Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  The following day, Tom and I headed for Adams. We had a vague notion of how to get there—take a bus up the coast for several hours, then jump off when you see a dirt road crawling up into the mountains. From there, find a motorcyclist willing to take you to the top. We had no clue what we might find—jungle, waterfalls, blood-thirsty gorillas like those from the movie Congo. Even in Laoag, few people seemed to know much about their upland neighbors. The city folk wondered why anyone would want to visit a place so far out of the way. Their voices turned grave to warn us that communist rebels lived in the mountains. This belief was widespread among urban Filipinos, and it wasn’t wholly false. The country’s communist rebel army had long been associated with the unforgiving terrain of upland jungles where the government had little authority. Still, the communist threat seemed wildly exaggerated. It got to the point where every time I passed a deserted, grassy hill, I expected someone to lean close and whisper, “Communists.”

  When we got to the Adams turnoff, the young Red waiting to take us up the slope didn’t look too radical—a fourteen-year-old in a denim jacket and a faded Orlando Magic hat, leaning against a mud-splattered Yamaha. He grinned when we jumped down from the bus and gestured up toward the green unknown. Tom, who spoke Ilocano, negotiated a ride to the Adams town hall. We squeezed ourselves onto the back of his dirt bike and began to crawl up the mountain. The teenager weaved around pools of sludge and dodged rocks as big as coconuts throughout the vertiginous climb. All the while, the gulf on our left kept growing. We hardly saw anyone else along the road—just a father and son plodding down the path with the curved, eighteen-inch blades of their bolo knives dangling from their belts. Later on, while crossing a drooping bridge of wooden planks, we passed over a naked, middle-age man bathing in a creek. When he looked up and saw two Americans above him, he giggled deliriously. When the road became too steep for the Yamaha’s engine to haul us up, me and Tom would hop off and walk until we reached more level ground. Close to Adams, small cinder-block houses mushroomed up along the road; after a sharp turn we found ourselves in the center of Adams, where a few modern buildings rose mirage-like out of the jungle. The town’s tallest structures were the municipal hall and a regulation-size, open-air basketball court with a concrete floor, surrounded by a ring of cement bleachers and topped with a high pitched roof.

  Tom and I walked to the municipal hall and found the town tourism director brimming with enthusiasm at an opportunity to do his job. He confirmed several obvious facts about Adams—that it was Ilocos Norte’s most remote town, that most of its population lived off the land, and that most people lived in houses made of cinder blocks and corrugated iron or bamboo and palm leaves. “Actually, I am proud to say that you two are not the first foreign visitors we have had here in Adams,” he told us. He took a marble composition book from his desk, shook the dust off and opened it to the first page, where we saw the beginnings of a ledger. Two Israeli travelers had already signed. “Will you please sign?” he asked.

  I asked him about the basketball court, which was on par with some of the nicer ones in Manila. It was still in decent condition with just one bent rim, but other than that and a couple weak spots in the roof where water leaked during heavy rains, it was good as new. Long fiber mats were laid out on the court, with rice spread out to dry on them. A small group of women sat in the bleachers and guarded the harvest. For the people of Adams, the court wasn’t just a place to practice reverse layups, it was the center of social life, the place where the town held singing contests, beauty pageants, and community meetings. During Christmas and New Year’s celebrations and the town’s annual fiesta week, festivities started at the basketball court and radiated out through the forest paths to people’s homes.

  The basketball court’s all-purpose role in rural living was not particular to Adams. Throughout the Philippines, in coastal fishing villages, pastoral rice-farming burgs, and isolated mountain hamlets, basketball courts were used in every conceivable way. At midday, when it was so hot that trying to play five-on-five would have people keeling over from heat stroke, farmers dried rice on the courts. This arrangement benefited drivers on provincial roads, who otherwise would have to dodge patches of grain scattered in the street. Parties for holidays, graduations, weddings, and debuts for girls on their eighteenth birthdays were all held on basketball courts. I even saw wakes where families mourned loved ones under the backboards. But provincial Filipinos who lived miles away from funeral homes weren’t alone in attending courtside wakes; shortly after former President Corazon Aquino died last August, one of her public viewings was held at the same high school gym where I played Thursday-night pickup games.

  With so many different uses for basketball courts, folks in the provinces often jerry-built their own playing surfaces so they wouldn’t have to compete with farmers, mourners, and revelers every time they felt like shooting around. In places like Adams and beyond, people often lived miles away from their towns’ central courts. So, like their urban countrymen, rural Filipinos improvised. They lashed the rusted hoods of broken-down cars to coconut trees to use as backboards. They dribbled, sprinted, slid, and leaped through clouds of dust on earthen courts surrounded by hulking tamarind trees. I saw entire hoops built from felled trees, from the backboard all the way to the supports. In some of the most isolated and impoverished areas, where a trip to Foot Locker might as well be a mission to Mars and a family’s income might struggle to cover the cost of food and medicine, some rims sported handwoven nets made out of abaca fiber, a local banana plant. I saw many of these courts (played on them too), and although the ball didn’t bounce as high off the dirt as I would have liked, and the gaps between the backboard’s hacked-together planks pretty much killed my bank shot, visiting them felt more spiritual than anything I ever experienced in a church. The devotion it must have taken to build an entire court from scratch touched me. It was one of the most sincere expressions of love I’d ever laid eyes on.

  Aside from marveling at the beauty of rural basketball courts, I also played in provincial tournaments. Friends from pickup games recommended me as an “import” for small-town leagues. Although the term “import” was borrowed from the PBA, it had a different meaning in these competitions. Here, imports were rarely foreigners—I was an exception—but instead, ringers from major cities like Manila, Cebu, and Davao who beefed up crews of neighborhood ballers. The team sponsors, often local big shots who operated somewhere in the gray area between politics, business, and organized crime, hired imports to boost their teams’ chances of taking home some championship brass, earning some heavy duty bragging rights, and also making money. Thousands of dollars were often wagered over the outcome of these tournaments, and an owner whose squad won the title would cover the cost of his imports with plenty of cash to spare.

  I should probably explain that the tournament I joined didn’t take place in a typical small town. I played in Boracay. The tiny, kidney-bean-shaped island may have been a speck on the Philippine map, but its profile among the country’s tourism destinations was unmatched. Boracay generated hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenue each year, a remarkable sum for an island not quite six miles long and less than a mile wide. Much of this was due to White Beach, a mile-long lawn of sand the color and texture of talcum powder. A diverse range of visitors found their way to Boracay; there were fairly normal travelers eager to see if the island could live up to the hype, but also a gallery of oddities and grotesques endemic to Southeast Asia—impenetrable cabals of Korean scuba divers, Filipino elites enjoying the spoils of their little corruptions, Western “sex-patriates” with comb-overs and fish-bowl bellies rolling in the sand with local women half their weight and one-third their age.

  Boracay was no typical seaside community. With its multitude of resorts, chain restaurants, and an outdoor mall replete with a sex-toy shop, Boracay was unlike any other place in the Philippines. Many foreign tourists there left without encountering a Filipino who wasn’t serving a rum-spiked
fruit shake, guiding a sailboat, or tidying a room. But in the hills behind White Beach there was a local population whose lives weren’t too different from those of Filipinos elsewhere in the nation, and the tournament I came to play in belonged to them.

  The man responsible for bringing me to Boracay was Leopold “Bong” Tirol, scion of one of the island’s leading landowning clans. Boracay’s earliest resorts were founded in the seventies in an ad-hoc, homesteading style. People arrived, claimed plots, and started building. The Tirol family was an exception among resort owners; they were titled land-owners who not only owned and operated hotels and golf courses, but also leased land for other entrepreneurs to develop. Yet although Bong could call much of Boracay his family bailiwick, he hadn’t been able to extend his dominion over the local hoops scene, where a Canadian bar owner named John Munro had built a small dynasty with teams named after his Javas Jerseys’ basketball uniform company.42 The fact that Bong had also once been involved with real big-time basketball, as manager of a team in the now-defunct Metropolitan Basketball Association, possibly fueled his annoyance over losing to Munro.

  Bong’s plan to take back Boracay hoops relied on me and three other Manila-based ringers. Bong had entered two teams in the tournament, and we would be split up, two imports per squad, with the objective of stopping Javas from winning another title. My teammate was Jonathan “Jonats” de Guzman, a bulky five-foot-eleven guard with a boxy crew cut and veined stovepipes for arms; he had played for Bong’s MBA team, the Pasig City Pirates, and was taking a week’s break from his normal job as a practice player for Talk ‘N Text to aid Bong’s quest. Our counterparts on Bong’s other squad were Ravi Chulani, one of my closest friends in the country and a three-point specialist, and Francis Sanz, another ex-pro from the MBA. Jonats and Sanz, who had meaningful credentials, received a daily allowance from Bong throughout the week; me and Ravi, just a couple of pickup ballers, were happy to be receiving room and board and spiffy new uniforms.

  Fresh off the plane from Manila, I caught a glimpse of the Tirol family’s clout when we arrived at their golf club in Caticlan. We were waiting to board a pumpboat headed to Boracay, more or less blending in with the other tourists there; it was one of the few places in the Philippines where a six-three white guy and a couple Filipino six-footers could remain fairly inconspicuous. But when Ravi told the receptionist we were Bong Tirol’s hired guns, the telephone receiver slipped from the stunned employee’s neck.

  “You’re the guests of Sir Bong?” he asked, voice quivering. “Why didn’t you say? I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

  The mercenaries had officially arrived to restore basketball glory to Tirol’s fiefdom. His name worked like a secret password; we spoke it and servants sprung into action. The receptionist clawed frantically at the air to summon a crew of porters, who scrambled in from a back room to gather our bags. The porters led us to the beach, hoisted the luggage onto their backs, and climbed over the bamboo pontoons of a private motorboat to load the bags. Had we allowed them, they might have also tried to carry us onto the boat.

  When we arrived on the shore in front of Bong’s resort, the White House, he was entertaining guests next to the pool and watching the creamsicle sunset. Dressed in khaki shorts and a polo shirt, Bong was holding what looked like a glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks; he was five-foot-seven, maybe, with sun-pinked cheeks and a carefree manner that made him seem more like a ruddy nineteen-year-old on spring break than a thirty-something resort magnate. He asked if we had a comfortable trip, then told us to put our sneakers on. He wanted to see us play ball. The sun was all but gone, but Bong had installed overhead lights on the island’s cracked blacktop court. As we warmed up, I felt worried. Did Bong have the motor running on his pumpboat, ready to banish whoever failed to impress him? I remembered Quemont Greer’s bitter sendoff from Red Bull, and all the other PBA imports who complained that their teams canned them unfairly. Was I headed down that road?

  Not this time. Over about a dozen short games of three-on-three, all of the imports looked good. I was quick and long enough to guard anyone on the court, plus my outside shots were falling and I scored on some tough contested drives. Ravi’s shooting was blistering. Sanz was a lazy defender but solidly built and the best low-post player on the court. Jonats was flying to the island early the next day, but Bong already knew his game from their days together with the Pirates. Jonats was a legit pro on the cusp of playing in the PBA; in fact, he might have been able to start for a lesser team, but according to the league’s strange economics, he had greater job security as a reserve for a rich team like Talk ‘N Text than as a vital cog on a shaky team that churned through players.

  When we returned to the White House, two members of the Sacapaño clan were waiting for me. They owned Charlh’s Bar (pronounced “Charles”), one of the island’s oldest beachfront pubs and a choice spot for listening to Eagles cover bands, nibbling pig organs, and spotting Western Lotharios. They were also my teammates; Bong was sponsoring the Sacapaño squad in the tournament. I wouldn’t be playing under the Charlh’s Bar flag, however, because the Sacapaños wanted to promote their new cockfighting arena.

  They brought me the weirdest basketball uniform on the planet. The jersey was a navy blue V-neck with my number, thirteen, over the left shoulder. An image of two gamecocks in mid-flight, their beaks poised to strike and their talons bearing down on each other, covered the chest. The words BORACAY COCKPIT ARENA, appeared above the roosters, and just below was an orange bubble proclaiming NEW! in white print. On the back of the jersey, my last name, Bartholomew, had received the Ellis Island treatment, and now read BARTOLEME. This was my moment. I had made it. What twelve-year-old, shooting baskets in the playground and dreaming of his future career, doesn’t look into the clouds and imagine himself as Bartoleme, import of the Boracay Cockers?

  That night, we went to Cocomangas, the bar owned by Javas head-man John Munro. It was one of the oldest and best-known watering holes in Boracay, but over the years the vibe in Cocomangas had turned increasingly seedy. Ten years ago, I was told, Cocomangas had been the nightclub in Boracay, a place where Filipino scenesters and moneyed travelers partied hard enough to keep them in bed until the following afternoon. Over time, however, the upper class crowd migrated to newer bars that opened closer to the beach. What remained was a meat market. When we arrived at Cocomangas, a group of women in halter tops and shorts were smoking outside. The moment they spotted me, they started shouting prices: “One thousand!” “Seven hundred!” “Free!” Sanz and Ravi found this hilarious, but I was already feeling queasy. Inside Cocomangas the gallery of horrors included balding men in fanny packs grinding against teenage Filipinas to a Black Eyed Peas song; a grab bag of lady boys and unfortunate-looking women, all half-naked, waiting for customers to approach them; older Australian men with leathery sunburnt skin pounding mason jars of mixed drinks while sizing up their prospective dates; and teenagers from Manila’s elite high schools tying on their first benders. The music was loud and overbearing; the air was thick with cigarette smoke and mosquitoes. If Munro was in charge of this joint, then I was eager to give him some basketball comeuppance.

  Before we played Javas, however, we had to dispatch a few weaker squads made up of busboys and cooks from local hotels and dive shops, as well as a gruff crew of public servants from the Boracay precinct of the Philippine National Police. The style of play was straight run-and-gun, with full-court passes leading to contorted, crowd-pleasing layups and hardly any defense. In Tagalog, they called this style of play bato, a word that meant “rock” but could also mean to hurl something as far as possible. After I pulled down rebounds, it was usually the first word I heard—“Bato!”—from a teammate dashing down court. Basketball players all over the world like to avoid playing defense, but few seemed to disdain it as much as Filipinos. Of course, PBA and college teams ran intricate defenses and fielded hard-nosed stoppers in their lineups, but in more disorganized competitions, the sport was abo
ut showing off your moves. There was even a sense of collusion between players on opposite teams: “I’ll give you the lane to try a spinning layup if you let me scoop a finger roll from the foul line.”

  I grew up under a different basketball ethic. I felt embarrassed when someone scored on me, and I got back at him not with a gaudy drive of my own, but by trying to shut him down for the rest of the game. I couldn’t rewire myself to give up on defense, which made me even more of a novelty to the Boracay spectators, many of whom seemed to enjoy me as a cross-cultural hoops study: White Americans are monstrously tall, have hairy arms, and play intense defense! I even earned the approval of Bong, who pulled me aside after a game and said, “The crowd is talking about you. They say you never stop going after the blocks and rebounds, like you’re crazy. They never see players like that.”

  We won each of our first three games by more than thirty points, and people started to recognize us around the island. During the day, when we walked along the beach, waiters at seaside bars would give us the thumbs-up, and people would run in from the street to yell, “Ang galing ninyo!” which was like saying, “Damn, you guys are good!” At night, every fifty feet, a group of guys huddled around a bottle of rum would stop us by shouting “Idol!” as we passed. “One shot!” they’d plead, holding out a plastic cup containing a snort of rust-colored liquor. They’d slap us five, reenact moves we made on the court, pass the communal cup and invite us home to meet their wives, sons, daughters, nephews.