Midway through this symposium there was a quiet commotion on one side of the room, apparently caused by Poch Juinio’s silent-but-deadly gastrointestinal combustion. Willie Miller, who had been resting his head in Poch’s lap, bolted upright and pulled his shirt over his nose. Before long half the team was peering out at Cone’s video from behind towels, washcloths, T-shirts—anything they could use to dull the fumes. A couple stifled guffaws emerged from behind their impromptu masks, and the players’ smiling eyes betrayed the laughter they were struggling to restrain. They managed to remain composed, but Poch’s inadvertent distraction deep-sixed Cone’s atmosphere of playoff intensity.
During Cone’s scouting sessions, the coach entered a basketball fugue state. His focus on explaining the game plan was unbreakable. To an attentive audience, this made him a powerful communicator. But once the players became distracted, Cone tended to be so deeply enmeshed in the cross screens and lag passes flashing through his mind that he wouldn’t notice the chaos around him. After Poch farted, the levity in the room overtook Cone’s fascination with guarding Galen Young. Oblivious, Cone moved on to the next urgent hoops concern—counteracting a move Young used to snatch offensive rebounds when his teammates shot free throws. The video showed Nic start to box out Young, who slid his hand underneath Nic’s armpit and then back-stroked him out of position. So far in the series, Young had used the trick to steal at least three extra possessions for San Miguel, and sooner or later it could cost Alaska a game. While Cone discussed techniques Nic could use to counter Young’s move, Willie was busy demonstrating to Poch, Eddie Laure, and Rensy Bajar that he could jam a paper Gatorade cup onto his chin and look like King Tut.
“We won those games, fellas,” Cone said, “but we can really improve on our game plan.”
That set Roe off. “That’s why I hope these guys will pay attention and actually improve instead of making the same fucking mistakes over and over again because y’all are in here playing,” the import said, directing his frustration at Willie’s side of the room. “Pay some fucking attention.” An awkward silence followed. With Alaska two wins away from the finals, Roe had chosen an odd time to call out a vital teammate, but he could no longer hold back his disgust. “Let them run around playing for forty-five minutes and let me sit around and rest. Shit.”
Scouting ended right there. Cone sent the players into the gym to warm up for practice. On the way out the door, Nic put his arm around Poch, whose gas played catalyst to Willie’s antics and Roe’s outburst. “You guys fart too much.” Inside the gym, Willie covered his eyebrows with a pair of Band-Aids. Giggling, he said, “They don’t want me to laugh! Willie-boy needs to laugh.”
Games three and four were a near mirror image of the first two, with San Miguel outplaying the Aces throughout except for one crucial quarter. Facing an insurmountable deficit had they lost game three, the Beermen won by ten points to narrow Alaska’s lead. After the game, Roe, whose lefty hook shot had been short all night, admitted he was tired. “I caught myself not running the court like three times,” he told Nic. “I couldn’t move, man. Just couldn’t get up and down.” San Miguel continued to best Alaska’s levels of energy and aggression in game four and seemed poised to tie the series. The Beermen led 68-60 after three quarters, and the Aces’ comeback hopes looked weak with Roe resting as the final period began. That’s when Mike Cortez, whose performance had been uneven since returning from knee surgery, displayed the form that led Cone to call the preinjury Mike Alaska’s best player. Over the first six minutes of the quarter, Mike scored or assisted on nearly every Alaska basket during a 19-10 spurt that gave the Aces a one-point advantage. San Miguel couldn’t keep him from driving into the lane, where he rebounded his own miss and scored a putback, dished to Rey for a running one-hander, kicked a pass to Eddie for a game-tying three-pointer, and sank two or three of his own picturesque teardrops. That momentum sparked Alaska to a game four win and a three games to one series lead.
When the Aces arrived at practice the next day, they didn’t carry themselves like a team that had just seized command of the series. They ambled into the gym on rubbery legs, groaning about Charley horses and tweaked ankles, and they talked as if needing just one more win to make the finals was a burden. In fact, the 3-1 margin was weighing on the players’ minds; it was the same situation the team found itself in the previous year against Purefoods. Alaska lost three games in a row and blew that series. Cone chided the players for losing their edge. “We’ve gotten loose, fellas,” the coach said. “Not everyone is taping [their ankles]. That’s bad news when you’re playing every other day and a sprain could mean you’re out for two or three games.92 That could cost the whole series, and it shows me you’ve stopped taking this seriously. We had a lot of fear coming into this series. We thought we weren’t ready for this team. Fear can be healthy, fellas. We lost our fear and that caused us to be sloppy.”
Prior to game five, Joel Banal’s words of inspiration hearkened back to the Philippines’ agricultural heritage: “When a fruit is ready for harvest and it’s hanging off the tree, don’t let it fall off that tree, because then it’s too late. It’s rotten already. You climb that tree and get it.” Perhaps he should have chosen a less flowery metaphor to urge the team to close out the series, because game five was a disaster. San Miguel scored on its first seven possessions. Alaska’s out-of-sync offense produced few scoring opportunities; instead, the hesitant players shoveled passes back and forth like a game of hot potato before attempting last-ditch heaves as the shot clock ran down. Trailing by sixteen points at halftime, several Alaska players had already been charged with three or four personals. In the fourth quarter, with the Aces down more than twenty, the drubbing took on grave implications when Young drew a foul and tumbled into Jeff Cariaso’s knee. Alaska’s trainers had to help Jeff off the floor, and his severe limp suggested he wouldn’t return for game six. When the final buzzer sounded, Alaska still led the series, but the Aces shuffled off the court looking like the 126-108 pasting had broken their will.
No one spoke inside the locker room. Cone stood alone in the showers, the water off, holding the wall with one hand and staring down at the grimy tile floor. He either didn’t want to speak to the team or didn’t know what to say to them. The players didn’t change into street clothes; they just sat in front of their cubbies, heads down, watching drops of sweat pool at their feet. The ball boys handed out spaghetti and implored the players and coaches to eat. The food mostly got pushed around plates and left behind. In two days Alaska would have to return to the arena and defeat the team that just routed them. The pressure would be on the Aces, who had plenty of reasons—San Miguel favoritism, the fear of choking, their mounting fatigue—to want to avoid a game seven. “If it’s game seven, San Miguel will win,” Mang Tom told me earlier that day, and that likelihood hung in the players’ minds.
There was also a feeling that despite leading the series, Alaska’s playoff run was close to derailing. After game five Jeff knew his season was over. “That’s not how this conference is supposed to end,” he told me, away from the rest of the team. “Fuck! We’re not even in [the finals] yet. When I walked off I thought, damn, this don’t feel right. You can tell when it’s hurt but you can still play on it, and this one felt different.” He wouldn’t break the news—a partial ligament tear—to his teammates until the next day, but they already sensed that they had lost their leader. Jeff’s on-court production wouldn’t be that hard to replace; Mike Cortez was gaining strength and could step in at guard, while rangy swingmen like Eddie Laure and Aaron Aban could compensate for some of Jeff’s tough defense. But Jeff was the team’s compass. Playing on championship teams had given him a sense of the moment; in close games it was often Jeff who found a way to get to the free throw line or leaked out for an easy layup when Alaska needed it most. And Jeff was everyone’s confidante: Roe complained to him about Willie’s childishness; Willie trusted him enough to take him seriously; and Cone relied on Jeff for hone
st reports on tensions among the players. Of course, Jeff would remain with the team in practice and on the bench, but without him on the court, it was unclear who could hold Alaska together.
Nothing worried the team more than Willie. He had averaged only 11 points for the series, and that number was skewed upward by the 19 points he scored—mostly in garbage time—in the game five blowout. Night after night the confidence seemed to be draining out of Alaska’s star guard. San Miguel was trapping him every time he caught the ball, stripping it away when he tried to dribble through double teams, and deflecting it when he passed out of them. On the rare occasions that Willie received the ball with room to shoot, he hesitated. Instead of taking shots he had made all season, he held the ball and waited to pass to a big man in the low post. He seemed flustered and committed errors I’d never seen him make. During game four he had a chance to go one-on-one against San Miguel’s Willy Wilson. He rocked forward on his pivot foot to push back Wilson, who had been playing him chest-to-chest. He faked a drive, then rocked Wilson back again, then tried another fake. Earlier in the season Willie would have blown by Wilson, but now his game seemed to have developed a stutter. The fakes created hardly any space, but Willie, desperate to score, tried to shoot anyway. He reconsidered in midair, double-pumped the ball, and forced a pass to Eddie Laure. Wilson deflected it, and even though Eddie managed to recover the loose ball, there wasn’t enough time remaining on the shot clock to attempt a decent shot. Willie’s indecisive play was a sure sign that San Miguel’s pressure had gotten into his head.
Finally, Cone stepped out of the shower room. He hardly had anything to say. The loss was so bad there weren’t any lessons to take home. “That can’t happen on Sunday, guys. Nothing worthwhile has ever been gotten easily. I don’t want everybody moping around here. Let’s get dressed and get out of here.”
The players changed without speaking. They left full plates of spaghetti lined up on the floor in front of their lockers. On my way out the door I passed the showers. Willie was there, alone. When he saw me pass he flashed a wide smile, grabbed an overhead pipe and began humping air. His swinging dong splattered soap suds on the wall, and I had to duck to avoid the spray. This time, however, Willie’s nakedness seemed more melancholy than outrageous, like he was trying to convince himself that he was still Willie “the Thriller” Miller, the PBA’s most irrepressible and unstoppable combo guard. But it would take more than exhibitionist hijinks to assure anyone that the same-old-Willie was back. He needed to prove it on the court.
So far in the series, the officiating had been respectable. The San Miguel highway robbery that Alaska expected hadn’t occurred. More fouls were called against the Aces than the Beermen,93 but the imbalance was no greater than earlier in the playoffs, when a frustrated sports columnist, Ronnie Nathanielsz, suggested that “the PBA is indeed a San Miguel league.” Alaska’s 3-2 lead seemed enough proof that the referees hadn’t prevented the Aces from winning, but instead just ratcheted up the degree of difficulty.
The pattern held through most of game six. Neither team was at its best, with San Miguel maintaining a slim lead over Alaska after each of the first three quarters. At practice the day before, Roe had played with the energy and determination of an import trying to prove himself on his first day with the team. He missed only one or two shots during several lengthy scrimmages. The succession of dunks, mid-range bank shots, and coast-to-coast drives made it clear that despite Jeff’s injury, Willie’s struggles, and his own homesickness, Roe was ready to beat San Miguel on his own, if necessary. That aggression carried over to the game. Roe attacked every defender San Miguel threw at him. He abused lighter defenders like Wilson and Wesley Gonzales in the low post and drove past slower big men like Dorian Peña and Danny Ildefonso. Roe’s 22 first-half points allowed Alaska to go into halftime trailing San Miguel by just two points, 49-47.
In the second half every time a five- or seven-point Alaska run seemed to tip the momentum in the Aces’ favor, the referees conjured ways to keep San Miguel ahead. When Mike Cortez chased down the rebound off an errant San Miguel jumper, Rico Villanueva raked him across the arm and the ball bounced out of bounds. There was no foul call; instead, a turnover was charged to Mike. A few possessions later Roe deflected an inbound pass intended for Galen Young. The ball glanced off Young’s hand and sailed out of bounds. The officials saw Roe’s deflection but not Young’s, and the Beermen retained possession. Phantom push and over-the-back fouls salvaged San Miguel’s unsuccessful offensive drives by giving the Beermen free throws and extra possessions. San Miguel wasn’t playing a poor game. Without help from the referees, they probably would have held a slight lead over the Aces. But throughout the second half, whenever a play didn’t work out for the Beermen, the referees gave them a do-over.
At the time I was incensed, but after the game I realized that I got to feel something rare for a foreigner in the Philippines. Unfortunately, that emotion was utter helplessness. As an outsider in Manila, I always had an escape route. If a coup attempt stirred up the restive public and I sensed danger, or if local officials harassed me for bribes, I could ride my American passport back to a comparatively safer, more equitable society. But since I had attached myself to purely Filipino endeavors like Alaska and the PBA, I couldn’t bail at the first whiff of unfairness. I had to choke down the plume of bile rising in my chest and swallow my frustration. After some of the whistles in game six, I started to understand why Filipino basketball fans historically felt so comfortable targeting referees for coin and battery attacks; I sensed why public opinion had been strangely supportive of Robert Jaworski and Big Boy Reynoso after they mauled those officials back in 1971; I sympathized with the vengeful Ginebra crowds who milled around parking lots, waiting until the early morning for a chance to confront the referees. Filipinos were used to getting cheated. Their government did it to them, in various manners and degrees of severity, every day; before that, our government did the cheating. People in the Philippines almost certainly would never get a chance to hurl debris at corrupt politicians. They probably wouldn’t even get meaningful opportunities to confront public officials in more civilized ways. But given the chance to lash out at crookedness in basketball, they let loose a fury so intense that it seemed like more than a response to shameless refereeing. It felt like a battle cry against a power structure built to serve its leaders and not its people. In game six, while watching what looked like an attempt to fix a basketball game, I felt a fraction of that mass pathos. I could read hundreds of Asian Development Bank and Transparency International reports about corruption in the Philippines and I still wouldn’t feel the depth of the country’s problems as I had during game six. I was watching something happen that I knew was wrong, and I knew I was powerless to stop it.
With ten seconds left in the game it looked like I was about to receive a final lesson in Philippine fatalism. With San Miguel leading by a point, Brandon Cablay crossed over against Willie, drove to the basket, and banked home a runner. There was hardly any contact on the play, yet Willie was whistled for a foul, and Cablay sank his foul shot to give the Beermen a four-point lead. Alaska called time-out, then scored a quick two points to cut the deficit in half. With 3.6 seconds to play, Alaska fouled Wesley Gonzales, who made one of two free throws to extend San Miguel’s lead to three. Alaska needed a three-pointer to stave off game seven. Because Mike Cortez had committed his sixth and final foul to stop the clock and send Gonzales to the line, Cone wasn’t sure who should take the last shot. He summoned Eddie Laure, then, just before sending the team onto the floor, he changed his mind. “No!” Cone shouted. “Dale, you inbound the ball.” Dale hadn’t played all night, and his job was to inbound the ball for Alaska’s Hail Mary. Dale found Nic Belasco at the three-point line. Three San Miguel defenders surrounded Nic before he could even turn and face the basket. His only play was to shovel the ball to Dale, who had stepped in bounds almost thirty feet from the hoop. The twenty-eight-foot prayer was Dale’s first shot o
f the game; the buzzer sounded just as the ball reached the rim, rattled around, and fell through the basket. The score was 92-all. Dale—the erstwhile washout whom Roe once angrily referred to as the PBA’s “scraps,” who was playing as a ringer in Cebu City corporate tourneys when Alaska hired him—had just saved the Aces’ season.
It would take two overtimes to settle the game. In the first, Alaska took a two-point lead thanks to a late three-pointer by Willie, but Young tied the score on a pair of free throws. Alaska battled back in the second overtime and seized another two-point advantage, thanks to a pair of slow-motion drives by John Ferriols and two clutch free throws from Rey Hugnatan. Down two with twenty-four seconds to play, L.A. Tenorio dashed through the lane and released a floater while gliding into John, who stood still with his arms up and then collapsed backward from the contact. When I heard the whistle, I was certain a blocking call would go against John and Tenorio, who made the shot, would receive a free throw to win the game for San Miguel. Instead, the referee waved off the basket and pointed in the other direction. Charging. Given the way the referees had called the game, this was the one ending to game six that no one foresaw. Who knows what the ref was thinking when he made the deciding call in favor of Alaska. The Aces won 113- 109. It was like fate intervened and told the powers-that-be they could wait. This was Alaska’s year.
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