Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Before Mike arrived in Manila, the country had never seen a player who handled the ball with such composure and slickness. He combined crossovers, hesitations, and spins into an elusive ballet that confounded local opponents when he entered the league. Over the years, however, local Filipino guards added similar sleight-of-hand touches to their ballhandling repertoires. Nic was one of several Fil-Am big men who finally proved that Filipinos taller than six-foot-four could run the floor without tripping over their own feet, and do it faster than some guards. He was known as one of the only local players, big or small, who could defend imports straight-up, without help from double-teams or sagging zone defenses. Jeff brought technique and intensity to perimeter defense that hardly existed in the PBA before him. For much of the league’s history, a stopper was someone who could put the other team’s best scorer in traction. Jeff could slide his feet to stay in front of a slasher just as easily as he could bump an opponent out of the lane. Owners and coaches, whose primary goal was always to win more games, noticed the impact Fil-Ams had on the league. They brought new skills, greater size, and hard-nosed defensive mentalities to the Philippine game, and by doing so forced local players to improve and raised the PBA’s level of play.

  Yet it seemed unlikely that Fil-Ams would receive much recognition for this contribution or be able to escape the perception that they were standoffish and arrogant. Jeff, who had fought against the label throughout his career, agonized over this reality. Even his wife told him that before they met, she saw him give a halftime interview on television and thought, “Who’s this Fil-Am guy? So mayabang; speaking English.” Over the years, however, Jeff became comfortable with the language and the Philippine way of honoring fans. Now, with Alaska, he was the key to team chemistry, the bridge between the Philippine-bred players, who felt at ease with Jeff’s fluent Tagalog, and the Fil-Ams, who considered Jeff one of their own.

  One afternoon before practice I followed Jeff on his monthly rounds to collect two hundred pesos from each of his teammates to be divvied up as tips for the ball boys, trainers, and Mang Tom. Inside the players lounge, he found Alvin on the couch with his head lolling back on a cushion and an ice pack strapped to his groin. “Kulang? O sobra?” Jeff asked while pumping his fist. Not enough? Or too much? “For the boys, Vin,” Jeff said, and Alvin groaned, reached into a duffel bag and pulled out two crinkled hundred-peso bills. Outside of the lounge, Jeff found Poch, Sonny, and John Ferriols sunk into a wooden bench, their arms around each other’s shoulders and a Kanye West song blaring from a miniature boom box John carried everywhere. “Guys, for da boys,” Jeff said. They decided that Sonny would pay for all three and the others would treat him to dinner. Just then, Willie was walking in from the parking lot. “Roommate!” Jeff shouted. “For da boys na!” Willie pretended to run away, then turned around and gave Jeff the money. In fifteen minutes Jeff had kidded and prodded his way to more than 3,000 pesos, which he handed over to Mang Tom to split with the others. When Tom turned around to sort the money into equal shares, Jeff tweaked his ass for good measure, and, as always, Tom’s sixty-seven-year-old legs propelled him a foot into the air. He wheeled around and shook a fist at Jeff: “Shit, man!”

  The players would kick in for the ball boys no matter who collected the tips, but no player but Jeff could have made the rounds so comfortably. Willie got along with his teammates as well as Jeff did, but no one—not even Willie himself—took Willie seriously. Jeff was able to interact so naturally with all his teammates because he worked at it. When Jeff finished with Tom, I asked him what he thought about the negative attitudes toward foreign-born PBA players. “As Fil-Ams, we have to be the ones to adjust,” he said. “I don’t blame people looking at Fil-Ams that way because it’s the way they carry themselves. Fil-Ams act and dress the way they do because it’s their culture. It’s the way we were raised. But we’re the new guys here, and we can’t expect the whole country to adjust to us.”

  Jeff’s enlightened approach to Fil-Ams’ role in the country, as well as his ability to blend seamlessly with his local and American-born teammates should have made him a beacon of Fil-Am success, an example of how Fil-foreigners should conduct themselves in the PBA. Instead, he was so adored by local players and fans that public opinion rechristened him as an honorary native. Jojo Lastimosa had been one of the most vocal critics of the PBA’s Fil-Am policies during the 2002 Senate hearings. I asked Jojo if his complaints also applied to Jeff, his former teammate, and Jojo answered, “Well, I don’t really think of Jeff as a Fil-Am. He’s really local.” But Jeff was unequivocally Filipino-American. He was born and raised in San Francisco, but because he assimilated successfully into Philippine society and didn’t fit the unflattering Fil-Am stereotype, people reclassified him. They didn’t question the attitude that Fil-Ams were bad guys, they just removed Jeff from the negative category. On a personal level, Jeff could feel honored that local players and fans considered him no different from themselves. But as a Californian, it tormented him: If every “good” Fil-Am was no longer thought to be American, then the remaining Fil-Ams would always be maligned.

  10

  Courts of Public Opinion

  One stuffy May afternoon, I met Roe Ellis and his brother Tim at a branch of the fast food chain Jollibee across the street from his apartment building. For a month Tim had been staying with Roe—sleeping on the couch, tuning his jump shot alongside Roe after practice, and even trying out for a few PBA teams that were looking to swap imports. Like Roe, Tim racked up accolades at Rainier Beach High School and went on to play D-1 ball, but unlike his brother, Tim had yet to establish himself as a reliable import. Roe intended this visit to be an exposure tour for Tim, something to give the younger Ellis a taste of life on the road.60 Tim’s workouts with other teams had been pretty successful. He was a step quicker than Roe, with smooth moves to the hoop and a graceful, hanging jump shot that was far prettier than Roe’s. San Miguel supposedly came close to signing him, but eventually decided against it. Tim stood just six-foot-three with a slight frame and the team doubted he could match up with other clubs’ larger, rugged imports.

  Enough food to feed a Filipino family of six sat on the table between the brothers—a pair of fried chicken meals with tubs of gravy and plum-sized clumps of rice; a gloomy chicken sandwich composed of a breaded patty, shredded lettuce, one slice of unidentifiable cheese and mayonnaise; a Champ burger, Jollibee’s obligatory Whopper clone; two smaller hamburgers, called Yums, dressed with a pink approximation of Thousand Island sauce; and french fries scattered everywhere over their two trays. The feast should have been a grand start to the brothers’ last day together, but Roe was in a foul mood and unable to focus on anything but Alaska’s loss the previous night to the Coca-Cola Tigers.

  A win would have given Alaska a 10-4 record and sole possession of first place with only four games to play before the playoffs; instead, the defeat left the Aces mired in a four-team race for second place. What’s worse, Roe sensed that Coke would have rolled over for Alaska. The Tigers were near the end of a tumultuous year, with a poor postseason outlook. Weary and ready to collapse, Coke was ripe for a knockout blow, but the Aces couldn’t deliver. A mid-season trade had replaced half of Coke’s starting lineup, and their once spectacular import Anthony Johnson had been dismissed. Rumors around the league blamed the Manila nightlife for sapping his vitality. Jeff Varem, a brawny and energetic forward fresh from the NBA developmental league, took Johnson’s place, but he was a younger, less effective version of Roe.

  Throughout most of the game, Coke tried their darnedest to mail it in. They allowed Alaska guards to blow by them, then chanced a few futile pokes from behind while watching the Aces cruise to the rim. Coke lobbed errant passes to Roe and Jeff Cariaso and stood nonchalantly as Alaska steamed downcourt for dunks and layups. Alaska held double digit leads at the end of each of the first three quarters, yet none of the players aside from Roe seemed to realize that the scoreboard concealed how poor Alaska was playing. The
Aces were winning because Coke had given up, not because Alaska had done anything right. In fact, the Aces seemed equally lackadaisical that night; they flubbed layups, hoisted three-pointers before Roe or Sonny Thoss got to touch the ball, and mimicked Coke’s lax defense. Roe attempted to whip the team into shape, first by example—he tried to swat every shot within reach, dove for loose balls, and dribbled coast-to-coast through the Coke defense to score on multiple occasions. When that failed, he stalked into the huddle with a killer’s scowl and snarled, “Quit bullshitting! Let’s play!” Then he kicked a guardrail behind the bench so hard that I could see it vibrating from the stands. Even this made little impact on the Aces—they glanced at the JumboTron, saw Alaska up twelve, and looked at each other, eyebrows knit in confusion: “What’s Roe’s problem today?”

  When the fourth quarter began and Alaska managed only three points over the first six minutes, they finally understood, but it was too late. The Aces’ thirteen-point cushion evaporated, and Coke took the lead on a pair of foul shots with two and a half minutes to play. The teams traded baskets down the stretch, and Coke came out on top, 94- 90. In the locker room, the players covered their heads with towels and stared at the floor. No one spoke; no one relaxed. The tension, equal parts shame and disbelief, was thick as pâté. Cone delivered his postgame talk in the kind of low, monotone mumble men use to break up with their girlfriends. He rested a palm on his forehead and cast a blank look at the wall: “A lot of things going through my head right now, fellas. We really didn’t take care of business there. We let them get momentum. We kind of screwed around at the end of the third quarter and we paid for it. We’ll put it away and we’ll go forward, but damn it, we need to learn something from this.” By the time he finished, Roe was dressed and halfway to the door. He said nothing to his teammates on the way out and slammed it behind him.

  Sitting across from his brother and their deep-fried smorgasbord the following afternoon, Roe was still livid. The game revealed flaws that had been nagging him throughout the first two months of the season, and he couldn’t bear them silently any longer. “Those guys need to stop fucking around,” he said, gouging the air with a half-eaten drumstick. “They ain’t used to winning. All of a sudden they win a couple games and they think they can coast.” He couldn’t believe some of the boneheaded plays his teammates made. Foremost in his mind was a two-on-one fast break in the third quarter. Rey Hugnatan and John Ferriols had the ball with a single Coke defender between them and the basket. Instead of going strong to the hoop and passing off after the defense committed to one man, they tried to be cute. John and Rey tapped the ball back and forth between each other as they approached the goal. When John caught the ball with an open lane in front of him, he didn’t take it. He shot-faked and passed again to Rey, who jumped like he was going to lay it in, then dropped a behind-the-back pass to John, who pumped at least five more fakes before attempting a shot, which was now contested by three defenders who arrived during John’s fit of fakes. The shot rolled around and out of the rim, Coke regained possession and John and Rey ran back on defense with Alfred E. Neuman grins. Alaska had a double-digit lead. What, me worry?

  John, especially, was developing a habit of fast-break swashbuckling that led to missed opportunities. Earlier that week, in a win over Ginebra, the burly power forward tried an inside-out, stutter step dribble that bounced out of his hands, over his head, and into the clutches of a trailing defender. The PBA crowd howled with delight at this play. It reminded them of the free form, silly brand of hoops played in Philippine playgrounds, where everyone attempted his most rococo move and the turnover-addled hijinks fueled the fun. But winning, not whimsy, inspired Roe, and he was sick of John’s shenanigans. “Fuck all that playing to the crowd with seventeen pump fakes,” he said, using an unwrapped Yum burger to reenact John’s spasms with the ball. “You can pump your ass right on over to the bench.” By now Tim was pounding the table in laughter, and even Roe had to take a break from his diatribe to chuckle at his impromptu roast of the Alaska roster.

  But underneath Roe’s frustration was real concern about the team’s chances, and his chagrin over the Coke loss led to the cruelest assessment I heard from him all season: “Let’s be honest, a lot of the guys on this team are the scraps of the PBA.” The roster, he explained, included role players like Rey, John, Eddie Laure, and Rensy Bajar, ex-MBA stars who struggled to find their niche in the PBA; aging studs like Jeff Cariaso and Nic Belasco, who were traded to Alaska after the teams they played for during their primes lost faith in them; and Willie Miller, a former number one pick in the PBA draft and league MVP who, despite his breathtaking talent, had been traded twice by franchises that thought his comedic approach to the game didn’t breed success in the results-oriented world of professional basketball.

  It turned out that Willie was the root cause of Roe’s frustration. After the riff on pump fakes, Roe’s diatribe seemed to be losing steam, but then he mentioned Willie and the look in his eyes hardened. “Willie thinks he’s a star, but if he’s so great why has he been traded two times?” he said. “After a while people get tired of the funny man, all that joking and playing around. Sometimes they want a businessman.”

  Alaska’s two best players, Roe and Willie, couldn’t have had more divergent basketball styles. Roe had the classic workhorse mentality. He succeeded by taking every element of the game seriously, by treating every loose ball and rebound like it could lead to a game-winning possession. Before games, he psyched himself up to a level of feverish intensity that didn’t subside until the final buzzer. Willie, on the other hand, goofed around as if his life depended on it; as if every fifteen minutes his biological clock told him to laugh. He played with a joyous, improvisational flair that made him impossible to guard but also prone to errors—quick shots, risky passes, careless ballhandling, daydreaming on defense. Willie was guilty of every hoops sin, but when he committed them, he never seemed penitent. He smirked at his own foolishness, maybe gave his bald head a light smack and shrugged it off. Bahala na. It was the Tagalog expression for “leave it to God” or “it’s out of my hands,” and it was Willie’s standard response to a bungled play.

  If Roe and Willie were Alaska’s yin and yang, there was hardly any harmony between them. After the Coke loss, Roe began to see Willie’s nonchalance as a scourge that could spread through the team and derail the Aces’ championship run. Early in the season, before Alaska had established itself as a top team, the players mimicked Roe’s tenacity. A forward like John wouldn’t have tried to lead a one-man fast break; he would have concentrated on rebounding, post defense, and knocking down baseline jumpers. Before the team’s first game, I told friends I would be following Alaska, and they asked why I didn’t choose a better team. Back then John and the rest of the overlooked Aces had a chip on their shoulder. They wanted to prove themselves, and behind their workhorse import they exuded toughness and scrappy play. Now that Alaska had become a top team, the players lost their edge. They relaxed and started taking cues from Willie. But Willie was a singular talent. His carefree style was an effective way for him to play, but when less gifted players tried it, disaster, à la John’s head-fake fiasco, was never far behind. Willie’s game was a thing of beauty, but it needed a disclaimer: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

  At this late point in the conference, with a winning record and the postseason looming, Roe no longer had to worry about Alaska replacing him. But being assured of a paycheck until season’s end wasn’t enough for Roe, who was feeling the weight of the sacrifices he made this season. Foremost among them was rest, something most thirty-two-year-old athletes need in much greater quantities than Roe received. Including the Australian league, he had been playing for nine months straight, and Alaska’s playoff run would probably last another two months. Not long after this PBA stint was up, he was expected to report to Townsville, Australia, for another season. With Alaska, Roe was holding back his scoring for the sake of Cone’s triangle offense and to anchor the defense
. He was averaging about 20 points a game when he could easily norm 30. Money alone wasn’t enough to make the grueling schedule and his selfless output worthwhile. He already had a house, a BMW, motorcycles, and tailored suits at home in Seattle; his goal was something less tangible and more meaningful—a championship in an international league, something he’d never won before.

  Other annoyances of life in Manila were also wearing on Roe. During practice, his friend and former teammate Jojo Lastimosa had made it his mission to correct Roe’s shooting form. Jojo, one of the best guards in PBA history, had the ruthless self-confidence of an all-time great. In his mind, no task, no matter how formidable, was beyond him. Roe was ten years into his pro career, and he’d succeeded at every level except the NBA. Yes, there were chinks in his game, but changing them now was pointless. Still, Roe played along with Jojo’s coaching, tucking his elbow in and shooting free throws under the coach’s guidance after practice. He didn’t intend to use Jojo’s suggestions in a real game, but he put up with them out of respect.

  Roe’s relationship with his driver Neil had become strained. This was Neil’s first job chauffeuring a PBA import, and he was having a little too much fun. Neil happened to resemble PBA journeyman Joey Mente, so when he traveled with the team Neil pretended to be Mente and signed autographs as him.61 He enjoyed shooting around before practice, a perfectly acceptable pastime until he began wearing Roe’s discarded headbands and challenging reserve guard Rensy Bajar to embarrassing games of one-on-one. Neil’s transformation from humble employee to wannabe baller coincided with more serious transgressions. He acted as Roe’s de facto translator when they shopped in Metro Manila’s sprawling flea markets, talking vendors down from their asking prices. Sometimes, Roe noticed Neil telling shopkeepers to add extra DVDs to his tab. Later, in the car, Neil would slip the additional movies into his own bookbag. When Roe went to the mall for dinner or coffee and Neil noticed women eyeing the import, he would take it upon himself to ask if they wished to visit Roe’s apartment.