These lockdown defenders provided a safety net that masked their teammates’ missed rotations. That wasn’t good enough for Cone. Covering up for one player’s lapses meant leaving someone else open. Smart teams like Ginebra and San Miguel would find those open men and either score or draw fouls. Cone wanted the Aces’ opponents to feel like there were no soft spots to attack. In practice, he focused on getting the players to stay in a low defensive stance for entire possessions. During drills, all the Aces could squat in a mean, alert position with their weight on the balls of the feet, their knees bent, and their arms open wide to deflect passes. Too often, they looked different in games—straight and relaxed, like they were waiting at a bus stop. Their tendency was to wait until an offensive player caught the ball, then crouch and get ready to guard him. But by then it was too late; the Alaska defender had already ceded the advantage.
Cone’s solution was to require his players to pound the floor with both palms and shout “Defense!” at the beginning of each possession. The court slap went mainstream in the nineties thanks to a gnat-like Duke University point guard named Steve Wojciechowski. The Washington Times called him the “most reviled 6.6-point scorer in NCAA basketball history,” and although the emphatic gesture reeked of Wojo’s loathsome scrappiness, it was nevertheless an effective way to force players into defensive position. “The best players on our team don’t stay low on defense, and we follow their example,” Cone said with the sound of a court slap still reverberating through the gym. “Don’t just be the top scorers. Lead us on defense too.”
Although he addressed the entire team, everyone in the gym understood he was speaking to Willie Miller. Each Alaska defender was guilty of sloughing off from time to time, but Willie was the Aces’ most habitual offender. Thanks to his athletic gifts, which led Willie to believe he could always recover after falling a step behind, and his happy-go-lucky nature, the team’s star guard frequently got caught dozing on defense. In a couple late season games, including Alaska’s second loss to Red Bull, Willie played straight-legged defense and couldn’t catch up to his man. He had to hack opposing guards to prevent them from dribbling past him and he ended up benched with foul trouble during crucial stretches of the game.
Now, Cone prevailed upon his top local scorer to change his ways. But rather than yell at Willie as he would most other players, Cone decided to protect Willie’s famously brittle confidence by delivering this coded reprimand. Throughout his career, Willie had been a riddle to coaches. Telling him to do something was often the worst way to get him to do it. Cone believed direct criticism would drive Willie into his shell; not only would the mercurial star not respond to defensive instructions, but Willie’s brilliant offense might also subside. Unlike past coaches who butted heads with Willie, Cone tried to influence him obliquely. “Down the stretch, you’re better off running a play for another player, and telling him in private to pass to Willie,” Cone told me after practice. “If you make the play straight for Willie, he’ll make a turnover or do something silly. If you give it to somebody else, who then gives it to him, then he’ll make a fabulous play for you. I don’t know why it works that way. Rather than banging your head against a wall trying to change him, you work within that.” So far, Cone’s approach had been successful; Alaska won a bye to the semifinals, and Willie, who was logging some of the best scoring and assist numbers of his career, was a front-runner for the MVP award.
A few days later, Alaska’s worst nightmare became Ginebra’s reality. The San Miguel Beermen—the team the Aces avoided by beating the Gin-Kings in the tiebreaker—eliminated Ginebra in a close best-of-three quarterfinal. The mood inside the Alaska players’ lounge was muted the day after San Miguel clinched the series. The team finally had an opponent, which meant the coaches’ nebulous training sessions would give way to more concrete preparations. Earlier in the week this might have been cause for celebration. Now that the moment had arrived, the team was grim. The Aces were hoping to play Ginebra, a team they had beaten three times already. They felt like they had the Gin-Kings figured out. San Miguel was another story. The Beermen—their nonthreatening moniker notwithstanding—were scary.
“Eight games—that’s no joke,” Jeff Cariaso told me, regarding San Miguel’s mid-season winning streak. He had sensed that Alaska would play the Beermen, although he seemed unenthusiastic now that the prediction came true: “When they got matched up with Ginebra, I said, ‘We’re gonna have to play these fools.’ I would rather have played Ginebra, because at least with them you know who you need to stop—Nealy. San Miguel is full of surprises. Every time they’re in a must-win game, they win.”
Jeff was referring to the Beermen’s playoff run, during which they had survived four win-or-go-home elimination games and ended three other teams’ seasons. San Miguel would not be an easy out, but that was just one reason for Alaska to worry. The Beermen had a stingy defense much like Alaska’s. With a beefy, veteran front line that included two-time MVP Danny Ildefonso, San Miguel may have been the only PBA team capable of outmuscling the Aces on the boards. The Beermen possessed a cast of rugged perimeter defenders who would be champing at the bit to limit Willie’s output, plus a handful of offensive wild cards who could take over any game. The catalog of potential threats included Willy Wilson and Brandon Cablay, two former Aces who would be eager to punish the team that traded them; Chris Calaguio, a three-point specialist enjoying a career year; and L.A. Tenorio, a twenty-two-year-old point guard rocket whose speed and limitless energy seemed tailor-made to expose Willie’s sins of nonchalance.
Then there was Galen Young, the San Miguel import who rescued the team from its 0-6 tailspin at the beginning of the conference. Until he arrived in Manila, a string of import-related fiascos nearly ruined the Beermen’s season. Their first choice, Kelly Whitney, was sent home for being too tall before he got a chance to play. With only three days between Whitney’s failed measurement and San Miguel’s first game, the team scrambled to find a warm foreign body to field as an import. They came up with Vidal Massiah, who, despite his Atlantic 10 Conference credentials and dramatic name, was no savior. In his second and final PBA game, Massiah scored no points. Next came Paul McMillan, a husky forward with a permanently sour look on his face. McMillan was a competent rebounder and inside scorer—he even put up a 41-point game against Talk ‘N Text—but he didn’t have the all-around game needed to revive San Miguel’s local talent and save the season.90
A month into the season, the Beermen brought in Young. The team figured they had finally hired a surefire import. The thirty-one-year-old forward had already proven himself in the PBA—in 2004 he played for Alaska—and the team knew he was in shape because he flew to Manila weeks after leading the Yakama Sun Kings to the CBA championship. Yet in Young’s first game, a blowout loss to Alaska, the jet-lagged import made four of twenty-three shots and was booed for most of the second half. His performance was such a dud that there was talk around the league of San Miguel’s plan to drop Young and hire their fifth import of the season. As Young grew familiar with his teammates, however, the wins began to pile up. He was different from the archetypal PBA import, whose idea of an assist was a pass to himself off the backboard for a dunk. Young loved to stand at the top of the key and pick apart defenses with his passing. He didn’t know his personnel in San Miguel’s first loss to Alaska, so he didn’t know how to set them up. Once he figured them out, the Beermen steamrolled through the rest of their schedule.
Young played the same role for the Beermen as Roe did for the Aces, but their styles were slightly different. Young’s game had more slickness and finesse; Roe relied on strength and hustle. Yet both players acted as the lubricant that made their teams run smoothly. That wasn’t all the two imports had in common. They were old friends from the international hoops circuit, admirers of one another’s games, and teammates on a 2006 Yakama squad. Recently, they had both signed to play for the Australian league’s Townsville Crocodiles in the coming season. The rival imports
would be teammates in a few months. On top of all that, Young had also unveiled a silver mohawk for the playoffs. Although the style made Young look like Wesley Snipes’s psychotic villain in Demolition Man, it also gave the Beermen a certain rally-cap charm. They could care less about Alaska’s long-awaited championship; San Miguel had pulled off a laudable mid-conference turnaround, and now they were out to complete their own storybook season.
Alaska had other reasons to feel apprehensive about San Miguel. The Beermen were the PBA’s most storied franchise, the local answer to the New York Yankees. Of the league’s ten teams, San Miguel was the sole remaining pioneer franchise that joined the PBA in 1975. Their powerful owner, onetime Marcos crony Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, was chairman of the San Miguel Corporation, the Philippines’ largest food and beverage company. San Miguel controlled three PBA teams—the others were the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants and Barangay Ginebra Kings—but the flagship Beermen were reputedly closest to Cojuangco’s heart. No other team had won as many championships, and San Miguel was the only active team other than Alaska to have pulled off a grand slam, when they captured all three conference titles in 1989.91 As such, there was a feeling among teams outside Cojuangco’s umbrella that the Beermen, thanks to their owner’s wealth and influence and the team’s tradition and history, were the league’s favorite sons.
If Alaska felt like they took on the entire Philippines when they faced Ginebra, then playing against San Miguel felt like taking on the basketball powers-that-be. In a country where the will of the people often lost to the will of the powerful, taking on the hoops establishment felt like Alaska’s ultimate test. As soon as the match-up was announced, Cone began telling the players to expect bad calls from the referees. He was especially concerned because Alaska owner Fred Uytengsu was leaving that week to take his family on an African safari. Without his presence behind the bench, Cone worried that the one-sided officiating could become more brazen. Only Uytengsu had the stature to make a stink in the press and cajole the commissioner into giving Alaska a fair shake. Meanwhile, Boss Danding Cojuangco was expected to be sitting behind the Beermen during every game.
The perceived favoritism benefiting Cojuangco’s teams was especially strong heading into the semifinals, just weeks after San Miguel obtained forward Enrico Villanueva in a lopsided trade with Red Bull. San Miguel gave up aging big man Rommel Adducul for Villanueva, who was then considered one of the league’s bright young stars. On its own, that would have been an unfair swap, but Red Bull then turned around and dealt Adducul to Purefoods for Don Camaso, a player so low on the PBA totem pole that he was supposedly slated to be an import in the same Boracay tournament where I dropped my pants until Purefoods activated him from their reserve roster. Purefoods, of course, was San Miguel’s sister franchise, so the three-team swap smacked of collusion. Translated into NBA terms, an exasperated Cone compared Red Bull’s decision to give up Villanueva for the eventual prize of Camaso to “Dwight Howard being traded for Ronnie Turiaf.”
There was no proof of malfeasance in the Villanueva trade, but most PBA observers believed that Red Bull was “selling players.” Teams with lower operating budgets were often suspected of trading their best players to big-spending teams for benchwarmers and large under-the-table cash payments. The scuttlebutt around the league priced Villanueva’s bounty at almost half a million dollars, money Red Bull might use to cover operating expenses, pad employees’ Christmas bonuses, or develop more young stars to sell. Another well-known but officially unacknowledged act of PBA subterfuge was laundering players. League rules stipulated that teams owned by the same individual or corporation could not trade directly with each other. This gave cash-strapped teams an incentive to act as trade conduits for sister teams. For example, if Purefoods and Ginebra wanted to shuffle their line-up, a team like Red Bull or Air 21 might facilitate the deal in exchange for token deadweight players, future draft picks, and untold cash considerations.
For Red Bull, it helped to have a coach like Yeng Guiao, whose approach to nurturing basketball talent reminded me of slash and burn agriculture. The raging mentor had a sterling track record of turning other teams’ castaways into borderline stars. Once he gave them a taste of his acid tongue, they became inspired—some might say intimidated—to play their absolute best. Few players, however, could endure Guiao’s badgering for long. After a couple seasons they would stop responding, but by then Guiao had squeezed every drop of talent from them and maximized their trade value for Red Bull to make another deal. Once again, Guiao’s methods sounded wicked, but his results were unquestionable. As the season went on, I found myself admiring Guiao’s style. There was something exhilarating about watching him take players who other teams considered deadweight, then plug them into his system and beat the same teams that traded them. Guiao was one of the league’s last practitioners of Jaworski-style coaching, where toughness and passion mattered more than strategy and talent. His Red Bull teams proved that there wasn’t just one way to win basketball games.
What amazed me about the PBA’s gentlemanly frauds was that they were open secrets, existing not only as locker room gossip but fodder for the press. Yet no honest effort was made to stop teams from selling or laundering players, probably because most of the league’s franchises had benefited from these kinds of deals in recent years, and trades were approved by a majority vote of team representatives. Only Alaska and the Santa Lucia Realtors objected publicly to the Villanueva swap. Team managers Joaqui Trillo of Alaska and Buddy Encarnado of Santa Lucia condemned the deal in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “Let’s call an apple an apple,” Encarnado told reporters. “We all know our basketball, we’ve been here for a long time. How can that trade be fair? We will never resort to selling our players.” Trillo added: “This is too much already. I don’t know where the league is going. We may be stupid, but we’re not dumb.” Mixed in with this avalanche of botched idioms was a scathing critique of how unscrupulous trades were corrupting the league.
From what I could tell, the PBA trade rules existed in a parallel legal universe, along with regulations on Fil-foreign players and maximum salaries. The rulebook didn’t matter because the real-life test of any transaction was the ability to get away with it. If no one stopped teams from hiring players of questionable Filipino heritage, from paying franchises to accept their washed-up talent, or from rewarding stars with bonuses worth orders of magnitude more than their contracts guaranteed, then these practices were considered acceptable. In that case, why even have rules? Why not allow teams to conduct business however they pleased, since that was what they did anyway? When I asked Cone to reflect on this charade, he said years in the league had dulled his frustration.
“When I heard about the trade, I was surprised at myself that I wasn’t angry,” he said, holding back a fateful chuckle. “I’ve gotten numb to it all.” He showed a flash of indignation but recognized that it was fruitless to take on the whole PBA: “The shortsightedness of it all is typical of our league and typical of our culture. You power up your team in the short run and destroy the league in the long run. No one has the wherewithal to say flat out: ‘This is wrong.’ If I say it, it becomes sour grapes. I’m an arrogant American. So we just deal with it. Other teams are going to have certain advantages, and it’s my job to win in spite of them. If you get punched enough, you get beat up enough, you don’t feel the punches anymore.” One thing was for sure: even though Alaska had fresher legs and a better record, beating San Miguel was going to be an uphill battle.
After all of Alaska’s apprehension over the Beermen, the Aces went out and claimed a relatively painless 2-0 lead in the semifinals. Alaska outclassed San Miguel in seven of the first eight quarters the teams played, with the lone exception coming in the fourth quarter of game one, when the Beermen clawed out of a double-digit hole with help from the referees, who saddled the Aces with eleven fouls in the period. Despite sputtering down the stretch, Alaska held on for a 100-99 win sealed by one of Roe’s jump hook
s. In game two the Aces jumped to an early lead and never looked back in a twenty-five-point blowout. The team they had dreaded was beginning to look like a pushover.
In practice Cone tried to curb his team’s emerging overconfidence. Yes, Alaska was halfway to the finals, but taking two more games from a team that was undefeated in must-win situations would be no cakewalk. The coach’s principal concern heading into game three was Young. San Miguel’s import looked sharp through the first two games. He was matching Roe’s scoring numbers, beating Nic Belasco and Rey Hugnatan off the dribble, and manhandling the Aces’ big men in the paint. Worst of all, Young was averaging close to 10 assists per game. His pinpoint passes—the “sweet pass,” as Cone called it—energized his teammates and sparked his own confidence to take over games. While watching a series of possessions late in the fourth quarter of game one, Cone couldn’t help but marvel at Young’s ability to dominate a close contest. Time after time Young caught the ball at the top of the key, surveyed the court, and then charged toward the basket, where he’d score or create contact with his defender to draw a foul. “Man, Galen just puts the ball on the floor and it’s go, go, go, and the refs bail him out every time,” Cone said. “You can’t do anything about it.”
The coaches didn’t want to send a chaser at Young, as they’d done against Ginebra’s Rod Nealy, because it would only open up another cutter for Young’s passes. They decided to give Nic and Rey a consistent approach to guarding the import; that way, at least, they wouldn’t feel marooned twenty-two feet away from the basket, wondering which way Young would go and how to stay in front of him. The plan was to always shade Young toward the baseline. Then when he picked up his dribble, the passing lanes would be limited to one side of the court. If he got to the middle, his options multiplied and he became more deadly. Cone expected Young to beat Alaska’s defense and score from the baseline a few times, but he could live with that. “He’s gonna put up some big numbers,” Cone warned, “but while he’s putting up those numbers the rest of their guys aren’t going to get involved.”
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