The game began, and when Ateneo secured the jump ball, the blue side whooped in joy as if big man Ford Arao had just hit a game-winning hook shot. The crowd’s feral enthusiasm was cranked up to soccer hooligan levels, even though the sloppy first-half play didn’t give either side much reason to cheer. La Salle’s backcourt, a pair of smurf-sized guards, T. Y. Tang and J. V. Casio (whose name sometimes appears as Jayvee and the abominable Jvee), were as abbreviated in height as they were in name. Time and again they drove into the heart of Ateneo’s defense only to miss off-balance runners or kick the ball out to three-point gunners whose shots rarely fell. Ateneo wasn’t much better. They pounded the ball into Arao and Rabeh al-Hussaini, effective but clunky big men who managed a few buckets despite shooting with a shotputter’s touch. However dull the action, the fans preserved their fever pitch. They screamed for defensive rebounds, loose balls, and out-of-bounds calls that favored their teams. When La Salle’s slinky six-foot-five Rico Maierhofer slipped free for a baseline dunk, the green mob burst into chaos.
Despite the ragged play I was able to discern the teams’ opposing styles. Ateneo was nauseatingly clean-cut, like they weren’t just Blue Eagles but Eagle Scouts. Kirk Long, my American look-alike, was literally holier-than-thou. His parents were missionaries and Ateneo recruited him out of a high school called Faith Academy. Fellow guard Eric Salamat’s last name meant “Thank you” in Tagalog, although with Salamat’s quick hands and penchant for stealing the ball, a more ironic, sneering interpretation of his name seemed appropriate. Then there was team captain Chris Tiu, a Filipino Ken doll and scion of a wealthy Chinese family. Tiu, pronounced “choo” and greeted by unfortunate “Tiu-perman” signs throughout the arena, was revered as the consummate student-athlete, a top player who left the team in 2005 to study abroad in France and returned to eventually become “King Eagle.” At the time, Tiu said he was unsure if he wanted to pursue a career in professional basketball, business, or politics.70 Ateneo played textbook basketball, with classic man-to-man defense and an inside-out offense that relied on post-up moves and outside shooting. The squeaky clean image, the royal blue uniforms—I felt like I was watching a Filipino cover band perform as the Duke University Blue Devils.
La Salle walked the court with a more menacing swagger, with more of the accessories—baggy shorts, headbands, tattoos, elaborate beards—that signified basketball toughness. Maierhofer was a gifted leaper whose chin-strap facial hair and Teutonic name added extra malice to his shot-blocking and dunking prowess. Guards like Casio were more streaky than steady. They didn’t always make the smart play; they forced the ball into hopeless situations and relied on skill and gumption to finish with two points. The Green Archers played aggressive, intimidating basketball anchored by Pumaren’s vaunted full-court press. Alaska assistant coach Joel Banal, who coached Ateneo to a championship in 2002, admitted that La Salle’s press gave him nightmares. He knew the Green Archer defenders would converge on his ballhandlers and that after being hounded by Pumaren’s charges, they’d cough up the ball. If Ateneo was Duke, La Salle had to be the Blue Devils’ early nineties nemesis, the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels, whose brash, dominant athletes humiliated Duke in the 1990 NCAA title game but were upset by the Blue Devils the following year.
Basketball connoisseurs may not have found much to enjoy on the court during the Ateneo-La Salle game, but the real spectacle was in the crowd. In the lower deck, posers tried to blend in with tycoons by bogarting courtside seats with their bodyguards. It made an impression—“I’m important!”—but when I asked other society types about the guy in the brown shirt with his private army in tow, no one could identify him. If the U.S. ambassador could leave her SWAT team at home, so could these guys. The Quezon City government and Philippine National Police had already pledged enough manpower to reconquer parts of Mindanao from Muslim separatists, and the peacekeepers were in plain sight, huddled together in camouflaged cabals beside each entrance to the arena.
Three contestants in the Binibining Pilipinas71 national beauty pageant also stood near a corner entrance, looking like they got lost on the way to the prom. Or perhaps they had found an environment that suited them perfectly: Ateneo-La Salle provided ample pomp for the beauty queens, who seemed more interested in pouting for photographers than following the game. Their heavy makeup reminded me of that popular American style of histrionic fandom—face-painting—only these hoops fashionistas lacked beer bellies and used glitter. With their hair teased up into shimmering black meringues and held together by enough hair spray to cause a minor explosion should a cigarette fall from the rafters, these stunners probably posed the greatest fire hazard in the building, but the paramilitary trio leering at them looked unconcerned.
As the game progressed—neither team had broken out of its slump, so it was close—the tension in the arena transformed people. Led by some of the most mannered and educated members of Philippine society, the fans reached a state of frothy lunacy that until that point I had never seen outside of zombie films. Sophistication, etiquette, and selfcontrol were discarded as assorted bigwigs cried like babies, hurled invectives like street-corner drunks, and chanted together like cult followers. Senator Richard Gordon, a member of Ateneo’s Blue Babble Battalion cheerleading squad during the sixties, was jumping up and down in the aisle, stomping his feet and waving a blue T-shirt in circles. This was Gordon lite; the senator was renowned for leaping onto the scorer’s table in fits of passion and sneaking behind La Salle colleagues to whisper “La Salle bulok!” La Salle is rotten trash! At this game, Gordon faced the Ateneo congregation and raised his palms toward the ceiling to rile them up. It worked. The crowd hardly sat during the fourth quarter, and when Maierhofer stole a rebound by pushing an Ateneo big man, Gordon led his side in a synchronized gesture. Hundreds of shame-filled index fingers pointed at the La Salle forward like they were preparing to burn him at the stake. Those who felt that the index finger lacked emotional charge flashed middle fingers. The rivalry actually had a long history of violence dating back to the 1960s, when the universities were still all male and games ended with parking lot brawls. Even in recent years, high emotions had boiled over into ugly incidents. In 2005 the “Dream Game,” a friendly exhibition between PBA players who came from La Salle and Ateneo, was marred by an on-court melee that inspired fans to launch trash and a full can of San Miguel beer onto the court.
As the fourth quarter wound down, the teams also transformed to live up to the heightened atmosphere. In crunch time, players who hadn’t found their touch all game became world-beaters. Maierhofer was hitting turnarounds at the high post and beating his man to the basket for acrobatic layups. Chris Tiu rose to the occasion after missing most of his shots in the first half. In the last two minutes, with his team trailing by six points, Tiu sliced La Salle’s lead in half with a three-pointer over a trio of bum-rushing La Salle defenders, then scored a double-clutch, go-ahead layup a few possessions later. Ateneo won 65-64.
The rivalry had a way of staying with players and coaches throughout their careers. When Banal’s Ateneo team won the 2002 title, squelching La Salle’s run at a fifth straight championship, it was the coach’s “most fulfilling accomplishment.” Ateneo published commemorative books about that season, and Banal was immortalized, at least among the Blue Eagle flock, as the miracle coach. “After that championship,” Banal told me, “it was like the whole Filipino nation knew me. Like if you go to a restaurant and you’re paying your bill, somebody from Ateneo got it already.” But the sword cut both ways. Alaska point guard Mike Cortez had been dominant throughout his three-year La Salle career. He was so good, in fact, that when his last game in green turned out to be a dud—he missed eleven of thirteen shots in 2002’s deciding loss to Ateneo—he was branded a game-fixer. The accusation was based on nothing but bitterness and innuendo, but it followed Mike into the PBA, where even though he helped Alaska win titles and made all-star teams, many fans whispered, “Benta,” Tagalog for “Sold,” anytime he missed an
important shot.
Ateneo-La Salle enmity even loosened the bond of friendship between the teams’ coaches. Norman Black and Pumaren won several professional titles together with the San Miguel Beermen. But those eighties glory days meant little now. “If you’re part of the rivalry, you just don’t like each other,” Black, plain-spoken and deadly serious about all things basketball, told me. “Franz played for me and he was my assistant coach, but that has little bearing on what’s happening right now. He’s the coach of La Salle; I’m the coach of Ateneo. Let the chips fall where they may.”
11
My Big Break
Basketball sat at the junction between politics and entertainment in Philippine pop culture, with all three sharing common borders that allowed ballers, actors, and elected officials to cross into each other’s realms. As far back as the early days of the PBA, television and film producers sought to turn players’ popularity into ratings, with mixed success. Politicians supported basketball and occasionally owned professional teams, largely because their involvement with the sport provided an electoral boost. Athletes not only converted their fame into acting and government jobs, but also married into elite political and entertainment families.72
Freddie Webb, the fleet-footed guard who played on the last Philippine Olympic team in 1972, probably pulled off the politics-entertainment-hoops hat trick most successfully. Webb was the face of the Tanduay Rhum Makers for most of the seventies. He never managed to win a championship with Tanduay, but he did ride his celebrity into a post in local government, a starring role in a prime time sitcom, and an eventual Senate seat. Webb, a natural showman with good comic instincts, still appeared in romantic comedies as his stock character—a buffoonish, over-the-hill beefcake.
Robert Jaworski also made television forays before becoming a senator, although his theatrical talents were less inspirational than his behind-the-back passes. Jaworski headlined an early eighties police procedural, Manila Files, which a handful of people told me was the worst show ever broadcast on Philippine television. That would make it the Mona Lisa of schlock entertainment. This was, after all, the land where no fewer than five adaptations of the telenovela Betty La Fea (all from different countries) had been aired and where one of the current top-rated programs was a sitcom called Show me da Manny, starring the world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao.73
Atlas Sports Weekly called Manila Files a Filipino answer to Starsky & Hutch, with Jaworski and Francis Arnaiz, the real-life starting guards for the PBA’s Toyota team, playing members of a Manila police “Special Operations Squad” bent on showing the world that “crime does not pay.” The show was filled with production values so poor that they would make the effects in low-budget Blaxploitation flicks look like Avatar. Episodes would end with so-bad-it’s-good action sequences, usually shot in abandoned warehouses, where Jaworski and Arnaiz threw stage punches at gangs of petty crooks who crumbled instantly and permanently; then the backcourt duo would mow down a second wave of bad guys with dozens of shots from revolvers that never needed reloading. When the smoke cleared, another criminal mastermind was thrown in the slammer, while Jaworski and Arnaiz exchanged satisfied looks through aviator sunglasses. Basketball could get you on TV, but it couldn’t make you an actor.
It was fitting, then, that my entrée to the proud Philippine tradition of hokey television also came through hoops. Not long after I arrived in Manila, I started playing pickup games with a group of ex-pros, guys in their early thirties who had played some college and MBA ball and managed to last a couple years in the PBA. They spent enough years on the fringes of Manila’s celebrity scene to know some prominent actors and directors. After a game one night, I got a call from Chris Tan, one of my pickup buddies. Chris had played for Santa Lucia and was remembered for hitting a deep three-pointer that clinched a championship for the Realtors in 2001. His wife was a talk-show host for the GMA network, one of the country’s two ruling TV conglomerates.
“Chris? What’s up? Did I take your rubbing alcohol?”74
“Hi Rafe, do you want to come out in a novela on GMA?”
“Sure.” I accepted even though I hardly knew what he was talking about. I understood that GMA meant channel seven, and that novelas were telenovelas, prime-time soap operas filled with overheated romance, backstabbing connivance, and inconsolable weeping.
“Great! The director needs some American guys,” Chris said. “Come to the restobar on Scout Borromeo, corner Mother Ignacia, tomorrow night at seven. You’re going to be in Bakekang. You get to have a bed scene with Sunshine Dizon.”
And then he hung up. Back home, if an acquaintance gave me a time and place and said to be there because he wanted me to act in a “bed scene,” my next move would be to change my telephone number. In Manila, however, it seemed to fit with life’s unpredictable rhythm, the same way my landlady’s septuagenarian dad sometimes came to my door unannounced at six-thirty in the morning to collect rent checks. Besides, I was more concerned with Googling Sunshine Dizon to see how my costar stacked up in the realm of gorgeous TV starlets.
Sunshine seemed like an enchanting young woman, also in her early twenties. She started as a child actress in the late eighties and played supporting roles in dozens of popular movies and TV shows. With her baby face, round eyes, and button nose, Dizon conveyed a tenderness that most of her sex symbol colleagues lacked. Her character Bakekang, however, looked nothing like the actress who portrayed her. I read online that the show, based on a 1970s comic book and film, told the story of a mythically ugly woman—think Medusa without snakes—struggling to get by in a cruel world. To transform into Bakekang, Dizon wore a swollen, lightbulb-shaped prosthetic nose covered with pockmarks and inserted crooked brown dentures that looked like the novelty redneck teeth sold in supermarket gumball machines. “Bakekang,” I was told, conveyed something similar to “ugly duckling” in English, but without the happy ending of becoming a swan. If you were Bakekang ugly, you stayed that way for life.
The next day, as I rode a jeepney west across Kamias Road, my head kept banging against the exposed metal spot where the interior’s Naugahyde cushion had worn away. My one good shirt—a blue button-down—and my jeans were hanging from a handrail that ran lengthwise down the center of the jeep, and the garments whipped into irritated passengers’ faces as the driver careened through traffic. It didn’t matter. Nothing could puncture my high spirits. I was living the dream! I would never get a chance to act on national television in the States. Not that I ever dreamed of starring on General Hospital, but who could say no to the opportunity? Plus, this gig had fallen into my lap by the grace of hoops. I thought of Alex Compton, who once told me how a network cast him in a Tagalog sitcom before he could speak the language, and Jaworski and Arnaiz and the other ballers who stumbled into showbiz careers. I wasn’t in their league, but somehow basketball led me to Bakekang the same way it led them to movies, billboards, and, in some cases, politics. I couldn’t wait to upload the scenes on YouTube and hear my friends’ bewildered reactions: “Why are you on TV, and moreover, why are you in bed with a woman wearing a duster and Billy Bob teeth?”
I hopped off the back of the jeepney and walked a few blocks to the shoot. “Are you Raphael?” a voice called out from a tent. One of the producers, Miss Mona, introduced herself and insisted I sit down and eat from a pink tray of rice, squid, and vegetables. After dinner she would tell me about my role. While I chewed squid, I saw another basketball friend, Twan Clinton, loping toward me. Twan was a six-foot-eight Jamaican-American from Miami with shoulder-length dreadlocks and long arms as skinny as the string beans I was pushing around my tray. No one seemed to know precisely why Twan was in the Philippines, and everyone had heard a different rumor: he managed a call center, he was on the lam, he was CIA.
One undisputed fact about Twan was that he was a man about town, and standing a foot and a half taller than everyone around him meant that people noticed him. Twan could definitely hoop, but he had never played professionally, w
hether in Florida, Manila, or anyplace else. Still, he seemed to make the most of the common misconception in malls and nightclubs that he was a visiting NBA player. That is, he rarely went out of his way to correct anyone who mistakenly identified him as a onetime member of the Miami Heat. To many Filipinos, he was tall enough, black enough, and he could dunk like a pro. Twan earned pocket money as a ringer in corporate leagues and neighborhood tournaments around Manila. I went to watch him play in a mayor’s cup playoff game in nearby Rizal province once, and as our van rattled into the town plaza, people shook the chain-link fence surrounding the court and chanted, “Cleen-tone! Cleen-tone!” The clamor grew as Twan walked toward his grimy cement stage. When he reached half-court, a young boy ran out and presented him with a ball. Twan took it, galloped toward the basket with two big dribbles, then sprang high into the air off two legs and jammed the ball through the rim with two hands, while people screamed and hugged like they had won the lottery.
In the tent, Twan explained that Chris Tan had also called him the previous night. We were to be costars in Bakekang. Miss Mona came over to explain the show: Bakekang was an ugly girl from a poor family. She lived in a slum where everyone made vicious jokes about her dark complexion, her bulbous nose, and her hideous teeth. Without money or beauty, her situation seemed hopeless. Television was her escape. Her rare happy moments came while watching novelas, and she dreamed of falling in love with a hunky actor named Kristof. One day Bakekang vows to take control of her destiny and make something of her life, to show the people who hurt her that she was indeed someone special.
And there was only one way to make her dreams come true: find a white foreigner and have mestizo babies. That’s where me and Twan came in. I looked at Twan with a raised eyebrow, and he lowered his face into his hands and chuckled. We were finding out that the main character wasn’t the only ugly thing about Bakekang. The show was built on racial attitudes that stretched my conscience to its breaking point. Every day, makeup artists transformed Sunshine into Bakekang by flattening her nose and darkening her skin. Bakekang believed her best shot at a better life was to find a Caucasian man—more of a sperm donor than a husband—and have whiter, more European-looking children who could support the family by starring in commercials. These mores were nothing new; I encountered them every time I went shopping and struggled to find a bar of soap that didn’t tout its whitening abilities. In Bakekang, however, I wasn’t merely observing an unpleasant fixation with skin color. I was perpetuating it by helping a fictional Filipina, a character created to relate to average viewers, achieve her dream of raising a mestizo love child. I was the whitening ingredient.
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