Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  “I’ve never seen refs as obvious as in the last two games,” Jeff told me after the win. “But the way we won, with John taking the charge from Tenorio and actually getting that call—it’s like poetic justice.” It was, and for the time being it restored my faith in the basketball universe.

  15

  The Gift of Basketball

  It turned out that the Beermen’s relentless double teams weren’t the only thing bothering Willie Miller in the semifinals. After the San Miguel series, I asked Willie’s teammates if they expected him to bounce back in the finals, and although all the players remained confident in him, they kept alluding to “the problem with Willie’s contract.” Cone told me what happened. Due to a managerial mix-up, Willie’s contract, which was supposed to expire at the end of the season, had actually expired on July first, between games five and six of the semis. Cone himself didn’t know about the situation until about a week before the contract was up, when the team and Willie had to negotiate. They settled on a temporary fix that preserved all the details of Willie’s old deal and extended it an extra month. By August, the finals would be over and they would have time to discuss a proper extension. “From an organizational standpoint, we dropped the ball,” Cone admitted. “We should have seen that a long time ago.”

  On a practical level, the oversight didn’t make a huge difference. Willie was already earning a maximum salary worth about $90,000 per year, not including performance bonuses for won games, individual statistics, and playoff success.94 According to league rules, he couldn’t sign for any more than he was already earning, and Alaska was sure to offer him a multiyear contract at the same max level after the season. Still, it sent a discouraging message—we’ll keep paying you until the end of the playoffs, and see if we still want you after that—to the team’s most psychically fragile individual, who also happened to be, aside from Roe, its top scorer and most talented player. Of course, Willie played the good soldier and denied feeling any anxiety over his unresolved contract, but it was hard to believe that a player whom coaches were afraid to criticize directly wouldn’t take this slight personally. In the semifinals, when San Miguel made taking Willie out of the game their top priority, this compounded the dilemma by giving Willie a reason to doubt himself and his future with the team. He had just played the six worst games of his season, and now Alaska management was telling him they’d prefer to wait until after the postseason to discuss his extension. It was like opening up a black hole of insecurity in Willie’s mind and then covering it with a Band-Aid.

  Willie’s contract woes stirred his teammates’ sense of worker solidarity. Many of them had also experienced uncomfortable negotiations with Alaska’s front office, which was known among players as one of the league’s most frugal. Of course, the Alaska Milk Corporation had an unassailable excuse for the way it handled the Aces—the salaries they paid were as high as the league allowed. But viewed in the funhouse mirror of behind-the-scenes PBA transactions, a maximum deal like Willie’s might be considered a pay cut by stars on teams with more free-spending owners and more creative accountants. Whenever team manager Joaqui Trillo was confronted with his franchise’s tight-pocketed reputation, he was quick to counter that in 2001 Alaska signed Kenneth Duremdes, a former MVP, to the most expensive contract in league history.95 This was true, and Alaska willingly signed worthy players to maximum deals; they just wouldn’t sweeten the pot with under-the-table benefits or extravagant performance incentives. In another league this principled stand might be considered honorable although not extraordinary; only in the topsy-turvy PBA, where the prevailing ethics permitted a certain amount of graft, could a pledge to obey the rules be interpreted as miserly.

  Aside from the moral principle of wanting to do the right thing, Alaska’s outwardly scrupulous management of the team stemmed from the company’s wholesome corporate image. Alaska sold milk; having clean-cut players and a franchise that played by the rules was a non-negotiable aspect of the brand. I sat down with Fred Uytengsu, who ran the family-owned company and team, to hear the full corporate spiel. Dressed in a painstakingly coordinated dark suit accented with a mauve shirt and burgundy tie, he talked about the challenge of managing a PBA franchise without cutting corners: “There are other things that we want to do. Set a good example, not just in youth and role model situations but as a company. Being a good corporate citizen. Honoring the salary cap. I know some teams are violating the salary cap. It’s just obvious. You look at some teams when they’ve got ten-deep star players, all making max money. Yeah, it’s a little bit frustrating when you see the odds stacked against you, and then they have the audacity to say: ‘Oh no, we’re all under the salary cap.’ Bullshit.”96

  Alaska’s players weren’t so invested in the corporate image; they were mostly concerned with earning as much as possible during their limited playing years. Besides, the salary cap didn’t serve a moral purpose. It was instituted to protect megalomaniacal team owners from spending irresponsibly and hurting not just the league, but also their principal businesses. At the same time, however, the cap did create a level playing field of team-building guidelines, and when franchises ignored the spending limits it threatened the league’s competitive balance. The trick for Alaska, Uytengsu explained, was to find players who might not be thrilled about earning less than players on other teams, but who nevertheless were too prideful to let that interfere with the goal of winning. “Before we trade for a particular player, we try to see if he has the capacity to understand and finally live up to our belief system,” Uytengsu told me. “It may not be there right away because he was spoiled with another team, and maybe we can break that down, we can break into his inner core and have him really understand. Take Jeffrey [Cariaso], for example. I’m sure he could go and get special favors at other teams. But he’s a good person in his heart, and he knows what’s right and what’s wrong. So we have a player like him, who then can talk to other players who might think: ‘I got shafted, man. I don’t get that extra perk I got before. I don’t get the free car.97 I haven’t been promised a side contract.’ It’s worked with some players and it hasn’t with others, so we’re not perfect in doing this, but we are firm. We’re gonna win with pride and integrity or we’re not gonna win at all.”

  Uytengsu delivers a bravura speech. Maybe the Alaska ethos didn’t always convince players, but it definitely rubbed off on me. The idea that Alaska went against the grain with its straitlaced approach had me pulling for the team to defeat higher-profile franchises like Ginebra, San Miguel, and Talk ‘N Text. I wasn’t inspired by the honor and integrity of it all as much as the simple underdog narrative: Here was a team trying to do more with less. A squad whose own import, in a moment of frustration, compared his supporting cast to the league’s detritus. Yet here they were, poised to win a title.

  On the other hand, there was an undeniable expediency to Alaska’s value system. The franchise paid lower salaries than competing teams, then explained to the players that earning less would make them better men. It also made the Alaska Milk Corporation wealthier. Alaska officials were always quick to wax poetic about the team’s family atmosphere, which was relatively unique among PBA teams. Homegrown players and Fil-Ams forged actual friendships; Cone’s relationships with veterans were marked by mutual trust and respect; the players’ families spent time with each other away from games and official team functions. All of it was true. The Aces were a tight-knit group. But in the right situation—an aging player, a can’t-miss trade—Alaska’s familial bonds took a backseat to the business of professional basketball. “Players will be surprised when we make some of the deals we make,” Uytengsu admitted. “They just have to understand that the life of a professional basketball player is that you can be traded.” Again, he’s correct, but for the players who drank the company Kool-Aid and accepted off-the-books pay cuts to be part of this basketball family, it was understandable that they might feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Willie’s contract snafu wasn’t so severe, but it reawake
ned the players’ dormant perception that Alaska didn’t always repay in kind the loyalty and sacrifice it asked of its athletes.

  A new accoutrement appeared in the Alaska lounge the week before the Finals began. To accompany Manila’s rainy season and the head colds caused by its daily swings from stifling morning humidity to cool afternoon downpours, the trainers placed a plastic bucket filled with eucalyptus oil next to the couches where the players sat. This was the hydrogen bomb of cold remedies. Each whiff of the pungent sludge—I initially thought it was some variant of high-viscosity turpentine—blasted the players’ sinuses clear, and judging by the woozy expression left on their faces afterward, also erased a cluster of brain cells. When Jeff and Poch Juinio arrived for practice, they went straight for the eucalyptus. Poch buried his face in the bucket like he was bobbing for an apple, huffed the fumes and emerged coughing and snorting. His nose had turned red, almost purple, and his eyes were watery. Poch passed the container to Jeff, who sniffed cautiously then turned his head to the side, his face scrunched like he’d just been maced.

  The redolent goo appeared to have helped eradicate the players’ bad memories from the difficult San Miguel series. After surviving the Beermen, Alaska’s players and coaching staff thought the team they would face for the championship, the Talk ‘N Text Phone Pals, would be a comparative walk in the park. The Phone Pals were a young team with scant finals experience, especially compared to Alaska’s multititled veterans like Jeff, Poch, and Nic Belasco. Their import, J. J. Sullinger, had been the subject of replacement rumors when Talk ‘N Text suffered an early season slump. The brash, twenty-four-year-old reinforcement’s penchant for shooting step-back, fadeaway three-pointers after ten seconds of shake-and-bake dribbling was considered harmful to the Phone Pals’ chances; that is, until he started sinking these supposedly low-percentage shots at a high rate and the team surged up the standings. Alaska planned to concede the highlight reel to Sullinger while riding Roe’s steady scoring, rebounding, ballhandling, and defense to the championship.98

  For a little extra motivation, several Alaska players and coaches held personal grudges against Talk ‘N Text. The telecom franchise first brought Roe to the Philippines in 2001, but they sent him home before the season began because they deemed him too small. Alaska assistant Joel Banal was head coach of the Phone Pals for almost four seasons until early 2006 and led the team to a string of semifinals and finals, but was dismissed for failing to deliver a championship. Months after Talk ‘N Text fired Banal, they traded Willie to Alaska. At various points in their careers, Roe, Willie, and Banal had been spurned by Phone Pals owner Manuel V. Pangilinan, and they considered the chance to deny him a title fitting payback.

  Pangilinan, the same tycoon who bankrolled the Ateneo team and liked to be called “M.V.P.,” also spared no expense on his professional team. If San Miguel owner Danding Cojuangco was the PBA’s staid mogul, its Steinbrenneresque boss of bosses, then M.V.P. was the league’s Mark Cuban, its Young Turk hell-bent on accumulating championship bling for the chairman’s boardroom. During off-seasons Pangilinan sent the Phone Pals around the world on training tours, exposing the team to techniques used by the coaching vanguard of the United States, Serbia, and Australia. Since 2000 the team had shuffled through coaches at the rate of almost one per year, and the Talk ‘N Text roster was in perpetual flux, with Pangilinan acquiring as many top-flight stars as possible. The boss’s performance incentives were fodder for such legendary gossip that at the pre-finals press conference, journalists hectored Talk ‘N Text coaches and players for hints about their promised championship bonus and never bothered to ask Cone what goodies awaited the Aces. Alaska’s philosophy—long-term continuity99 and lower bonuses to keep winning itself the primary goal—couldn’t have been more different.

  Talk ‘N Text and Alaska also played different styles of basketball. The Aces were a defensive-minded, half-court team that won by out-rebounding and outworking their opponents while counting on a touch of offensive dazzle from Willie, Roe, and Mike Cortez. Cone loved to point out that the triangle was “an equal opportunity offense” that relied on court spacing, sharp player movement, and precise passing. The Phone Pals had a slew of gifted scorers, starting with Sullinger but also including two second-year swingmen, Mark “Macmac” Cardona and Anthony Washington. Both had breakout seasons that year, especially Cardona, who led all nonimports in scoring. The team based its offense on isolating these players and giving them space to break down opponents and score via difficult, often spectacular one-on-one moves. The Phone Pals played pressure defense with an eye toward creating steals and easy points, not necessarily getting stops. They were quick and athletic, but did not have the team defensive mind-set that they were going to get low, stay in front of their men, and challenge every shot. Cone believed that if the Alaska guards could avoid turning the ball over, the Aces could score easily against Talk ‘N Text’s half-court defense.

  I sensed a mild, slightly haughty disapproval in the way Cone talked about Talk ‘N Text, as if they weren’t quite worthy of being Alaska’s final test. The coach had a puritan streak when it came to proper team basketball. He was a hoops aesthete, and in his mind there was nothing subjective about hardwood beauty. It was Willie curling over a baseline screen and catching the ball for an open six-footer; it was Jeff sliding his feet to cut off an offensive player’s drive; and it was not Macmac Cardona blindly charging into the lane to shoot a running one-hander over four defenders. With its deep pockets and star-studded roster, Talk ‘N Text just seemed gauche. Cone didn’t see how a team full of scorers could defeat the Aces. Roe more or less shared this sentiment. “They don’t play defense like San Miguel, and I don’t think they’ve been in too many dogfights—real tough dogfights—like we have,” he told me before the Finals. “To be honest, I think we could really just dominate Talk ‘N Text.”

  Only Banal, who had firsthand knowledge of the Phone Pals and Pangilinan’s largesse, foresaw another struggle. “It’s a professional league,” was his cryptic response when I asked him about Talk ‘N Text’s aggressive style. “They’re properly motivated, if you know what I mean.”

  A few days before the finals, I headed to Roe’s apartment. I found him sorting through a stack of thirty or so bootleg DVDs he bought that afternoon. At the beginning of the season, when I accompanied him on similar shopping sprees, Roe had seemed buoyant, delighting in the endless selection of plastic-wrapped discs, from the World War II mini-series Band of Brothers to Michael Jackson concert recordings. He envisioned collecting enough to start a small-scale Netflix in the Pacific Northwest and reminisced about an earlier PBA tour, when he hired a seamstress to make hundreds of retro NFL jerseys, which he took home to Seattle and sold out of his trunk. Now, however, he poked through the heap with disgust, wondering aloud if any of the films were worth lugging back to the States. The thrill had long since gone from Roe’s hoops sojourn. He had logged many more minutes on his couch, splitting time between CNN and pirated versions of Transformers and Die Hard than he had on the court. During the last two weeks of the season, Roe took on the weary, hard-headed attitude of Bruce Willis’s character in the movie, a hostage to a career that kept him alone, on the road, and toiling against long odds for most of the past decade. The Finals were Roe’s last stand, and they meant more to him than just another check on his hoops to-do list. More than the wealth he’d accumulated over the years, a title would validate his choice to leave friends and family behind and spend almost a third of his years chasing an orange ball around the globe.

  “All season, all the sacrifices everybody has to make, this is the last time we have to sacrifice,” he told me, glancing up from the DVDs. “I’ve been away from home for—God damn—eleven months now. That’s my sacrifice right there. And I’m not even gonna have a month’s break before I have to go play again. The ultimate satisfaction will be winning the championship. Then I can go to the next team and be like, shit, I didn’t even get a rest but at least I won.”r />
  And now that Roe had built up this season into a culmination of his life’s work, he saw Willie, the man whose help Roe needed most to complete the quest, faltering. The guard’s dreadful showing in the semifinals shook Roe’s confidence in the teammate he once trusted as his number two scorer. Roe flashed a touch of sympathy for Willie, considering the hostile double-teams San Miguel unleashed on him and Alaska’s careless handling of his contract. “You know, there’s so much going on with Willie right now, I don’t know whether to blame him, or what,” Roe said when I first asked about Willie.

  But as Roe kept talking, his mood darkened. His duty as an import—playing all but two or three minutes of every game and leading the team in nearly every statistical category—was more demanding than anything expected of his teammates, and he wasn’t permitted the luxury of excuses. Willie had been a scorer since he first picked up a basketball. There was no doubt he’d seen hundreds of double teams and traps. By now he should know how to pass out of them, run the offense, and look for scoring opportunities by moving without the ball instead of catching it at the wing and going one-on-two. “Damn,” Roe said. “How long you been playing basketball in the PBA? This is the first time a team ever ran something against you?” Whatever trust he had in Willie was vanishing, and Roe seemed ready to try and win the next series singlehandedly, if need be: “He gets out there and does some good things and he does some bonehead things. So that’s why I picked up my scoring, because right now I don’t know what I’m gonna get from Willie.”

  In the last games of the semifinals I noticed Roe freezing Willie out of the Alaska offense—purposely passing to other players, even when Willie was open, to keep him from getting the ball. When I asked about it, Roe snickered. “Yeah, you already know,” he admitted. “Fucking right. I’m going where I’m comfortable right now, man, ’cause I don’t know what to expect from Willie. It’s all about winning.” Most irksome, however, was the coaching staff, who kept handing out warm fuzzies to Willie when, according to Roe, what the slumping guard really needed was a kick in the ass: “I get so mad with Tim for not saying nothing to him because everybody’s afraid of him going into his shell. I’d rather him go into his shell and sit on the bench and cry instead of being in the game, fucking up and losing for us. Because of Willie going into his shell, I’m going into a rampage. So you pick your poison.”