It didn’t matter, however, that the game itself wasn’t impressive. The energy radiating from the court made me feel starry-eyed. This was what all those people had been talking about when they raved about barangay hoops. Although I wasn’t in the province, the atmosphere was still parochial. Even though my neighbors lived a ten-minute jeepney ride away from malls that housed multiplexes and sold all sorts of pricey staples of first-world living, they spent most of their lives selling cigarettes, driving tricycles, and collecting five-peso donations to assist parking along Katipunan Avenue. Their whole lives took place in that neighborhood, and on this night the whole neighborhood was at the court. If the players bobbled the ball so much because they felt nervous, it was no wonder; their entire extended families as well as almost everyone else they knew were in the stands, pressed against thin yellow ropes tied along the sidelines to keep the crowd from spilling onto the court. If a player scored 30 and sealed the championship with two clutch free throws, or if he threw a boneheaded pass that cost his team the game, he would hear about it until next year. I remember thinking that playing in front of that crowd would intimidate me, and I was only a temporary, fringe member of the community. For the born-and-bred Loyola Heights crowd, this game meant everything. When I played for the Cockers, the Boracay lifers must have felt the same way.
Back in Subic, before Alaska played Purefoods, there was one similarly meaningful moment. Just before the teams finished warm-ups, the big-city PBA took on the outsize passions of small-town basketball. With the game clock ticking down its final minute before tip-off, Willie Miller sauntered away from Alaska’s layup lines and stood at the sideline near half-court. He worked his gaze over the crowd baseline-to-baseline, making eye contact with all the people he recognized from his hometown. Meanwhile, practically everyone in the stands seemed to be standing to yell something at Willie, or if they didn’t know him, snap a picture with their cell phones, because they might not get another chance to see him and the other PBA ballers playing in their hometown.
The game played out like a typical PBA affair, only in a slightly smaller, hotter arena. Alaska beat Purefoods 94-80 and improved their record to five wins against one loss, which put them in a first-place tie with Red Bull. The Subic win came as a minor surprise because Roe had been suffering from back spasms that week. Cone wanted him to rest, even if it meant risking a loss against the Tender Juicy Giants and their high-scoring import, Marquin Chandler. But Roe refused to sit and further won the adoration of his teammates by playing despite his injury. In limited minutes he handcuffed Chandler, and even soared for a breakaway dunk that left the Alaska coaching staff wincing. If Roe aggravated his back and had to miss upcoming games, Alaska’s emerging confidence might have vanished and the season could have been spoiled. Luckily, Roe dunked comfortably and then ran back smirking at the coaches, their faces ashen with worry. With the game in hand, Roe rested for much of the fourth quarter and let Willie lead the team with 23 points in front of a hometown crowd.
After the win, hundreds of well-wishers stormed the court and surrounded Willie. While the rest of the team showered and Cone congratulated Roe on a gutsy performance, fans outside the arena found the locker room windows—a pair of smudged portholes eight feet off the ground—and took turns pressing their faces against the glass. It was their last glimpse of basketball royalty, as well as the final glimmer of provincial zeal during Alaska’s out-of-town trip. Just as Cone finished explaining the Aces’ upcoming schedule and led the team in its customary “One-two-three . . . together!” chant, he realized that Willie never made it back to the dugout. He was still on the court, kissing babies and posing for photographs.
“Shit, he’s been gone the whole time?” Cone asked as the team headed back to the bus, back to Manila, back to their normal lives. “I didn’t even notice. No wonder it was so quiet.”
9
Fil-Am or Fil-Sham?
“Pre-cise-ly! Ab-so-lute-ly! How do you do?” Inside the Alaska players lounge, Willie Miller was showing off his command of genteel English. He was speaking in a put-on British accent with lilting, effeminate flourishes because that afternoon he decided to sit in the “English section” for a change. Leather couches ran along two walls of the lounge, and most days the homegrown Filipino players sat on one side while the Filipino-American Aces and Roe sat on the other. When Willie’s King’s English failed to garner much reaction, he turned to Roe and started slapping the import’s hand in a way vaguely reminiscent of a fist bump and hugging Roe with one arm.
“What up, son? Yeah, son, I be chillin’, son.” Unable to keep a straight face through any of his jokes, Willie greeted Roe in mock American slang, but couldn’t stop a giggle from intruding whenever he said “son.” Now, at least, Willie wasn’t the only one laughing. His imitation Ebonics had Roe and the team’s four46 Fil-Ams howling. His clowning created a tableau of the Philippines’ unique and muddled cultural blend, a legacy of hundreds of years of Spanish and then American colonial rule, followed by a contemporary society in which poverty drove a tenth of the population to work abroad as sailors, nurses, nannies, maids, and at countless other jobs. The nation’s web of cross-cultural influences sometimes seemed most snarled in Philippine basketball. Here was Willie, a half African-American, Zambales-reared Filipino, regaling the team’s black import from Seattle and their full-blooded Filipino—yet still American—teammates with goofy renditions of American hip-hop culture.
Willie, with his shaved head and dark complexion, looked a lot more like the stereotypical image of someone who might say, “Do your thing, son.” To an untrained eye, he might not even look Filipino. But it was Alaska’s Fil-Ams like Jeff Cariaso, Nic Belasco, Mike Cortez, and Alvin Castro—none of whom would blend in on the set of a Jay-Z video—who spoke fluent American slang. All were part of the mash-up of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds that came together in the discussion of Filipino identity, which, curiously, was often viewed through the prism of basketball.
When Willie sensed he’d milked the English section for all its laughs, he reverted back to his natural state, blurting out rapid-fire Tagalog laced with his high-pitched English catch phrase, “Oh yeah!” and skipping across the lounge to re-join Alaska’s local players.47 The seating arrangements on each side of the room could not be any different. On the Fil-Am side, every player occupied a well-defined sliver of personal space. Of course, with four large guys packing themselves into a standard size couch, some contact was unavoidable. Nic had no choice but to be pressed between Jeff and Mike, who were themselves smushed against Alvin and the end of the couch, respectively. Still, it was clear that each player did his best not to touch his neighbors. They turned slightly to face each other while talking, but personal space was sacred. This code of conduct seemed normal to me. I had obeyed it hundreds of times on subway cars and in cramped vans headed to basketball games.
On the other set of couches, something very different was going on. The homegrown Filipino players were seated in one tangled, conjoined mass. Willie was in the middle of it all, with one leg splayed in front of him and the other resting on Poch Juinio’s pale, fleshy thigh. On his other side, Willie was reaching behind Eddie Laure with one arm to sprinkle scraps of blue fuzz on an unwitting Dale Singson’s head, and doing so meant Willie had to bury his face in the crook of Eddie’s neck. Poch was leaning into Willie to create enough separation between the couch and his butt to pass gas on John Ferriols, who had already stuffed his head inside Rey Hugnatan’s shirt to escape the smell. Laure, with his endless arms, was giving one-handed shoulder rubs to the players on each side of him, and Rensy Bajar had decided to rest his head in Sonny Thoss’s lap.
The contrast between Philippine and American norms of male camaraderie, acted out on opposite sides of the lounge, couldn’t have been more stark. To Roe and Alaska’s contingent of Californians, their teammates’ snuggling was excessive and borderline disturbing. Of course, they understood it was a simple cultural difference, but that couldn’
t change the fact that seeing their teammates draped on top of each other evoked all sorts of homoerotic discomfort. The locals, no doubt, considered themselves just as manly as their Fil-Am teammates, but their notion of machismo didn’t preclude clutching a teammate’s inner thigh. And so, due to cultural preferences like this, most PBA teams split into cliques depending on where their players were raised. This de facto segregation seemed divisive, but it was just natural. I always enjoyed trying to figure out which legs belonged to each player when Willie and company formed a human knot; the players also exchanged some genuinely tender moments when they weren’t farting on each other, such as when Poch would massage Willie’s scalp. Still, I was never eager to sit with those guys, and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable when someone started caressing my shoulder. I sensed that I belonged on the anglophone side of the room.
Yet even though the Philippine- and American-raised factions separated amicably, relations between the PBA and its Fil-Ams had not always been simpatico. Over the past decade, an influx of players raised in other countries forced the league to consider what makes someone Filipino and how Filipino a player needs to be to join the Philippine Basketball Association. Competition for jobs created tension between homegrown players and their foreign-born counterparts. Largely thanks to Jeff Cariaso, Alaska dealt with that tension as well as any other team, which made the Aces’ team chemistry a key advantage in their drive for a championship.
The Philippine Basketball Association possesses the unenviable duty of deciding who qualifies as Filipino and therefore is allowed to play. This sounds like a simple classification task, but history and geography have contrived to make determining Filipino identity utterly baffling. Even before the Spanish arrived and drew the Philippine archipelago’s national—some might say arbitrary—borders, the country was a melting pot. Although much of the population shared some Malay heritage, rough seas, imposing mountains, and impenetrable jungles ensured that groups who settled in different areas developed distinct languages and cultures. Arab merchants arrived in the South and spread Islam. Chinese traders lived alongside the local population in major ports like Cebu and Manila. Three-hundred-plus years of Spanish colonialism were followed by American control, which gave way to a short, violent period of Japanese occupation before the Philippines finally became independent. Each foreign power left behind not just a colonial legacy, but also a sizable gene pool. By the time the PBA played its first games in 1975, the Filipino “race” was a mix of Malay, Chinese, American, Spanish, and Japanese backgrounds, among others; the country was not just a melting pot, but a blender.
Ethnic tensions had always strained relationships between different groups, especially between the darker-skinned masses of Malay background and the Caucasian and Chinese mestizo elites who controlled a disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth. In the early days of the PBA, however, ethnic rivalries were not an overriding concern. Two of the league’s greatest shooters, Fortunato “Atoy” Co and Lim Eng Beng, were Chinese citizens who became naturalized Filipinos and were welcomed by the PBA. Divergent ethnic backgrounds mixed harmoniously in the seventies and eighties because players and fans alike shared a Filipino cultural heritage. Co and Lim may have looked more Chinese than their teammates, but they were both raised in the Philippines, spoke Tagalog, ate rice at almost every meal, and loved basketball for as long as they could remember.
Not counting imports, the first player raised outside of the Philippines to play as a local in the PBA was Ricardo Brown, a half-Filipino guard who starred at Pepperdine and came to the Philippines in 1983. Before Brown ever played a quarter, observers of the Philippine game worried that he could set a dangerous precedent. In Champ magazine, Butch Maniego warned that Brown could be “some sort of test case before a whole horde of players with similar lineage come in and take over roster spots which would have gone to our homegrown cagers.” Brown’s heritage was confirmed, he was naturalized, and he joined the Great Taste Coffee franchise and led the team to two Finals appearances in the 1983 season, where they lost twice to Billy Ray Bates and the Crispa Redmanizers. Brown was scrutinized and picked apart by sports writers in his first season; they expected more from the heralded American, who was chosen by the Houston Rockets in the third round of the 1979 NBA draft. Over time, however, he won them over with his low-key manner and by letting his remarkably steady play speak for itself. A squat, five-foot-nine point guard with a fullback’s massive thighs and a deadly pull-up jumper, Brown won the league MVP award in 1985 and was named to five All-PBA first teams. Although a heart ailment forced him into early retirement in 1990, his career scoring average of 23.1 points per game is still the highest of any Filipino player in league history.
Over the course of Brown’s seven-year career, the dreaded “horde” of Fil-Am conquerors never materialized to usurp local players’ jobs. Something else, however, was developing within the Philippine national team. In 1980, Ferdinand Marcos appointed his crony Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco to restore Philippine basketball to its perch atop the Asian hoops hierarchy.48 Cojuangco formed a training pool of the country’s top collegiate talents and recruited Americans Jeff Moore, Dennis Still, and Chip Engelland to practice with them, as well as an American coach, Ron Jacobs, to train the team. He planned to put the Americans on a path to Philippine citizenship in time for the 1988 Olympic Games. While Moore, Still, and Engelland waited to become naturalized, they would compete with their local teammates and share the skills they had learned at top U.S. college programs. (Engelland was a member of Mike Krzyzewski’s first teams at Duke University and now works as the San Antonio Spurs’ shooting coach.)
Cojuangco’s experiment never got a chance to play out. As public sentiment turned overwhelmingly against the Marcos regime and civil unrest grew throughout 1985 and 1986, the team disbanded and the program was scrapped. Although its run was brief, Cojuangco’s national team left its imprint on Philippine basketball. For starters, they were the only Filipino squad to defeat an elite U.S. national team. In 1985 the team beat the United States in the championship of the William Jones Cup, an invitational tournament in Taiwan. Team USA included six-foot-eleven Joe Wolf, who became a multiyear NBA veteran mostly remembered for his mullet; Tommy Amaker, Jay Bilas, Kenny Gattison, and other NCAA standouts filled out the roster. The American team was coached by Purdue University’s Gene Keady, who, with his trademark greasy comb-over and a forehead blanketed by a galaxy of liver spots, seems like the perfect curmudgeon to fall victim to such an upset. The Philippines won 108-100 in overtime in a game that many middle-age Filipinos remembered as one of the happiest moments of their lives. I met a resort manager in Palawan who professed to own a poster of Samboy Lim scoring over an American defender in that game. He said the poster still hung on the wall at his mother’s home in Manila. It was the dazzling, acrobatic Lim, along with sharpshooter Allan Caidic, who outplayed the American guards that night and inspired Keady to name them “Heckle and Jekyll.”
In January 1986, a month before Filipinos flooded the streets in the name of People Power and drove Marcos into exile, the national team defeated China and South Korea to win the Asian Basketball Championships and qualify for the World Championship tournament. It was the team’s last hurrah; to the new Philippine government, Cojuangco’s squad was tainted, and Cojuangco himself fled the country for several years to avoid prosecution for his role in Marcos’s regime. Lim, Caidic, and the others joined the PBA as a new generation of stars, and Philippine basketball insiders learned that recruiting foreign talent could pay large dividends, a lesson they wouldn’t forget.
Heading into the 1990s, a new generation of Filipino-American basketball players were coming of age in the States, mostly in Filipino hubs like Hawaii, California, and New Jersey, but also in less typical immigrant destinations like Michigan and South Carolina. They were the children of Filipinos who arrived after the United States lifted national-origin quotas in 1965 and made it easier for Filipinos and other non-European immigrants to
move to the States. These American-born Filipinos learned basketball on high school and traveling teams with bigger, stronger, more diverse competition than existed in the Philippines. A six-foot-two teenager in Manila would probably be taught to play like a forward, or in some cases a center; a Fil-Am of the same height learned guard skills and competed against big men who might be six or eight inches taller than him and just as agile. In the early nineties, the PBA and semi-pro leagues in the Philippines invited Fil-Am all-star teams of high school- and college-age players to tour the motherland and compete against local teams. The best Fil-Ams stayed behind to try their luck in the PBA.
Jeff Cariaso was one of these Fil-Am pioneers. Alaska drafted him in 1995, and, along with other U.S.-reared talents Vince Hizon, the brothers Dwight and Elmer Lago, and a handful of others, they changed the face of the league. At first the novelty of Fil-Ams made them the toast of the PBA. Cariaso was the league’s rookie of the year in 1995, while Hizon, playing for fan-favorite Ginebra, parlayed his mestizo looks and three-point touch into heartthrob status. Fil-Ams brought a new style to Philippine basketball—they attacked the basket with more fury than local slashers, whose artful finger rolls and scoop shots seemed dainty by comparison. The American-raised players had a swagger that was more hip-hop and more NBA than the way Philippine-bred athletes carried themselves. Some homegrown Filipinos even tried to mimic the puckish, American attitude, like two-time MVP Danny Ildefonso, who made the “raise the roof” gesture every time he dunked.49 Unfortunately, Ildefonso’s celebration looked goofy and forced, like Mark Madsen’s dancing during the Lakers’ 2001 championship parade. For Fil-Ams, wearing headbands or pounding their chests Iverson-style didn’t seem foolish; it was natural.
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