Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Being one step below the truly peerless players may have spurred Jaworski to play every possession like a true believer in a holy war. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to win games. Pushing, holding, tackling, tripping, stomach-punching, hip-checking, forearm-shivering—to Jaworski, every tactic was on the table if it meant winning. His presence intimidated opponents, who knew competing against him would test their fortitude as much as their skill. He might have been even more imposing to teammates, who could incur his wrath by showing any trepidation on the court. When Jaworski told a player on his side to hack someone on the other team, the order was obeyed. His teammates had no choice but to be fearless. Philip Cezar would know. Near the end of his career, Cezar played with Jaworski at Ginebra, then retired and served as one of the team’s assistant coaches. “Even if you’re a bakla,” Cezar told me, referring to that distinctively Filipino genus of hypereffeminate transvestite, “you will become tough. He will see to it.”

  In 1971, four years before the PBA came into existence, Jaworski’s hot-blooded nature led to the low point of his career. He was playing for Meralco in the MICAA league and his team was trailing in a game that had been marred by one-sided officiating. Jaworski had already been ejected for arguing bogus calls, so when he watched a frustrated teammate peg the ball at a referee over another bad whistle, he sprung from the bench and flattened ref Jose Obias with a right cross. After the punch, Obias needed five stitches over his left eye, and Jaworski earned a lifetime ban from basketball. Yet even at that early point in his career, the public sensed he would be vital to the sport. The next year, Ferdinand Marcos reinstated Jaworski by presidential decree and returned Philippine basketball’s emerging icon to his adoring masses.

  Jaworski seemed driven to personally express his gratitude to as many fans as possible. The man was a natural baby-kisser with unlimited stamina for signing autographs, mugging for cameras, and making small talk. After games, the walk from the Araneta Coliseum to his car could take hours, as Jaworski hugged and thanked every fan who stopped to say “Good game” or “Better luck next time.” In three years of listening to Jaworski stories, I never heard anyone—his contemporaries, his admirers, or even his critics—say that he denied a fan’s request. He was a one-man Make-A-Wish Foundation, dropping by schools to deliver inspirational pep talks, visiting ailing cancer patients, and stumping beside a longtime Toyota and Ginebra ball boy who in 1989 ran for barangay captain of his hometown in Pamapanga.

  Jaworski’s appeal grew stronger as he aged and his presence in games became more and more improbable. By his late forties he didn’t just have a natural rapport with fans, he actually resembled them. With a receding hairline and doughy loose flesh hanging from his triceps, Jaworski looked too lumpy for pro ball in his GINEBRA NA! jersey. Yet there he was, waving a towel from the sidelines and haranguing the referees. When he would finally check himself in, usually during the fourth quarter, the crowd would explode. Jaworski’s three-point shots and behind-the-back passes, once hallmarks of his venerable talent, had become something of an inside joke with his followers. The idea that he had the balls to step onto the court and pull his old tricks against guys twenty-five years younger than him, and the fact that many of those tricks still worked inspired the crowd to its wildest, giddiest frenzy, which in turn boosted Ginebra’s momentum. The people loved him, and in their eyes he could do no wrong.

  Jaworski entered the basketball mainstream in the late sixties, when he led the University of the East to a pair of national championships. He remained in the spotlight long enough for successive generations of fans to watch him progress from a fiery upstart with a flashy floor game to a crotchety fifty-two-year-old man jockeying for position with men young enough to be his children. In fact, toward the end of his career he actually drafted his son Robert Jr., or “Dodot,” as he was widely known. The two were teammates for the last three years of Jaworski Sr.’s career.83 To put Jaworski’s Methuselah act into perspective, consider this: among his many nicknames—Sonny, Jawo, the Living Legend—one particularly famous moniker was the Big J, a name coined by commentators who compared Jaworski to one of his NBA contemporaries, Oscar “the Big O” Robertson, who retired in 1974.

  As the years dragged on, Jaworski became a flesh and blood memento of Filipinos’ erstwhile pride in the hoops. He was old enough to have played on some of the last national teams to win the Asian Basketball Championships and qualify for the Olympics. The coach of those teams was Caloy Loyzaga, the all-time great who brought glory to Philippine hoops when he captained the bronze medal team at the 1954 World Championships. The Philippines hasn’t been back to the Olympics since 1972, three years before the PBA was launched. As the Philippine legacy of basketball achievement receded into the past, Jaworski stuck around as a living and breathing, passing and dribbling monument to the country’s former grandeur. As the PBA grew over an almost twenty-five-year period, Jaworski was there as a constant counterpoint to changing times, a symbol of the sport’s better days.

  The golden age in Philippine hoops peaked with the 1970s and 1980s PBA rivalry between the Crispa Redmanizers and the Toyota franchise, which played under various car model names like the Tamaraws, Comets, Silver Coronas, and Super Corollas. Crispa and Toyota were the nascent PBA’s premier teams. The league had yet to instate a salary cap or rookie draft, so Crispa and Toyota built their roundball arsenals by paying the highest salaries, outbidding other franchises until practically all of the nation’s best players were either Redmanizers or Tamaraws. Crispa and Toyota played each other in the league’s first six championship series.84 It took nine years before a team other than Crispa or Toyota claimed an All-Filipino title, the most coveted of the conference championships. It was no surprise, then, that most fans cheered for these powerhouse squads.

  Head-to-head meetings between the rivals were society events nonpareil, with the Araneta Coliseum even more saturated with tycoons and celebrities than in the present day Ateneo-La Salle match-ups. Imee and Bongbong Marcos (whose wife’s family owned the coliseum) became true-blue Crispanatics and Big Dome regulars after Imee married Tommy Manotoc, the coach who took over the Redmanizers in 1983. The back pages of sports magazines were filled with gushing fan correspondence like tribute acrostics based on the players’ names and letters asking for “colored pics of the fantastic players that comprise the mighty Crispa Redmanizers . . . including their imports and even their water boy.” The most devoted supporters even became minor celebrities. Felicisima Bais, a nondescript middle-age woman, was widely known as Mommy Crispa, the enthusiastic conductor of the Crispanatic masses who constantly waved her homemade CRISPA MABUHAY! banner. When she died at the beginning of the 1978 season—she fell down a flight of stairs and suffered a fatal head injury—the press eulogized Mommy Crispa in mournful, glowing obituaries, fondly recalling her frantic exhortations: “Eyes to the ball! Eyes to the ball!”

  The Crispa-Toyota feud, divisive among fans, also managed to unite people from vastly different and even antagonistic segments of Philippine society. Manileños and probinsyanos, prodemocracy activists and government shock troops, Manila Polo Club patrons and squatters—they all chose a side. Crispanatics and their Toyota foils could even be found within the ranks of Muslim separatists fighting against the government in southern Mindanao. You could not get farther away from the Philippine mainstream than these rebels, who lived in remote jungle fiefdoms. Yet in the eighties, after Crispa and Toyota disbanded, the anthropologist daughter of Crispa Coach Virgilio “Baby” Dalupan traveled through territory controlled by the Moro National Liberation Front and found that Crispanaticism was alive and well. She was leading a relief mission to Basilan, an island not far from Borneo. Her team planned to deliver food and clothing to the Yakan, an indigenous group living on the island, but before they could enter Yakan communities they needed permission from the guerilla commander. When the rebel posse arrived, the devout Muslims refused to acknowledge Dalupan’s daughter because she was a woman. For two days t
he commander avoided so much as looking at Dalupan’s daughter. Then, after lunch on the second day, he broke his silence. “How are you related to Baby Dalupan?” asked the commander. “You know when I was a student in Mapua [an engineering school in Manila] I was really a fan of Crispa!”

  The rivalry’s real heat derived from the fact that none of the other PBA teams posed much of a threat to Crispa or Toyota. Most years, they met in the finals of at least one of the season’s conferences, and a succession of playoff battles engendered bad blood between the teams. Crispa, a textile firm that sold men’s undershirts and briefs, fostered a populist image for the Redmanizers, whose confounding name came from Crispa’s signature technique. Crispa’s “Redmanized” garments didn’t shrink in the wash. The company probably used a popular pre-shrinking technique called Sanforizing, which was developed in the United States in the 1930s, and renamed it to avoid infringing on the Sanforized trademark. Almost anyone could afford Crispa, and the company’s basketball players dressed and acted like jeans and T-shirt kinds of guys. Toyota, playing under the banner of a foreign automaker, was the glamour team. Guards Jaworski and Francis Arnaiz and center Ramon Fernandez, the faces of the team, were nearly as famous for their light-skinned, mestizo looks as they were for anchoring Toyota’s inside-out attack. They arrived at games dressed like the Bee Gees, with sunglasses and silk shirts buttoned only halfway up to reveal chest hair and gold necklaces. Toyota attracted its share of the masses, but the average Filipino’s bond with the team was primarily aspirational.

  The likelihood of fisticuffs was one element of the Toyota-Crispa allure for Marcos-era basketball fans, but people were equally drawn by a unique Philippine style of play that the early PBA stars perfected and disseminated. These players hadn’t learned the game at basketball camps or through the endless drilling of coaches. They learned by watching their fathers and uncles play in barangay leagues, then mimicked the moves and hurled shots at the hoop until they discovered the right touch. Seventies and eighties basketball had a beautiful, idiosyncratic flair. Each player possessed an oblong hoops genius all to himself, developed according to the particular irregularities of the dirt or cement courts where he practiced. This helped create an array of offensive moves and defensive tricks that hardly existed outside of Philippine basketball, and probably wouldn’t have evolved away from courts where coconut trees set picks at center court or where backboards were wooden planks nailed together, with each board requiring a different combination of force and spin to sink a bank shot.

  Crowds adored not just the creativity apparent in these self-taught shots but also the familiarity of that kind of hoops. The run-and-gun, improvisational style was no different from the sandlot barangay games that fans played, only with elevated levels of skill and artistry. The basketball layman could attempt a magical shot; the pro could make it eight times out of ten. Toyota’s Arnaiz was known for his “loop” shot, a running underhand layup with range out to the free throw line. On a dead sprint, he would scoop the ball from his hip, almost like a no-look pass destined for the hoop. Despite its low release point the shot was nearly unblockable because Arnaiz did nothing to telegraph it. One moment Arnaiz would be dribbling, and the next, the ball would be airborne. By the time defenders could react, the ball was already curling over their heads toward the rim. His teammate Fernandez, a bony six-foot-five stickman, patented a running one-hander in the lane that he set up by juking his defender left and right. It became known as the “elegant shot”; halfway between Kareem’s sky hook and Olajuwon’s dream shake, it defined big man grace for the Philippine game. Atoy Co, a lanky six-foot-two shooting guard, was Crispa’s most flamboyant player and almost certainly the deadliest gunner in PBA history to sport a Beatles-style bowl cut. Co perfected the standard jump shot, then added flourishes like the turnaround, fadeaway, and a leg kick that caused him to land with his legs split. Spinning and fading on jumpers are standard evasive maneuvers, but Co used them as garnishes, occasionally executing a turnaround from sixteen feet when he was alone on the fast break. The spread-eagle landing, which seemed like the least practical piece of Co’s mechanics, was actually made necessary by Jaworski’s tendency to slide his foot underneath opponents’ landing spots.

  Dirty play during those years was as integral to the game as boxing out. Teams hired designated enforcers, burly hitmen like Crispa’s Johnny Revilla and Toyota’s Alberto “Big Boy” Reynoso, whose raison d’être on the court was to clobber opposing teams’ scorers. Arnaiz’s looper, Fernandez’s elegant shot, and Co’s gaudy jumpers all developed from a mixture of diskarte—flash, the desire to show off their talent—and survival. All that gorgeous finesse helped players avoid a knee to the thigh or elbow to the solar plexus. There were other ways to score without getting body-slammed. Freddie Webb and Yoyong Martirez, two of the league’s fastest guards, got most of their points by sprinting ahead of the lumbering hatchet men. Jaworski was the rare perimeter player who consistently challenged enforcers. He used his blocky physique to blast through defenses. When he got close to the basket, he would jump with one foot extended like a battering ram to clear space for his layup. Yet even Jaworski, the PBA’s foremost practitioner of smashmouth basketball, had a go-to finesse move that sports writers called his “don’t care” shot. Sometimes, when he was close to the hoop with a defender smothering him, he’d just flip the ball up underhanded and bank it in. The shot drove opponents mad.

  The Crispa-Toyota throng undoubtedly dug the fireworks incited by the enforcers’ thuggish takedowns, but fans and players reserved a higher level of appreciation for trickery. Some players studiously cultivated a technique of cracking open the side of the mouth to shoot a thin stream of saliva at an opponent on the free throw line. Once a spitter established his reputation, the mere threat of his disgusting ability could wreak havoc. Just clearing his throat would plant fear in shooters’ minds. From the perspective of American basketball—and the hundreds of imports who were tormented by cunning Filipino opponents—these plays seemed just as dirty as a kick in the shin, and maybe worse because you could see the kick coming. But in Philippine basketball ethics, taking advantage of less experienced players was a skill as esteemed as boxing out or denying the ball. The word for this craftiness, gulang, is also the root of the Tagalog word for “parents.” The double meaning implied that for young players, being fooled by their hardwood elders was part of the game—a fact of life.

  To learn about gulang, I visited Crispa defensive stopper Philip Cezar at his home on a quiet side street in San Juan, the Metro Manila city where he was once vice mayor. Cezar was known as, among other nicknames, “the Scholar.” The wiry six-foot-three forward was renowned as the premier thinking man’s player of his generation. He revealed his best trick: “I love to hold the hand.” His guttural, chainsmoker’s rasp and deliberate cadences oozed wisdom, like Yoda mixed with Morgan Freeman speaking in a Filipino lilt. Under the boards, against the pick-and-roll, even while defending the low post, all Cezar needed for an advantage was a grip on his opponent’s palm. Once he had the hand, he had his opponent on a leash. A player would try to cut across the lane only to find himself tethered by Cezar’s gentle grasp. Against massive imports, Cezar would give up five or six inches in height and fifty pounds in weight but still outduel them for rebounds by grounding their momentum with a tug on the hand. “When I hold his hand,” Cezar grumbled and gave a self-satisfied nod, “that’s it. He cannot jump.”

  Ed Cordero, a six-foot-four shooter who joined Toyota in the early eighties, filled me in on the cherished art of tormenting imports. Many foreign players were pikon—easy to piss off—and local ballers quickly learned to take advantage of opponents with short tempers. Holding the hand à la Cezar was a good way to get under their skin, but if you really wanted to mess with an import’s head, you had to get homoerotic: “When I was playing, we noticed that imports would be very icky when you touched their butts. Here in the Philippines, you can be with some gay guy, but it doesn’t mean
you’re gay. My impression is, in the States, people think if you’re friends with some gay guy then you must be gay too. So the fact that you hold the import’s butt, they would think you’re gay. And you don’t just touch them, you touch the center part.” Cordero broke into a joyous cackle while outlining the contours of an imaginary ass with his hands, then stroking the middle with two fingers. Once Cordero had violated an import in this manner, the freaked foreigner would usually settle for outside shots rather than drive to the rim and face Cordero’s wandering hands.

  Diskarte and gulang were alive and well in the PBA when I followed Alaska. Poch Juinio and John Ferriols possessed the full arsenal of tactics—handholding, shorts-grabbing, elbow-throwing, and who knows, maybe even spitting—passed down through generations of big men. Now, their role was to instruct Sonny Thoss in the dark art of below-the-backboards skulduggery. During the second half of a late-season win over Air 21, John noticed that import Shawn Daniels’s shoe fell off after a battle for an offensive rebound. A foul was called on the play, and while the players lined up around the free throw line, John kicked the sneaker away from the roly-poly import known as “the Incredible Bulk.” He nudged it softly enough to avoid attracting the referees’ attention but with sufficient force to drive the high-top into the first row of seats behind the basket. Daniels gave John a quizzical look—why would you do such a thing?—and let out an exasperated sigh before trudging into the crowd to retrieve his footwear. John nodded at Sonny. Gulang.