Pacific Rims

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Pacific Rims Page 23

by Rafe Bartholomew


  There’s that word again. Mayabang. The same label of arrogance that could prematurely end an import’s season had dogged Fil-Ams since they entered the league. Velasco, the broadcaster, explained the chasm between Fil-Am players and PBA followers: “The Fil-Ams didn’t behave like Filipinos, and that alienated the fans. The general attitude when the Fil-Ams came over was that, ‘This is a job, I’m getting paid well for it and anything beyond what I do on the basketball court is none of your business.’” No one told them that there was another part of the job, a social contract of touchy-feely bonhomie between fans and players.

  I wasn’t sure how to feel about the antipathy toward Fil-Am players. For obvious reasons, I found it easy to relate to Alaska’s Fil-Ams. I really liked those guys—we could riff for hours on everything from hoops and rap music to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and goofy Steven Seagal movies. Even though I was becoming conversant in Tagalog, I couldn’t hold as rich a conversation with Willie in his native language as I could with Jeff in his. Often, I felt Fil-Ams were blamed unfairly for cultural differences that were beyond their control. I too felt nervous when I sat behind the basket surrounded by giggling drag queens who wouldn’t stop asking me to take them home with me. I just had to ignore the alarm bells ringing in my head and remind myself that they only meant to share a harmless laugh.54

  At the same time, however, I couldn’t help but observe something wonderful in the warmth and closeness between Filipino fans and homegrown players, and that spark was absent in their wooden interactions with Fil-Am players. The opportunity for hoops junkies to interact with pro ballers who were genuinely happy to pal around with them was rare and perhaps unique to Philippine culture. In the States, fans could only admire NBA stars in the abstract, through highlight reels and Twitter feeds and occasionally humorous television commercials. Through no fault of their own, it seemed like Fil-Am players had undermined one of the PBA’s most elemental characteristics—the athlete-fan relationship—and I hoped that eventually more American-raised players would make the extra effort to preserve that bond.

  PBA fans had good reason to suspect that Fil-Am players who didn’t walk or talk like Filipinos might actually be impostors. At the peak of the PBA-MBA rivalry, a few opportunistic scouts and franchises saw how eager the PBA was to hoard Fil-Am talent and recruited American players with no Filipino blood, fabricated their local family trees, and helped them forge documents that confirmed their right to play as Philippine citizens. Thus, Fil-shams were born.

  The first Fil-sham was Sonny Alvarado, the number one pick in the 1999 PBA draft who became a dominant six-foot-seven forward for the Tanduay Rhum franchise until the league discovered his false papers had been shepherded through the verification process by a PBA office worker. Alvarado, it turned out, was Puerto Rican. How could someone with no Filipino or even Asian heritage fly to Manila and masquerade as an authentic Pinoy? Fairly easily. Friends sometimes joked with me that Filipinos could pass for any race on the planet. Just look at the Alaska organization: rookie forward Christian Luanzon was Chinese; Willie Miller, half black; assistant coach Dickie Bachmann was part German; even team owner Fred Uytengsu had mixed Chinese and American blood and the boyish good looks of a pre-Parkinson’s Michael J. Fox. All of them were Philippine citizens. With this much diversity in just one PBA franchise and thousands more mixed-heritage Filipinos throughout the country, it wasn’t hard to see how Alvarado could impersonate a Filipino, especially with prominent backers ready to grease the palms of any official who sniffed a hoax.

  In 2000, midway through his second season, Alvarado was deported and the PBA tried to play his case off as an isolated incident. Meanwhile, however, two other rumored Fil-shams hailing from parts obscured—Purefoods’ Al Segova and the Santa Lucia Realtors’ Rob Parker—left the country and were never heard from again. The departures of Alvarado, Segova, and Parker marked the beginning of the Fil-sham debacle. Obtaining counterfeit documents in Manila was as easy as riding a jeepney to Claro M. Recto Avenue. This sprawling east-west thoroughfare was home to the country’s largest facsimile flea market, where dozens of open-air stalls sold fake diplomas, marriage and birth certificates, and even medical licenses that were nearly indistinguishable from genuine documents. For PBA fans, it was easy to imagine how teams and agents could have phony documents made to prove Fil-shams’ Filipino heritage, then secure their official clearance from government agencies with well-placed bribes.

  For Fil-foreigners to play in the PBA, they had to meet the criteria for Philippine citizenship. They had to be at least half Filipino by blood, and one of their Filipino parents had to have been a Philippine citizen at the time of their birth. This meant that Fil-Ams born in the United States to parents who had already become naturalized American citizens were technically not eligible to play in the PBA. Before Fil-Am prospects could be drafted or hired as free agents, they had to gain clearance from the Bureau of Immigration, then have that endorsement reviewed and affirmed by the Department of Justice. Both agencies were supposed to base their decisions on a dossier of evidence that documented the players’ Filipino background and their parents’ citizenship—passports, birth and marriage certificates, immigration and naturalization records, sworn affidavits from parents and extended family members. The MBA, on the other hand, didn’t impose such strict rules on its franchises. As challenger to the PBA’s throne, the upstart league allowed exceptions—Alex Compton55 among them—for novel and marketable players with more tenuous connections to the motherland. The MBA received an initial ratings boost from these players, but hiring them ended up being like inviting vampires into the house of Philippine basketball; once they were in, there was no way to get them out. By the time the MBA folded, the league’s Fil-foreign stars were already rooted in Philippine society, and several found their way onto PBA rosters where their dubious Filipino pedigrees were set to collide with the league’s eligibility rules.

  The suspicion that many Filipino-American players who entered the league between 1998 and 2002 couldn’t prove their heritage, along with the cultural differences that divided locker rooms, led Alaska’s Jojo Lastimosa and Purefoods’ four-time MVP Alvin Patrimonio to draft a “manifesto” on behalf of Philippine-born players in 2002. The statement protested the special treatment Fil-Ams received from teams and called for an investigation of their claims to Philippine provenance. In those years, many Fil-foreign players who were hired directly from other countries received the kind of perk-laden contracts usually reserved for imports, including high-rise condominium units and chauffeured cars paid for by the teams. To Jojo and other provincial stars who came to Manila to play professional ball, this seemed unfair; teams never offered that level of assistance to athletes from Cebu or Davao, even though, just like Fil-Ams, players from other regions might find Manila overwhelming. Jojo and company drove themselves to practice. Why couldn’t the American newcomers do the same? The possibility—no, likelihood—that there were more Fil-shams among recent signees rallied support from local players, who were incensed by the notion of impostors robbing Filipinos of their livelihood. Almost a hundred players, about two-thirds of the PBA, signed the petition, which Jojo and Patrimonio forwarded to the Philippine Senate.

  For legislators seated on the Committee on Games, Amusement, and Sports, the Fil-sham issue was political paydirt. Basketball had been an essential element of Philippine identity for decades, and now a foreign blight had infiltrated the beloved pastime. Between November 2002 and May 2003 the committee held seven hearings to investigate the controversy. It gave politicians a chance to wear their nationalist hats, wave the Philippine flag, and save the PBA from Fil-Ams, Fil-shams, Uncle Sam, and any other foreign entities who might be stealing not just food from the mouths of Filipino players’ families, but highjacking the hoop dreams of every Filipino boy practicing spin moves in his flip-flops and praying to make it to the PBA. Oh, and by the way, the Fil-sham scandal also guaranteed top-notch TV exposure for the participating senators, whose h
earings would be broadcast live and recapped on nightly news broadcasts. Let the posturing begin.

  The Senate investigated citizenship claims of several Fil-foreign players, but throughout the hearings it was clear that the prize buck, the player they wanted to snare most, was Asi Taulava, a six-foot-nine Fil-Tongan (or possibly just Tongan) and the league’s preeminent big man. Taulava had already been deported in 2000 for failing to prove his Philippine citizenship, but just months after his exile immigration officials allowed him to reenter the country on a temporary visa so he could be reunited with his Filipina fiancée and children. Once he was back, Taulava’s lawyers, with support from his team, Talk ‘N Text, filed additional documents and affidavits to support his claim of Philippine heritage. Through these machinations, immigration officials were made to see the light; they certified Taulava’s citizenship and he returned to the PBA. Now, Senator Robert Barbers and his committee seemed determined to reverse the ruling and expose Taulava once and for all.

  Chairman Barbers, who died three years after the hearings, sent Senate staffers to Northern Samar, the province where Taulava traced his roots. Samar island, somewhat remote, very poor, and reputed to have the Philippines’ most decrepit roads,56 was precisely the kind of place where someone trying to fake his Filipino background would base his imagined ancestry, because who would bother going there to check the facts? Senator John Henry Osmeña, sounding a little flustered, expressed that exact sentiment in the first hearing: “Some of these players are claiming to have their mothers coming from faraway places like Samar and Kabankalan and God knows where.” But the staffers managed to find these places—in Taulava’s case, San Jose, Northern Samar, where his Filipina mother Pauline Hernandez Mateaki was supposedly born. The investigators couldn’t find a soul in San Jose who recalled Hernandez Mateaki or any member of Taulava’s extended family, which was very strange for a small community like San Jose where everyone knew each other. The most damning evidence against Taulava, however, was a confession from San Jose’s civil registrar, who testified that he added Taulava’s mother to the municipal register in 1998, after the town mayor set up a meeting between the registrar and Don Raymundo “Boy” Daza, the local congressman’s brother. Daza asked the registrar to add Hernandez Mateaki’s birth to the record as a personal favor, and it was done. During the registrar’s testimony, Senator Barbers asked if he knew his actions were illegal, and why he would help falsify the records. The registrar’s response, in Tagalog, was “Who could possibly refuse that man?”

  Senate investigators crisscrossed the archipelago to visit the ancestral homes of suspected Fil-shams and in several cases found similar discrepancies between the players’ claims and the facts on the ground. There was never a reliable record that the players’ relatives had been born or actually lived there. Still, I found it hard to accept the committee’s findings as definitive proof. This was, after all, a country where records were regularly lost to floods and natural disasters, where even the card catalogs in some of the nation’s top university libraries were incomplete. Was it really unthinkable that the baptismal records from a barangay in Northern Samar or La Union might be missing a few names? Nevertheless, the committee’s final report called for the deportation of Taulava and four other players and recommended continued scrutiny of three more suspected Fil-shams.

  The transcripts of the hearings possess a vaudevillian absurdity, thanks to a rotating cast of PBA representatives and government paper-pushers whose testimony resembled a rendition of Who’s on First. When managers of individual PBA franchises faced the senate panel, each of them denied knowledge of the process by which Fil-Ams gained clearance to play in the league. Despite the fact that team representatives scouted and recruited overseas talent, the managers claimed their organizations had hardly any involvement with Fil-Am players before the Bureau of Immigration cleared the athletes and they entered the PBA draft. It was as if the senators asked, “Which way did they go?” and the teams answered, “Thataway” while pointing in all directions to an alphabet soup of government agencies—the Bureau of Immigration (BI), the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the Department of Justice (DoJ), the Commission on Immigration and Deportation (CID). Employees of these offices appeared before the panel, and the senators repeatedly asked why Fil-shams’ papers had been approved when a thorough review of the facts would have revealed falsehoods. Time and again the witnesses would point the finger at another government body. That office would then send another bureaucrat to testify that yet another agency was responsible for investigating Fil-Ams’ citizenship applications, and the same pointless charade would begin with new characters. No one from any of the government offices that examined the paperwork seemed to understand their role in the process aside from collecting processing fees, gathering documents, and rubber-stamping them.

  The senators seemed equally dimwitted at times. Robert Jaworski, who left his PBA coaching job in 1998 when he was elected to the Senate, delivered a smirk-filled reminder that this issue was important to him because he never officially retired as a player. Never mind that he was in his mid-fifties. Senator Osmeña, while questioning Coca-Cola human resources director Jesse Macias, seemed unable to grasp the concept that a Filipino-American could mean someone born in the United States to Filipino immigrant parents.

  MACIAS: We have four Fil-foreign players. William Antonio, Jeffrey Cariaso, Rudy Hatfield, and Rafi Reavis.

  OSMEÑA: Why do you call Jeffrey a Fil-Am? Jeffrey, I think—both parents are Filipinos. In fact, they’re from South San Francisco. So, why are you leveling him as a Fil-Am?

  One of the richest ironies embedded in these hearings to protect the mythical indigenous Filipino basketball player was that Barbers, Osmeña, and Jaworski all had Caucasian parents or grandparents. But it was Barbers, grandson of an Italian-American soldier who settled in the Philippines, who treated the hearings like a Fil-Am witch hunt. He was their most bellicose interrogator and a champion of so-called pure Filipino talent. Still, it was hard not to detect a whiff of posturing in his aggressive manner, because of his mixed blood and also because Barbers had owned an MBA franchise, the Surigao Miners. The Miners were known for hiring only local players, but could Barbers really be unaware of his league’s role in opening the door to Fil-Ams? Whether Barbers was shameless or just oblivious, he lambasted the Fil-Ams, in this case, Andy Seigle, a six-foot-ten forward from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  BARBERS: Of course, your mother has told you her origins as to what part of Eastern Samar she comes from. Could you not recall where in Eastern Samar?

  SEIGLE: I can recall, sir. I know I’ve been there before because my grandfather was really sick and I brought him here to Manila. I’m just unaware of the name where they are from.

  BARBERS: How many times have you been in Eastern Samar?

  SEIGLE: I’ve been there once.

  BARBERS: And you know your relatives there, of course.

  SEIGLE: Most of them are in Santa Ana. There’s two more in Mariveles, Bataan.

  BARBERS: Can you tell us the names and addresses of these relatives of your mother?

  SEIGLE: I can tell you their names. I can tell you what city they are in, but I don’t know the exact addresses. There’s my aunt Preciosa and Terry; they are both there in Santa Ana.

  BARBERS: Slowly, so we can take note of the first name and the family name and the address.

  SEIGLE: Just my aunt Preciosa. I don’t know the last name.

  BARBERS: It’s beyond comprehension for a Fil-Am to not even know his own relatives, especially if your mother is a native of this country. So you must, at least, know these people if you do not know your relatives in Eastern Samar. You forgot about the name of the place where your mother comes from. At least your own relatives in Manila, as you mentioned, you should know their address and their names.

  SEIGLE: Well, my uncle’s name is Ricardo Yadao and he lives in Mariveles, Bataan.

  BARBERS: Where? In Mariveles, Bataan?

  SE
IGLE: Yes.

  BARBERS: No particular address, no specific address?

  SEIGLE: On a mountain.

  BARBERS: On a mountain?

  SEIGLE: That’s where he lives.

  BARBERS: So we have to use a chopper in going there?

  Of course, the players didn’t do themselves any favors by being unprepared to answer the senators’ questions. In a country where close family ties were very much the norm, Seigle couldn’t have looked more alien than when he testified he didn’t know his relatives’ last names and admitted he had only visited them once or twice after living in the country for years. Yet Seigle and other Fil-Ams were anything but alone in their gaffe-prone ways. When Jojo Lastimosa testified, one senator asked about his petition on behalf of native-born Filipino players, and Jojo answered, “I just want to clarify, your honor, because we did not really read the whole manifesto.”

  The shortcomings of the PBA’s citizenship model of integrating Fil-Ams were revealed throughout the hearings. None of the senators, lawyers, players, agents, or bureaucrats involved seemed to understand the legal process for certifying Fil-foreign athletes. In many cases the players’ backgrounds didn’t fall neatly inside or outside of the league’s definition of a Fil-Am, but somewhere in between. The hearings showed how muddled the question of Philippine identity could be. “It becomes interesting now,” was all Barbers could say when he questioned Fil-Am Rob Wainwright and learned that his mother’s family migrated to Hawaii before it became the fiftieth state. This meant she became an American citizen when Hawaii gained statehood in 1959, but she never renounced her Philippine citizenship. Had she been grandfathered into dual citizenship? If so, then Wainwright was a Fil-Am. If not, he was a Fil-sham. And Wainwright’s case seemed simple compared to Andy Seigle’s. Back in 1998, a year after Seigle joined the PBA, he was selected to play for the national team in the Asian Games, but he wasn’t eligible because he never obtained a Philippine passport. Time was short, so the PBA pulled some strings and set up a meeting with President Joseph “Erap” Estrada, the former action movie star who in 2001 was chased out of office for various acts of plunder and corruption. By presidential order, Seigle was given a passport, but at the Fil-sham hearings, officers from the Department of Foreign Affairs, which issued the document, weren’t certain that Estrada’s decree had been legal. In another farcical twist to Seigle’s case, his younger brother, Danny, was widely accepted as a legit Fil-Am. Andy, however, was born in 1972, a year before the Philippine constitution was rewritten to include the modern definition of Fil-foreign citizenship. Instead, Andy was born under the 1935 constitution that required children born to Filipino parents outside of the country to elect citizenship by their eighteenth birthday. Andy had waited until he was twenty-six, which, in the committee’s opinion, made him a Fil-sham.

 

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