Willie Miller had enough diskarte for two teams. He was Philippine basketball incarnate, a compendium of every herky-jerky stutter step and improbable scoop shot practiced daily on almost every barangay court in the country. His spoken English may have been merely proficient, but when it came to English, the art of placing spin on the ball to bank it through the hoop, Willie was Charles Dickens. He was a maestro of pektos, PBA lingo for “spin,” and a flick of his wrist was enough to send the ball ricocheting off the glass and into the net at seemingly impossible angles.85 Willie also mastered the sidestep, a one-on-one move that served as the capstone to many of his drives. American players are usually taught to finish strong at the hoop with a burst of speed and a leap toward the rim. For most Filipino players, no matter how hard they drive to the hole, they aren’t going to finish above the rim. The sidestep presented an alternative. To execute the move, the player jumps sideways before shooting instead of jumping forward to the basket. His defender is left stranded, while the ballhandler frees himself for a short scoop or bank shot. Willie’s sidestep was especially deadly because of his girth. His upper body was as thick as the meaty torsos of Alaska’s big men, which made his quickness all the more otherworldly. He had the shape and heft of a bowling ball, but changed directions as sharply as a balloon with the air running out of it.
“Some of the shots he will make, guys in the States would go, ‘Where’d that come from?’” Cone told me, describing the distinct flavor of Willie’s game. “He makes them all the time. Those are shots that he learned. It’s not different from the style you learn growing up on the playgrounds of New York. Willie learned it growing up on the barangay courts of Olongapo.” Cone was right. I had been so mesmerized by the Philippine game’s pektos and diskarte, so absorbed in cataloging every move and tracing it back in time from Willie to Jaworski and beyond, that I never really stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. The New York game I grew up playing and fell in love with had a lot in common with Philippine hoops. New York is a basketball town, and even though the sport may not reach every New Yorker the way it penetrates Philippine society, it seemed like everyone I knew when I was young played ball. Not just my teammates and kids my age, but also out-of-shape old guys who wore goggles and knee socks. Everyone knew how to play. They didn’t necessarily have polished basketball skills, but they all had some self-taught go-to move—a two-handed bank shot, a back-you-down hook—that never missed. It was their version of diskarte, although a lot of the time it wasn’t so pretty. I rarely saw these peculiar moves make it to the NBA, perhaps because of the pros’ technical superiority. But the best Filipino players had somehow smuggled oddball, personalized skills into the PBA, and I wasn’t just fascinated by how Jaworski’s or Willie’s style was different or exotic, but by how it felt familiar.
There were a few staples of the Philippine game that Willie lacked. His stocky frame was not built to fly. The PBA’s brilliant acrobats, guys like Samboy “Skywalker” Lim, Vergel “the Aerial Voyager” Meneses, and Paul “Mr. Excitement” Alvarez,86 perfected the yo-yo shot, a downright miraculous floating layup named for the way its practitioners brought the ball up and down in midair before flipping it through the net. These shots, along with Willie’s full array of jaw-dropping moves, were Philippine basketball’s answer to the NBA’s highlight reel. Compared to Lebron James rising into the stratosphere before a dunk, the Filipino moves lacked raw power, but I found it just as exhilarating to watch these smaller players create shots I had never even imagined. Willie’s shooting touch, at times, was magical; after he scored, stupefied crowds couldn’t help but wonder, “How’d he do that?”
Another shot missing from Alaska’s inventory was the kilikili, or “armpit” shot, which was something of a dying art among PBA big men. It was a Philippine take on the up-and-under move, except that instead of stepping past a defender to find open space to shoot, a player executing the kilikili shot tried to reach under the defender’s raised arms and fling the ball upward while drawing contact. The shot emerged from the defender’s armpit and, when successful, was a guaranteed “And one.” Over the years, referees grew wise to the kilikili shot’s artifice and stopped rewarding its practitioners with foul calls. Since it was a low percentage move on its own, the gambit had been largely abandoned. The lone exception was six-foot-nine Marlou Aquino of the Santa Lucia Realtors, for years the league’s tallest full-blooded Filipino. I couldn’t think of a more frivolous move for a player nicknamed “the Skyscraper,” but Aquino never gave up reaching under the arms of shorter players to release his kilikili shot.
The twin essences of gulang and diskarte had antecedents tracing back at least to the fifties, but they weren’t enshrined as the stylistic soul of Philippine hoops until Crispa and Toyota electrified nationwide audiences in the seventies. After a decade, the teams disbanded and the PBA instituted a draft and salary cap. Parity soon followed. With more evenly matched teams, coaches could no longer succeed simply by hoarding talent. They needed strategy. The overall quality of PBA games improved. Turnovers became rarer as teams learned to execute specific game plans. But Philippine basketball lost a smidgen of its vitality as coaches took greater control. There would always be irrepressible talents like Vergel Meneses and Willie Miller, whose hearts pumped pure diskarte, but only Ginebra fully preserved the Crispa-Toyota ethic. When Toyota disbanded after the 1983 season, Jaworski and Arnaiz joined the Gilbey’s Gins. By 1985 the team name changed to Ginebra. Jaworski, already pushing forty, was named player/coach, and he stacked his roster with former Toyota and Crispa mainstays like Philip Cezar, Arnie Tuadles, and Freddie Hubalde. Much of what remained of those beloved teams became combined in Ginebra, which attracted a massive following of both Crispanatics and Toyota lifers.
Jaworski ran the team as if in a time warp. While the rest of the league modernized, Ginebra remained proudly mired in the seventies. Practice consisted of stretching and then a scrimmage to 200 points. They played run-and-gun basketball and their strategy boiled down to playing with more passion than their opponents. Jaworski recruited wily defensive specialists like the rotund Loyzaga brothers, Chito and Joey, who looked more like the Mario Brothers than basketball players; he cultivated enforcers like Wilmer Ong and Rudy “the Destroyer” Distrito, who recently did time in a Nevada prison for a cuckoldry manslaughter; and he showcased dazzling scorers like Vince Hizon and Noli “the Tank” Locsin, a chunky, undersized power forward who could hang in midair and spin shots off the board as well as the most agile guards. Ginebra’s legion of fans saw in the team a condensed history of Philippine basketball. They saw themselves in Ginebra’s style of play, which elevated street-corner basketball to the level of PBA champions. So in 1998, when Jaworski finally left the PBA and the Gin-Kings caught up with other teams’ training techniques and coaching philosophies, the fans remained loyal. Jaworski’s aura would be forever linked with Ginebra.
A few days before Alaska was to play Ginebra, Cone devoted the first hour of morning practice to a core conditioning workout, exactly the kind of training the cigarette-smoking, beer-guzzling athletes of the Crispa-Toyota generation rarely considered worth their time. In today’s PBA, however, every team used plyometric drills and core-strengthening exercises. The methods might still lag behind NBA techniques, but they were nevertheless more forward-looking than Jaworski’s “roll the balls out” approach. Cone scheduled these workouts throughout the season, and he was careful to always leave a few days between the grueling sessions and the next game to allow his players time to recuperate.
That morning, the players walked into the gym and groaned when they saw the floor divided into seven stations, each containing some combination of medicine balls, twenty-five-pound plates, yoga mats, giant rubber exercise balls, and a pair of platforms attached via bungee cords to harness and garter belt contraptions. The court looked like a cross between a medieval torture den and Plato’s Retreat. Two players set themselves up at each station, where one performed a designated exercis
e while the other assisted. After two minutes they reversed roles, and after both players finished they rotated to the next drill. At the first station, directly under the basket, Nic Belasco watched Roe bend over at the waist while holding a twenty-five-pound plate to his chest, then swivel his torso from side to side. It seemed like the kind of low-tech, brute strength technique Rocky Balboa might use. Fifteen feet down the baseline from them, Aaron Aban’s task resembled a children’s game, albeit a sweaty one that inspired lots of grunting. Starting from a prone position, Aaron was doing sit-ups while holding a seven-pound medicine ball over his head. Once he sat up, he tossed the ball against the wall, let it bounce back to him, then repeated.
Things got kinky near the free throw line. There, Sonny Thoss was on his back, holding a small medicine ball pressed between his ankles. Keeping his legs straight, Sonny lifted them until they were perpendicular to the floor, then lifted his derriere off the mat and clenched for a beat before starting again. John Ferriols was supposed to be spotting Sonny, but instead he was positioning his crotch inches away from Rensy Bajar’s face, which kept rising and falling as part of a drill that required Mike Cortez to stand behind Rensy, who was kneeling, and push him forward. Rensy was breaking the fall by doing a push-up that bounced him back up to the original position. At least, that was how Alaska’s trainers intended the exercise to be performed. In actuality, Rensy spent half of his two minutes facedown on the floor, laughing at John’s carnal groaning.
Closer to half-court two VertiMax platforms were set up and the scene looked like something out of a bondage convention. Poch Juinio was standing on the platform, harnessed into a belt with four bungee cords—two on each hip—tethering him to the device. The coaches arranged plastic cones between Poch’s legs, and his job was to jump from one foot to the other over the cones. The cords provided roughly the same amount of resistance as another player grabbing Poch’s waist and trying to hold him down, and the exercise was meant to test his balance, leaping ability, and endurance. Poch, however, had just turned thirty-four and had almost no muscle tone. His body had natural bulk and old-man strength, both of which he used expertly to outposition younger, fitter players in games, but all of Poch’s know-how was useless on the VertiMax. He breezed through the first twenty seconds of the drill. Then his form started to break down. With each jump, his upper body bent forward a little more, until he was nearly doubled over. For the rest of the two minutes he ceased “jumping,” in a literal sense of the word, and instead stepped gingerly from one foot to the other, sometimes losing his balance and kicking a cone across the gym. When the whistle blew, Poch hobbled off the platform, his face ashen and his hair plastered to his forehead. With his hands on his knees, he uttered “Shit na malagkit!”—sticky shit—between gasps.
Poch’s partner, Eddie Laure, was his near-perfect athletic foil. Lean and nimble, Eddie possessed boundless energy and a wingspan that would impress the engineers at Boeing. When his turn came to do the VertiMax hop, Eddie bounced effortlessly back and forth, waving his fingers in a jazz hands flourish.87 But in terms of athletic exhibition and sheer performance, Eddie’s joyful demonstration was nothing compared to what Willie Miller was doing on the other platform. The bungee cords were attached to his thighs using makeshift garter belts. Before he strapped himself in, Willie had pulled his socks to his knees, tucked a long-sleeve thermal undershirt into his shorts, and hiked the waistline up to his sternum. The look revealed his bulbous thighs, which looked thicker than some men’s midsections and supplied the horsepower for his astonishing quickness. Once the bungee cords were snapped onto his thighs, Willie began marching, bringing a knee to his chest with every step. He pumped his legs like a cartoon robot set to move on overdrive, but his upper body remained placid and so controlled that he managed to whistle a tune during his two minute sprint. The other players dropped their medicine balls to laugh and cheer for Willie, the player expected to lead them to victory against Ginebra and in the playoffs, grinning and whistling on the VertiMax with a self-inflicted wedgie.
Was this good or bad for the team? Willie sometimes acted like the high school smart-aleck who goofed off because class was too easy, while his less academically gifted partners-in-crime struggled to make grades. After the VertiMax routine, I asked Cone if he wanted Willie to act more serious. “A lot of coaches have done that,” he said. “They try to battle him. Make him conform. Tell him, ‘This is the kind of player you should be.’ You’re just gonna butt heads with him and you’re gonna lose him eventually. The key with Willie is learning to accept him for what he is.”
Yes, Willie could be a distraction, but Cone could rarely find reasons to discipline him because the clowning hardly ever affected his play. “You watch him do the core stuff,” Cone continued. “He does it better than anybody. He’s so instinctive. When I’m doing the plays on the blackboard, he knows exactly what I’m doing before anybody else, by far. He sees the game extremely well.”
Inside Alaska’s locker room, the team tried to prepare for the Ginebra tiebreaker like it was any other game. Willie was dribbling in front of a mirror. Roe’s head had disappeared behind the jeans and shirt hanging in his cubby, where he was plugged into an iPod and thumbing through a John Maxwell leadership book. Eddie was practicing his human pretzel act in a corner. The assistant coaches were huddled around a bucket of french fries, rehashing stories from the biggest games of their careers and comparing Nealy to old-time imports like Byron “Snake” Jones, Cyrus Mann, and Lew Massey. The sound of athletic tape being ripped from rolls and wrapped around ankles filled the room, along with fumes from the rubbing alcohol being kneaded into players’ backs and thighs. Rubbing alcohol was the PBA’s cure-all; it was used as a massage oil, hand sanitizer, and short-notice shower. Alaska went through seven half-liter bottles per week, and much of that was used on game days, when the air inside the locker room could be downright noxious. Early in the season, before I developed a tolerance for the chemical haze, I would feel woozy after twenty minutes in the room.
Cone stood up to review the Rod Nealy scheme. “Stop him early,” the coach warned. “He’s had some huge, just gigantic first quarters: 21, 24, 26 points. Get the ball out of his hands. Don’t let him do that to us.” While Cone illustrated the backcourt chaser on a dry-erase board, I noticed Willie staring at me. He raised his eyebrows twice and pointed with his lips at the table next to me. If I stretched, I could reach a bunch of bananas resting on the far end of the table. I pointed to the bananas and Willie smiled. He made a target with his hands, like he was waiting for a chest pass. I looked at Cone, who was fully engrossed in the whiteboard, and shook my head. Willie nodded to reassure me; his smile grew wider. He held his hands out again and mouthed “Ba-na-na” to me. I tore off a fruit and shovel-passed it across the room. Just before Willie could catch it, John Ferriols snatched the banana out of midair. All three of us started snickering until we felt eyes on us. It was Roe, glowering in disgust.
The shame turned everyone serious. This was the most important game of the season, and we were playing catch with bananas. The automatic semifinal berth at stake against Ginebra could make the difference between a championship and a playoff flame-out. A handful of teams had won titles after surviving the play-in phase of the PBA playoffs, but many more ran out of steam in the semis or finals. A loss tonight would put the Aces in a hole they might not be able to climb out of, and Roe wasn’t about to let Willie, John, or me forget that.
Cone reminded the team that the Ginebra crowd would make them feel like they were playing against the entire nation: “The only guys that want us, Alaska, to win tonight are in this room. There’s gonna be a time-out when the crowd’s just going crazy, and you need to sit down, relax, and focus on what you need to do to win this game. Composure, fellas. Let’s do two minutes.” Alaska always observed this suspended moment of silence before games. Cone wanted his players to visualize executing the game plan they learned in practice. This time, the players seemed more grave than usua
l. Roe threw a towel over his head and sat motionless in his cubby. Jeff Cariaso leaned forward and rested his head against his interlocked hands. Rey Hugnatan buried his head in the nook of his elbow and fiddled with the braided, three-inch rat tail trailing down the back of his neck. Even Willie, knowing that a win was crucial, acted serious. Well, he tried. For the first minute, Willie seemed meditative. He leaned back and kept his eyes closed. Eventually, however, a grin crept across his face. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. The rest of the team was still in its preparatory trance. He turned to me and pumped his hydraulic eyebrows. Eventually, I covered my face with my shirt to muzzle any giggles that might escape. Willie was ready to get on the court, not just to compete and win, but to perform, to feel thousands of eyes focused on him.
“Hee-neh-bra ! Hee-neh-bra !” The fans’ hymn to Jaworski filled the tunnel where the Alaska players lined up before taking the court. The overflow crowd of close to 20,000 was thin at courtside, where ushers enforced assigned seating. The upper regions of Araneta Coliseum, however, were given over to general admission tickets, where people filled seats on a first-come, first-served basis and thousands squeezed into the concrete staircases between rows. Clusters of Ginebra fans clogged the passages leading from the arena’s peripheral hallway to the stands. The coliseum was a pickpocket’s dream and a fire marshal’s worst nightmare. All through the arena, people waved pro-Ginebra and anti-Alaska banners—slapdash slogans painted on white sheets—and swung towels given out by Ginebra employees. It was gin versus milk; the grit, pluck, and populism of Ginebra, a drink that can get you stumbling, slurring drunk for less than a dollar, against the wholesome striving and family values of Alaska, which came in boxes illustrated with the face of a cherubic blond boy who looked like a long-lost cousin of Macaulay Culkin. The organizations were natural rivals, and Jaworski’s legend ensured that the Aces would be playing in front of a raucous Gin-King crowd.
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