Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  If all this sounds hopelessly convoluted, it is. The questions surrounding Rob Wainwright and Andy Seigle’s right to play in the PBA were the stuff of Supreme Court cases, not legislative publicity stunts. In fact, I got the feeling that the Philippine bureaucracy was purposely mind-numbing. That way, it would drive most people who encountered its Babel-like labyrinth of paperwork to pay fixers to grease the wheels of government. That’s what I did. The first time I extended my visa at Manila’s Bureau of Immigration,57 I wandered up a side staircase and saw the room where foreign passports got processed, a cavernous hall filled with rows of desks and electric typewriters. Workers in blue uniform shirts were slumped over, sleeping with their faces mashed in their keyboards, while others draped washcloths over their faces and snoozed on benches lining the walls. The sight didn’t leave me brimming with confidence when I headed downstairs to submit my visa application. A wall-size flow chart that resembled the blueprint for a nuclear power plant hung in the entrance; it showed the path my documents would take—a small-scale Bataan Death March through a jungle of government offices—once I paid my fees. That’s when I felt a tap on the back. One of the blueshirts, Bobby, was standing behind me. He explained that he could guide my papers through the thicket in an hour. It would only cost me an extra twenty dollars. Was I interested? Hell yes! But Bobby didn’t just take care of my visa that one occasion; he became my suki, the Tagalog word for a regular vendor. Bobby, it turned out, passed my neighborhood every day on his way to work, so every two months when I needed to extend my visa, I called him. I was filled with low-grade dread the first time I met Bobby in the back of a local McDonald’s and slipped him an envelope stuffed with my passport and a wad of cash—but it sure beat dealing with the chaotic and nonresponsive government.

  This was probably the same attitude PBA teams adopted when they sought government clearance for Fil-Ams they wanted to hire. Paying a fixer wasn’t the underhanded way to get things done; it was the more reasonable and efficient approach. The citizenship papers of genuine Fil-foreign players might contain the same irregularities as Fil-shams like Alvarado, but that wouldn’t mean they were also bogus Filipinos. The more the Senate committee pulled the threads of the Fil-sham scandal, the more it unraveled and revealed that the core disgrace didn’t belong to a few con-artist players but to a system that encouraged bending the rules. In the end, the Senate hearings resolved very little. Two players were deported, while Taulava and the others fought their deportation orders in court and won, partly because their bosses owned some of the Philippines’ most powerful corporations, but also because the cases against them were weak. They went on to lengthy, productive, and lucrative PBA careers, and three players once labeled Fil-shams by the Senate played for the Philippine National Team in 2007.

  After an Alaska practice one morning, I got a closer look at the lifestyles of some of the local players. An upcoming game would be played at the Ynares Center, an arena that looked down on Manila from the hills of Antipolo in neighboring Rizal province. Cone scheduled a few workouts there so the players could develop a feel for the gym’s dimensions. Antipolo, about an hour’s drive from Quezon City, was home to a familiar Philippine blend of vacation homes for wealthy Manileños and absolute squalor. The Ynares Center, named for the province’s ruling clan,58 was Antipolo’s Taj Mahal—a glittering white temple of basketball that dwarfed its humble surroundings. I figured out the jeepney routes between my neighborhood and Antipolo and used them to zip back and forth from practice without much hassle. When I left practice that day, I walked a few blocks from the arena and waited on the curb for the next jeepney. The sky was gray and threatening rain, but it would be a few hours before thunderheads formed, and until then the overcast breeze was a welcome respite from Manila’s pounding heat.

  Not more than a minute after I sat down, a white pickup truck stopped in front of me. The window rolled down and Aaron Aban, Alaska’s rookie shooting guard, peered out at me with a perturbed squint. “Paeng! Why are you in the street? Who will fetch you? Do you need a ride?” The back door swung open and there was Dale Singson, Alaska’s backup point guard, laughing uncontrollably at the thought of me riding home in a jeepney.

  “Where do you stay?” Dale asked. I told him Katipunan. “You take the jeepney and train everywhere?” He too was incredulous. Aaron and Dale had some distant notion that Americans, with their untold riches, all rode around in chauffeured SUVs, which wasn’t far from the truth for embassy types and corporate consultants flown in to work for local businesses. I, on the other hand, was trying to stretch a stipend meant to cover one year of living expenses into three. “Not even taxi?” Dale said. I could have afforded Philippine taxis, which can drive for hours and cost less then twenty dollars, but my New York upbringing had hard-wired in me a love for public transportation and a principled objection to wasting money on cabs. “Expensive!” I explained. Dale and Aaron nodded.

  Dale was a journeyman. He’d played a season or two for a handful of teams but never caught on as a full-time starter. Alaska signed him when starting point guard Mike Cortez went out with a knee injury during the previous conference. In practice, it was easy to see why Dale’s career had sputtered, but also why teams kept giving him chances. He was all guile on the court. Dale reminded me of a junk-ball pitcher in baseball. He had an array of bizarre, unteachable moves—running hook shots, finger rolls released from the free throw line, some kind of shovel shot that he’d set up with head fakes and then release from his hip while the defender was frozen. But he was erratic. When Dale’s bag of tricks worked, he was enchanting. But other days, when the shovel shot was ricocheting off the backboard and the running hooks were sailing clear over the rim, he was useless.

  Aaron was a different kind of player. He was a genetic wonder, a six-foot-one bundle of fast-twitch muscle fibers that made him faster, stronger, and more explosive than practically everyone on the team except Roe. I wondered, however, if Aaron’s athletic gifts stunted his growth as a basketball player. In the amateurs he probably just overpowered defenders, but against pro caliber players who could keep up with him, Aaron seemed lost. He hadn’t yet learned how to use his natural advantages to set up scoring opportunities. Instead, he would use them to shoot hopeless fadeaway three-pointers. Aaron wowed teammates in practice with powerful dunks and soaring rebounds in traffic. “Hayop!” they’d say. “Animal!” But it was beginning to look like he might never impress them in a real game.

  Maybe it was because Dale and Aaron recognized they were opposite halves of a near perfect player; maybe it was because they shared Cebuano as a mother tongue; or maybe it was because they warmed adjacent spots on Alaska’s bench—whatever the reason, the two grew close. The day they scooped me off the corner in Antipolo, they were carpooling to save gas money. For the second- and third-stringers, this level of thrift was necessary, because unlike Willie, Jeff, and Sonny Thoss, they couldn’t count on staying in the league for years and earning piles of pesos every month. Inside the pickup, the overriding concern was not playing time or the upcoming game against the Air 21 Express, but where to eat lunch. It didn’t seem to matter that all three of us were tearing apart KFC meals the ball boys handed out after practice; the lead-battered chicken thighs with gravy and a lump of rice were just meryenda, a mid-morning snack. Dale and Aaron spoke for a few minutes in Cebuano; I had been in the country more than a year by now, and was at the point where I could follow Tagalog conversations. I knew enough to tell the difference between the language I was studying and Dale and Aaron’s utterly confounding (to me) polysyllabic prattle.

  After a few minutes I felt Dale tapping my shoulder. He’d tilted his head forward and was looking at me with a lecherous, open-mouthed smile. “Paeng, you eat fek-fek?” Dale, in his early thirties, was the only Alaska player who still had braces. The guffaw lurking beneath his glinting, metal-mouthed smirk made him seem like a mischievous teenager, so I paused for a beat to decode his question. A moment later it clicked. I snapped back
in my seat, and Dale, seeing the recognition in my face, was giggling and hooting before I could speak. If he had said pek-pek from the beginning I wouldn’t have needed any extra time to think about it. Pek-pek means “pussy” in Tagalog. The same linguistic quirk that led so many Filipinos to wonder what kind of parents had been twisted enough to name me “Rape” had possessed Dale. He was mixing F’s and P’s.

  We had already turned onto Ortigas Avenue, the wide thoroughfare that would take us back to the heart of Metro Manila, and we were feeling hungry. “Uy! Lugaw!” Aaron jerked his head in the direction of a tent across the street with a tarpaulin banner promising LUGAW—GOTO—MAMI. Once we pulled over and got out of the pickup, Dale scanned the avenue for a crosswalk. There was none, so we waded into the street, three human froggers looking at four westbound lanes, a concrete divider, and four more lanes heading back to Antipolo. Dodging traffic was a fact of pedestrian life in Manila. I had already maneuvered through dozens of these thoroughfares, but it always felt dangerous.

  Crossing Ortigas along with two PBA players, even bench players like Dale and Aaron, was like having a force field. Normally, approaching jeepneys would accelerate to scare any pedestrians who might be considering a dash to the other side. But when the drivers saw Dale and Aaron, they stopped. Arms shot out the window slats of jeepneys, and Dale and Aaron walked through the column of vehicles to slap hands with the passengers. “Dale! Saan kayo pupunta?” Where are you guys going? One woman jumped out of a van to hug Dale, then had her husband snap a quick picture of her with the players. Even though the cars made it easy for us to pass, I still almost killed myself when I reached the divider. Dale and Aaron had already vaulted over it and sprinted to safety. I stepped up on the four-foot concrete barrier and realized that if I jumped down to the other side I would land on the hood of an approaching Honda Civic. I would have to wait for a better moment to cross. I stepped back down, close enough to a passing jeepney that I could feel the cackling driver’s breath on my neck as he swerved to avoid me. At the next chance I jumped the divider and jogged to the far side, where Dale and Aaron shook their heads at me and headed into the restaurant.

  The premises were just some plastic tables and stools under a corrugated iron roof. Sitting on each table were bottles of soy sauce and vinegar, calamansi limes, and skinny two-inch chili peppers. Two matronly cooks wearing grayish smocks stirred black cauldrons of bubbling porridge. Each bowl would cost between a dime and fifty cents, depending on add-ons like hard-boiled eggs, chicken thighs, and beef tripe. The tables were filled with construction workers and garbage pickers whom the Metro Manila Development Authority hired to sweep trash from the street. For some of them this might be their only full meal of the day, and the heavy lugaw seemed engineered to stave off hunger for the longest possible period of time.

  Dale and Aaron ordered lugaw with egg, extra bowls of mami, a beef broth noodle soup cribbed from the Chinese, and the ultimate luxury, sisig, a tossed salad of chopped pork jowls and ears, onions, and chilis that was served in a sizzling lake of margarine. Dale and Aaron tore into the crunchy and gelatinous sisig. They came to eat and didn’t spend a lot of time preening for the laborers, many of whom happened to be PBA fans. They signed a couple of autographs, smiled for a few snapshots with porridge-glazed lips. But the pace of the other diners’ meals slowed down noticeably once we sat down. They watched the players, men who probably hailed from the same provinces as some of them, consume a quintessentially Philippine feast. It was the kind of moment that Fil-Ams might never share with lower class Filipinos, because many American-born players wouldn’t be caught dead risking typhoid and hepatitis and God knows what else by eating lugaw and sisig off the street. Instead, they ate at places like Chili’s, where the only interactions they’d have with common fans would be slipping five-peso coins to the scruffy teenagers who prowled the parking lot.

  In the PBA, fans couldn’t base their loyalty on regional pride, so feeling a personal connection with the players became crucial. Not too many people could identify with a Purefoods hot dog or Alaska condensed milk. They could, however, feel close to players like Dale and Aaron, who weren’t just wealthy athletes, but guys who ate at the same curbside karinderias as construction workers; hell, they even ate from the same bowls, with the same spoons, and by doing so sent a powerful message of unity to the league’s fans. The populist bent of Philippine basketball was so different from my knowledge and experience in American sports that I wasn’t sure how to react to it. If I were eating at Subway around the corner from my apartment in New York, I would never expect to see one of the Knicks walk in, and if one did, I wouldn’t expect him to talk to me, aside from—at best—an obligatory “What’s up?” It would be foolish to expect more. Besides, as a New Yorker, I was raised to act unimpressed around celebrities; the only one I ever approached was Bill Walton. Philippine culture was clearly different. It wasn’t the fan’s duty to remain aloof in the presence of stars; it was the player’s responsibility to show gratitude to the average Filipino.

  The perception of Fil-Am players as a uniform gang of churlish Americans who considered themselves above the lowly masses was anything but true. Just on Alaska, each Fil-foreign player came to the PBA with his own set of attitudes and experiences. Sonny Thoss, the team’s six-foot-seven center, was born in Papua New Guinea to a Filipina mother and a German father. He lived there until college and learned to play basketball on summer trips to Cebu. In the eyes of the league Sonny was a Fil-foreigner, but inside the Alaska lounge he caucused with the locals. Reserve guard Alvin Castro, on the other hand, was born in the Philippines and moved to Los Angeles as a child. His Tagalog was pure and the PBA considered him a homegrown player, but he identified more closely with Fil-Ams. Alvin sat in the “English section” with Jeff Cariaso, Nic Belasco, and Mike Cortez; he preferred his homemade beef chili to kare-kare, the Philippines’ signature oxtail stew; and he hoped to hold his PBA job for another two seasons, long enough for his wife to finish a nursing degree. After that they planned to move back to California with their daughters.

  Nic was part of the second mini-wave of Fil-Ams to join the league in 1997, two years after Alaska drafted Jeff. But Nic’s family history differed from most other Filipino-Americans’ experiences. His grandfather was one of roughly 30,000 Filipino migrant laborers who settled in California by 1930. Nic grew up in the northern California59 town of Stockton, home to one of the country’s oldest Filipino communities. His parents, both full-blooded Filipinos, were born in the United States and English was their first language. “Man, my father hardly speaks Tagalog,” he once told me, to explain why he had learned to understand the language over his ten-year career but still rarely spoke it. And, thinking of how many third-generation Italian- or Polish-Americans were fluent in their grandparents’ mother tongues, I couldn’t blame Nic for not speaking much Tagalog or Ilocano. If I did, then I also deserved a stern rebuke for never learning my grandfather’s native Slovak.

  Lost amid the criticism of Fil-Am players’ foreign mannerisms were the ways in which they improved Philippine basketball. Take Mike Cortez, Alaska’s injured point guard, who grew up in the Filipino-American enclave of Carson, California. He was still a couple weeks away from returning to the Aces’ roster from a torn knee ligament, but when healthy, Mike wasn’t just one of Alaska’s best players, he was one of the best in the league. His surly—some might say American—on-court attitude was an important aspect of his game. When he made a move off the dribble, he didn’t just try to beat his man to the rim, he wanted to demoralize the defender. If a player scored on him, Mike wanted to come back and score twice. If the player scored again, Mike would spend the rest of the game making him stumble over his own feet. He was the PBA’s most fluid ballhandler. He could make an opposing guard look like a cat chasing a string; he dangled the ball in front of defenders, tempted them to lunge for the ball, then whipped it behind his back and vanished in the opposite direction. If the PBA kept a stat for the number of tim
es a player left his man standing in the open court, looking over his shoulder and wondering, “What just happened?” Mike Cortez might be the career leader. Yes, he carried himself with an imperious air—stared down opponents, didn’t make eye contact with people he deemed unimportant—but he wouldn’t have been the same player without that pugnacious attitude.