Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  When word trickled back across the ocean that players like Jeff Cariaso were becoming PBA stars, other Fil-Ams planned to make the leap, although until the turn of the century there weren’t much more than a dozen foreign-bred Filipinos in the PBA. That began to change in 1998, thanks to a start-up pro league that hoped to challenge the PBA’s twenty-three year reign over Philippine basketball. The Metropolitan Basketball Association boasted promotional and financial backing from prominent politicians and ABS-CBN, one of the nation’s two largest television networks. With ABS as the prime mover behind the league, the MBA had a built-in media apparatus that offered teams and their owners some of the country’s most valuable television exposure. With the network’s deep pockets and nightly audience of more than 20 million viewers, the new league was well-positioned to give the PBA a run for its money.

  Still, it wouldn’t matter how much clout the MBA received from its network if the league could not attract talent to rival that of the PBA. Since PBA teams had already signed the best local players, the new league courted Filipino-Americans aggressively. They loosened regulations so teams could hire players whose Filipino bloodlines were hard to prove and in rare cases nonexistent. In its first season, the MBA’s strange brew of Filipino journeymen and over-the-hill stars, hungry Fil-Ams out to prove themselves, and pseudo-Pinoy anomalies was a hit. The local game was preserved but infused with American influences like fluid, ankle-breaking ballhandlers, big men with three-point range, and slashers who finished their drives by dunking over defenders.

  The MBA’s great innovation was to form a truly national league with teams based in different provinces. Because all the PBA’s corporate-sponsored teams were based in Manila, the league never developed regional fan bases and rivalries. Sure, PBA teams would visit provincial towns from time to time, but the MBA gave real home teams to areas outside of Manila—like Cebu and Negros in the Visayas, and Davao City and Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao.50 Often, MBA teams signed top players from their home province’s college and commercial leagues to boost local appeal. It worked. MBA games almost always played to sellout crowds, while the scene at the Araneta Coliseum for subpar PBA match-ups on Wednesday afternoons could resemble a ghost town.

  The MBA, with its trans-Pacific talent pool and simmering local rivalries, seemed like the PBA’s riveting, renegade kid brother. The young league was rough around the edges, and overall the PBA still had better players, but no one seemed to have more fun at basketball games than the fans, players, coaches, and even announcers of the MBA. Take, for example, Bill Velasco, a sports broadcaster and journalist who has covered the sport for almost three decades. Every month or so I would meet Bill at a coffee shop and pump him for hoops gossip. Bill’s observations on Philippine basketball tended to come laced with the wry cynicism of a media veteran, but when we talked about his days on the MBA circuit, he launched into exuberant, hour-long soliloquies about the great league that was.

  Basketball fervor was reputedly most intense in Cebu City, the country’s second-largest metropolitan area and the nerve center of the Visayas region. So when the MBA gave Cebu its own team, the Gems, that passion boiled over. Bedlam ruled the Cebu Coliseum during any Gems game, but Cebuano fans were most frenzied when the Manila Metrostars or Negros Slashers came to town. For these games, the organizers knew to hire a platoon of truncheon-wielding peacekeepers to contain the riotous crowd. Facing the Metrostars, the Cebuano masses looked to exact revenge for decades of slights that stemmed from being the Philippines’ second city; against Negros, they aimed to flaunt their supremacy over a less prominent Visayan island. Both rivals, however, faced the same abuse—bombardment by peso coins, water bottles, and AA batteries—and survived by hiding under massive beach umbrellas. Whenever Bill described these scenes he appeared invigorated by reliving those harrowing moments, which he survived more or less unscathed. Bill’s colleague, on the other hand, a winsome courtside reporter who once found herself—her head, to be precise—on the receiving end of a flying Mono-block chair, might not view the MBA through the same rose-tinted glasses.

  Traveling with the MBA also unearthed loony interprovincial superstitions and prejudices. Occasionally, the Iloilo MegaVoltz would schedule a game in Antique, a neighboring province just a few hours’ drive up Panay Island’s idyllic west coast. During these games, the broadcasting crew’s foremost concern was to finish the game and get out of town before the manananggal came out. Somehow, the mountains looming over Antique’s sleepy farming and fishing communities became known as the ancestral home of manananggal, a breed of female vampires that sprouted wings and detached from their legs to become flying torsos. The beasts would fly through the night, looking for open windows or roofs that weren’t properly sealed. When a manananggal found a good spot, it would unfurl its long, proboscis-like tongue and lower it into a sleeping victim’s bed. The tongue would pierce the skin and suck blood (organs too, sometimes) from its prey. Supposedly, the manananggal’s favorite meal was a fetus still inside its mother’s womb. Yes, these myths sound outlandish, but many Filipinos take them seriously, not as absolute truth but as the kind of fate you didn’t want to test. Even urbane Manileños like Velasco, who attended the country’s top schools and enjoyed the same modern lifestyle as most Americans, reserved a corner of their belief system for these superstitions.51

  These regional quirks, the violent crowds, the bitter rivalries, and the mix of local talent and Filipino-American players, gave the MBA a vitality that the PBA—playing every week in the same Manila arenas, with many of the same teams and even some of the same players from 1975—lacked. The MBA even managed to poach some of the PBA’s stars, such as Vince Hizon, who signed with the Iloilo MegaVoltz in 1999 for a salary that was reportedly double that of the highest-paid PBA players. In overall status and audience, the PBA was still the dominant league, but the mere fact that the upstart association had established a fan base and stolen headlines from the older league spooked the PBA. A basketball arms race followed, with both leagues luring the other’s players away with overpriced salaries and a Fil-Am hiring spree that sent scouts to stateside Filipino communities from San Francisco to Staten Island. From 1998 to 2001 the PBA drafted or hired more than twenty-five Fil-foreign players, who suddenly made up about 20 percent of the league. Butch Maniego’s horde had finally arrived.

  At the same time, the Asian financial crisis hit the Philippines. The peso lost half its value compared to the dollar from 1997 to 2001, and team owners in both leagues began to cut costs. In the MBA, travel expenses sent franchises’ balance sheets deeper and deeper into the red. The home-and-away schedule that made the league so popular would eventually lead to its undoing. MBA owners could no longer afford their teams, and some of them stopped paying the players’ salaries.52 For PBA franchises, playing to a half-full Araneta Coliseum was better for business than playing to packed houses in the provinces. Meanwhile, MBA teams were dropping like flies. Several franchises collapsed by the end of 2000, and the whole league folded in 2002. The PBA had survived the MBA’s challenge. Now the league would have to learn to live with its Fil-Ams.

  A few minutes before the opening whistle of an 8:00 a.m. practice, Alaska’s assistant coaches stood in a circle near half-court. “There goes one more Filipino job right there,” Joel Banal said to Dickie Bachmann, Jojo Lastimosa, and Bong Hawkins. According to the latest PBA gossip, Alex Compton, the American player I met my first week in Manila, who had toiled in the semipro Philippine Basketball League after the MBA folded, then retired and became an assistant coach in the PBA, was finally going to be allowed to play in the big league.

  For most Philippine basketball fans, this was a feel-good story. When Compton came to the country in 1998, the MBA permitted him to play, even though he wasn’t Filipino, because he was born in Manila. He charmed fans with his clutch shooting—Alex led the Manila Metrostars to a championship and won the league’s MVP award in 1999—and embraced Philippine culture in a way that was almost unprecedented for a fo
reigner. Compton’s assimilation touched Filipinos, who had tolerated years of American imports who knew little more about the country than where to find a Big Mac. Compton, on the other hand, could pass for a native Tagalog speaker.53 During his MBA days he would drive team managers crazy by disappearing into crowded markets to mingle with working-class Filipinos as they shopped for rice and squid. Fans knew that Compton, like many Americans before him, could have gotten by without learning Tagalog; his studying the language was a gesture of respect that warmed their hearts. When the MBA collapsed, many of its players jumped to the PBA, but Compton’s lack of Filipino lineage meant he couldn’t play unless a team hired him as an import, and that would never happen because he was only five-foot-eleven. Yet he chose to remain in the Philippines because he considered it home. He was grandfathered into the rugged, mostly ignored PBL, and he took part-time TV gigs as a college hoops analyst and host of a men’s health program. All the while, Compton sent letters to the PBA, requesting that he be permitted to compete as a local. His plea became a minor cause célèbre, with Manila sports columnists arguing that his commitment to the Philippines and mastery of the national language made him Filipino enough to play. But the PBA wouldn’t budge.

  By 2006, Compton had his fill of the PBL and retired, even though he probably could have played three or four more years. A few times when I was out with him, shopping for groceries or eating gyros in a mall before church, strangers approached Compton to say he deserved to play in the PBA. In the 2007 import conference, it finally happened. Because Welcoat’s roster was full of PBA bric-a-brac—rookies and expendable role players bequeathed to the team in an expansion draft—the league allowed Compton, who was already the team’s assistant coach, to suit up as a second import. In one stroke the league made Welcoat more competitive, granted Compton’s wish, and pleased his thousands of fans, all while avoiding a precedent that could lead to other Philippine-born foreigners claiming a right to play in the PBA. When I heard the news, I called Alex to tell him how excited I was to finally see him play in the PBA. He called it a dream-come-true. But to Alaska’s assistant coaches, it was a travesty.

  “How did that even happen?” Bachmann asked, providing his own sarcastic response. “Speak Tagalog in public whenever you can.”

  “Pray all the time,” Joel added, “say hello to the commissioner every time you see him, come out on TV.” The coaches’ bitter laughter made one point clear: to them, it didn’t matter that Compton was a model citizen, that he could address them in their native language, that he was a leader in his church, or that the commissioner and even most Filipino fans felt he deserved this chance; to them, all that mattered was that Compton’s roster spot could have gone to a real Filipino, but instead it was going to a popular and well-connected American.

  This protectionist impulse was at the root of many Filipino players’ objections to the influx of Fil-Am players in the early 2000s. Even though in most cases the American-born Filipinos were no more than a generation removed from the islands, many native Filipino players and fans felt that Fil-Ams didn’t share their culture and didn’t deserve the fame and riches they received in the PBA. Always first on their list of complaints were the Fil-foreign players’ language skills. Many of the league’s Fil-Ams could understand Tagalog and hold an adult conversation in the language. But it often seemed that they only spoke Tagalog when absolutely necessary, like when telling their drivers where to pull over or asking their kids’ nannies when the children left for school. Even more importantly, the homegrown Pinoys felt that Fil-Ams didn’t share and couldn’t comprehend the local devotion to basketball. Sure, they also grew up playing the game. But did Fil-Ams build their own baskets out of twisted clothes hangers and rummaged two-by-fours? Did they play in bare feet or flip-flops until they were thirteen? Did they worship Atoy Co, Ramon Fernandez, and Alvin Patrimonio as kids, or were their idols Hakeem Olajuwon, Scottie Pippen, and Karl Malone? With no more than 150 active PBA players and a nation of 90 million people who revered the sport, Philippine hoops nationalists believed the roster spots should belong to players who had devoted their entire lives to the dream of playing in the PBA, not to guys from California who never considered playing in Manila until an agent convinced them they could make a lot of money overseas.

  Chris Guidotti, a former team manager in the MBA who supported Compton’s drive to join the PBA, summed up this attitude for me: “Some Fil-Ams are not even interested to learn the language. They just want to take Filipinos’ money and bring it to the States. Alex doesn’t have any Filipino blood, but he’s more Filipino than all these Fil-Ams in the PBA.” Guidotti’s take was harsh, but it accurately reflected the animosity many people felt toward Fil-Ams. Like many other prejudices, this bias was based in some fact and a lot of misunderstanding. When Filipino-Americans entered the PBA en masse during the MBA years, the basketball community began to notice the differences between players who were raised in the Philippines and those who grew up in other countries.

  Fil-Ams lacked the common touch that local players had cultivated for decades. Every PBA team had a corps of die-hard fans who attended every one of their teams’ games, waving glittery, personalized banners embroidered with the players’ names and screaming maniacally in support of their chosen franchise. These groups of fans were like off-the-books cheerleaders; they received blocks of free tickets from team management and players, and many enthusiasts even received cash per diems to cover travel expenses and meals. These fans tended to be the misfits of Philippine society—raggedy teenagers badly in need of dental work; crutch-wielding midgets; and poor souls bearing limps and gimp limbs as reminders that the Philippines wasn’t polio-free until 2000. The leaders of these motley crews tended to be flamboyant gay cross-dressers. The drag queens were called bakla in Tagalog, and they made up a meaty cross section of the PBA’s most avid devotees. In a crowded mall or some other nexus of the Philippine mainstream, the bakla might be pariahs, but they somehow carved out a niche in the world of professional basketball. At PBA games they led the entire crowd in chants for their teams, and the drag queen fans had a knack for stealing the show during timeouts with racy stripteases. And most of all, the players accepted these fans and even developed genuine friendships with them.

  On days when Alaska played the later game of a PBA double bill, the players and coaches would arrive early, usually in time to watch the beginning of the first match before heading to the locker rooms to stretch and change. During this downtime, the locals worked the crowd with the calm assuredness and affable demeanor of natural politicians. Poch Juinio would sit with his arm around Hector, a gay fan whose rendition of the “Go Alaska! Fight! Fight! Fight!” chant was a raspy, effeminate warble capable of cutting through thousands of roaring fans. Bong Hawkins would join two elderly, partially toothless women and gab about everything from his mid-nineties glory days to the pre-renovation Araneta Coliseum and the stench of its old locker rooms, which the PBA shared with cockfight breeders. Willie Miller would stand in the aisle, uncorking various combinations of smiling, cross-eyed, tongue-wagging facial expressions for a self-replenishing line of kids and female fans waiting for a hug and a photograph.

  For Poch, Willie, and Bong, these fans were as much a part of Philippine basketball as bounce passes and the pick-and-roll. Many of the fans had been following the homegrown players since their college careers. They had been sharing pre- and postgame chats with each other for years. Likewise, Filipino fans had come to expect this level of intimacy in their relationships with pro athletes. Two of the PBA’s greatest and most beloved players, Robert Jaworski and Alvin Patrimonio, were legendary not just for their hardwood heroics, but also for their endurance when it came to pleasing their fans. Stories abound of the two players mingling for hours after practice and games, refusing to go home until they had honored every request.

  Alaska’s Filipino-Americans, on the other hand, didn’t have years of interactions to develop bonds with the fans, nor did they grow up in a cu
lture where rubbing elbows with transgender cheer squads was the norm. They honed their hoops instincts in the United States, where common spectators enjoyed no access whatsoever to NBA stars, and where professional athletes rarely connected with the American underclass except in stage-managed publicity events. Even then, NBA players were more likely to be donating their time to underprivileged or sick children, not to the plethora of misfits who dominated the PBA die-hard ranks. Indeed, many of these marginal characters, with their ill-fitting sequined tube tops and haggard, wan faces, looked like they came to games straight from a casting call for third world indigence. When most Fil-Ams signed their PBA contracts, they were newcomers to Philippine basketball; they didn’t possess the lifetime of experiences and ingrained attitudes that allowed local players to mesh naturally with common fans, so they struggled to live up to the image of a PBA star.

  The American-raised players were never rude or cruel to the Alaska supporters; they were courteous but not warm. When Mike Cortez or Nic Belasco walked through the stands on the way to or from the locker room, they might slap some outstretched hands, but they rarely lingered with fans. Jeff Cariaso made an effort to give his devotees the attention they craved by smiling and making small talk, but even a twelve-year PBA veteran like Jeff didn’t feel comfortable around the den mother drag queens. It was hard to blame a guy who was raised in the States for being wary when packs of emaciated cross-dressers with blush bull’s-eyes painted on their cheeks beckoned with calls of, “Daddy, come here! Come talk to us!” Or for acting annoyed when semibelligerent fans grabbed their shoulders and squeezed like they wanted to take a piece home with them. But even though Fil-foreigners might have had legitimate reasons to feel reluctant about getting up close and personal with local hoops addicts, their public image suffered for it. As fans observed similar standoffish behavior in Fil-Ams around the league, the public reached their own conclusion: Filipino-Americans were snobbish. They were mayabang.