’m bragging. You don’t believe me because of my size.”39

  Tom took me by the wrist and headed to the back room, where the cinder-block walls were covered with framed blow-ups of his photographs. Alaska’s championship teams adorned one side of the room. In one image of a victorious pile-up, only Tom’s strained, elated face and right hand, forming a number one sign, were visible under the heap. Hanging on the opposite wall were his celebrity photos—a shot of him and the PBA Hall of Famers who played in a legends game to celebrate the league’s twent
y-fifth anniversary. Another of Tom next to Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino boxer who would soon become known as the world’s pound-for-pound best fighter. Tom walked to a dresser in the corner of the room and pulled open a drawer to retrieve a stack of moldering scrapbooks, their pages pasted with box scores and news accounts from his playing days.

  After high school Tom returned to Camarines Norte and began starring in Daet’s neighborhood and commercial tournaments. He was selected for a provincial all-star team that entered a national tournament in Manila, and there his play caught the eye of college scouts. He accepted a scholarship to play at the Mapua Institute of Technology, Manila’s premier engineering school. In three varsity seasons at Mapua, Tom started at small forward for the Cardinals and was one of the team’s top scorers. He left school before graduating to play semipro ball in the MICAA and Interbank commercial leagues that predated the PBA. Tom’s Mapua scrapbooks were destroyed years ago in a flood, but his commercial league artifacts had survived more or less intact. He poked the doughy, waterlogged pages, pointing to headlines and box scores clipped from sixties newspapers with Tom’s name alongside the likes of Olympians Caloy Loyzaga, Loreto Carbonell, and Lauro Mumar. On the score sheets, next to “Urbano,” I saw his point totals: 16, 24, 30. “See that?” He squeezed my shoulder. “Top-notcher in everything! To see is to believe, Raf!”

  I also saw, rendered in blurry, forty-year-old newsprint, pictures of Tom driving to the hole. There were fewer wrinkles and his mouth was less puckered back then, but Tom was instantly recognizable thanks to his narrow, rectangular face, stubby crew cut, and giant ears. The two pancakes jutting from the sides of Tom’s head became his trademark, the signature feature that everyone who crossed his path seemed to remember. Decades later, when Tom was reunited with greats like Loyzaga and Carbonell at PBA events, they saw his ears and knew it was him. In the seventies, when Tom was rising in the referee ranks, he called a game of the Manila International School when the teenage Tim Cone was playing for the team. When Cone was hired as Alaska’s head coach in 1989 and Tom was already with the team, Cone recognized the old ref. I asked Cone about it and he said, “How could anyone forget those ears? ”

  So by 1979, when Tom became a PBA referee, there was no question how angry players and fans would target him for verbal abuse. Every questionable call was met with a maelstrom of Tagalog curses, followed by “tenga,” the word for “ears” and Tom’s de facto name among PBA stars of the eighties. It was also the last word he heard from a section of rabid fans before they pelted him with peso coins. Tom’s Dumbo ears played a headlining role in the most memorable moment of his career. He was reffing a game of the Toyota franchise, then led by Robert “The Big J” Jaworski, an excitable guard who became the PBA’s most beloved player. Jaworski took the sport-as-combat analogy literally. His physical, bullying style, along with his outsize popularity, probably made him the toughest player to referee in league history. He was constantly hacking other players, and whenever refs called these violations, they could expect an earful from the foul-mouthed Big J. His tirades had a way of whipping the crowd into a frenzy, and in those days Filipino fans were not shy about expressing their discontent with a barrage of stinging projectiles. It’s easy to imagine the chilling effect Jaworski’s presence had on referees, who might understandably wish to avoid being threatened by 20,000 raging spectators.

  Tom was one of the few referees who refused to back down. During a now infamous game, he called Jaworski for a simple nonshooting foul. The Big J was defending his man on the perimeter, got a little too close while trying to body him, and committed a pushing foul. Tom blew his whistle, pointed to Jaworski, then headed to the scorer’s table to repeat the call. Turning his back to the Big J’s theatrics, Tom signaled a pushing foul and flashed seven fingers—Jaworski’s number—to the scorekeeper. All the while, Jaworski had been flailing his arms in disbelief, pointing to the crowd and ranting about the terrible call. Then he tiptoed about six inches behind Tom. Jaworski cupped his hands to his ears, simulating Tom’s expansive lobes, and wagged his tongue at the referee. Suddenly, the arena burst into laughter. Tom, sensing something was wrong, wheeled around and saw Jaworski mocking him. He ejected Jaworski on the spot for unsportsmanlike behavior, a decision that might seem obvious to fans of modern-day NBA basketball but was practically unthinkable at the height of Jaworski’s popularity.

  “I showed them that my balls are here,” Tom told me, pointing to his crotch, “not here,” then to his throat. Days later the commissioner summoned Tom and Jaworski to review the confrontation, and Jaworski dropped his tough-guy act. “You’re my favorite of the referees,” he said to Tom. “You’re the only one with courage. You’re the only one with guts.”40 The incident has entered PBA lore as one of the funniest on-court encounters in league history, one of the moments ex-players and lifelong fans mention when they talk about Jaworski. The Alaska coaching staff certainly remembered it; they speculated half jokingly that Tom’s ejection of Jaworski led the PBA to retire him as a referee in 1986, when league officials suggested him to the fledgling Alaska franchise as a practice ref and in-house scorekeeper. Since then he’d become an elder statesman—not just for Alaska but for the entire PBA, and by extension, all of Philippine basketball. Watching him on the sidelines, you might mistake Tom for a top league official, a visiting politician, or some kind of mafia don. There, Tom would greet a steady stream of players from various teams and generations; the commissioner and other representatives of the PBA top brass; journalists and agents; and casual fans who remembered him as a referee. They all stopped by to pay their respects. When I rode to practice with Tom, I usually spotted subway and jeepney passengers eyeballing him, then nudging one another and whispering, “That’s the guy from Alaska!”

  I asked Mang Tom what basketball had meant to him, and he pointed back to the room where he kept his scrapbooks. It was part living room and part hoops shrine. This time, however, he wasn’t referring to his basketball relics but the framed photographs of his children dressed in cap and gown for their graduation portraits. “Basketball is the bread and butter for me,” he said. “I got four kids. All of them studied from nursery, intermediate, high school, college because of basketball. All of them now are professionals. I can retire if I want and they’re already on their own, because of basketball. That’s life for me.”

  Now, Tom’s children work as bank tellers and call center agents. Even in those white collar professions, the wages were low and the hours long. But it was enough for them to live fairly comfortably and raise their own families, and for Filipinos who aren’t born into wealth, it doesn’t get much better than that. Tom didn’t obtain stardom and riches via basketball, but the sport brought him from his bleak beginnings to a decent life. For the ball boys and support staff of teams not only in the PBA but in semipro and regional leagues around the country, basketball was a way to inch forward in the Philippines’ hopelessly stratified class structure. Tom’s life may be a modest hoop dream, but it is one of the most inspiring stories Philippine basketball has to tell.

  Away from the team, I got to witness the central role hoops played in provincial towns. As a matter of fact, a basketball court was literally at the center of every Philippine municipality I can remember visiting. There must have been a handful of burgs dispersed across the nation that weren’t situated around a pair of rims and backboards, but I never found them. Basketball courts were so uniformly located in central plazas, alongside the other touchstones of Philippine society—city halls, public markets, and Catholic churches—that people widely (and mistakenly) believed that local governments were required by law to build public courts. Now, there was a constitutional amendment I could support! Such a regulation, however, would probably be unnecessary, since the sport had no trouble penetrating the most remote barangays. In fact, considering the feats of engineering and ingenuity that were required to build courts on the slopes of mountains, it was surprising that they hadn’t been constructed by decree.
How else could a place like Adams, Ilocos Norte, end up with what looked like a regulation-size court?

  I visited Adams on a lark while staying with a Peace Corps volunteer in Laoag City, the capital of Ilocos Norte, a northern province facing the South China Sea. Through the ages, the Ilocos region has built a reputation as a harsh place to live—a not particularly fertile sliver of scorched earth sandwiched between the ocean and the rugged Cordillera mountains. The Ilocanos, who toiled over their inhospitable territory to eke out a subsistence living, had a reputation for being hard-working, hard-headed, and cheap as all hell. Their unwelcoming land and willingness to work made Ilocanos some of the Philippines’ earliest migrants. They spread through neighboring provinces like Cagayan, Abra, and La Union, until Ilocano became the primary language of northern Luzon. Nor did their diaspora end there: Ilocano farmers settled as far south as Mindanao, and they made up the bulk of the first Filipino immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s, when they toiled in pre-statehood Hawaii’s sugarcane plantations, California’s lettuce patches, and Washington’s canneries.41 In the past half century, however, the province became associated with its most prominent native son, Ferdinand Marcos, who, despite his regime’s record of plunder and human rights abuses, remains beloved in Ilocos Norte, where he reinvested sizable portions of his embezzled fortune.

  When I hopped off the bus near the provincial capitol building in Laoag City, a row of tarpaulin banners celebrating then-Governor Bongbong Marcos served notice to the family’s enduring dominance in the region. It was early December, and the park across from the capitol featured Christmas-themed sculptures made from recycled goods, including a pile of empty mayonnaise jars shaped like the baby Jesus. That first day, I hit the tourist staples before linking up with Tom, my Peace Corps host, who was working at a local high school. In Batac, about fifteen minutes from Laoag, I saw the strongman himself, or at least what was left of him, since Marcos died in 1989. There, next to the dictator’s boyhood home, lay his preserved remains under a backlit glass case in an otherwise pitch-dark, chilly room where the only sound was an air conditioner’s hum. Throughout his reign, Marcos’s opponents called him a puppet of the United States for favoring American military and business interests over the needs of Filipinos, and the state of mild decay in which I encountered him seemed like poetic justice. He resembled a shriveled marionette: a preserved head, a limpid face with the sheen of a glazed doughnut, and nothing but a bag of bones beneath it.