Quick Hits

• Halftime Snack -- This weekend I worked as a coach at Ateneo de Manila University basketball school, a basic skills camp for kids ages five through 15. It was standard stuff on the court -- chest passes, the three man weave, dribbling through cones.
  
  Off the court, however, was a different story. About halfway through the morning session, the head coach called a 15-minute break, during which the campers flocked around a snack stand to chow down on some of the heaviest foods known to man. Instead of orange slices and powdered Gatorade, there were cheese-covered hot-dogs, chicken and pork longanisa sausages, warm bananas wrapped in fried dough and a gelatin-filled drink made with tapioca and brown sugar.
  

  What time is it? Gametime, huh!

  
  It was a pretty traditional Filipino breakfast without the garlic rice and fried eggs. I've got nothing against eating a big, square breakfast -- although, in the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I usually stick to cereal, just for the fact that it's a way to keep one meal sacred from the omnipresent blight of pork and assorted organ meats in this country. But eating that food during a basketball practice is beyond insane. It's suicidal. I was ready to call in a crew of 17 mop-wielding, bandana-wearing women to clean up the Roman vomitorium the courts were about to become.
  
  I learned one thing that morning: Filipino children can hold their sausage. Unfortunately, they do it by becoming extremely lazy (tamad na masyado, 'di ba?). They avoided severe reflux by dogging it for the next hour and a half. A heavily sated 13-year-old might as well be heavily sedated. The sausage and cheese food coma was nearly unshakable. Crisp outlet passes became blubbery lobs and defensive slide drills looked more like a round of the Electric Slide at a retirement home. Next week, we'll just play Bingo after the mid-morning merienda.
  
• Arch Rivals -- Shame on all those who don't remember this video game. Before NBA Street, even before NBA Jam, there was Arch Rivals. Unlike the more recent games, Arch Rivals wasn't wildly unrealistic in the sense that you could dunk from 25-feet out and shoot fireballs through the basket. Rather, it was wildly unrealistic in the sense that you could punch players on the opposite team in the face and break beer bottles over their head. Or, if we're talking about Philippine basketball, it was completely realistic.
  

  If you think this is rough, trying going to a karaoke bar in Quirino.

  
  Listening to the complaints of American and American-born Filipino basketball players in Manila, you'd think they played in a real-life version of Arch Rivals. Foreign players here are always warned about the physical nature of the Philippine game, but it's hard to take seriously when many of them are coming from NCAA Division 1 programs in the United States, where they routinely bounced around with well-muscled 6'10'', 260-pound enforcers (Aloysius Anagonye, anyone?). It's also hard for Americans to imagine what's waiting for them, given the U.S. interpretation of the rules.
  
  In one player's second game in the country, he was running down court on offense while his point guard brought the ball up the other side of the floor. His defender ran up to him and started working his midsection like a boxer working a speedbag. Now, the American said he keeps his stomach muscles tensed throughout games to avoid having the wind knocked out of him by sucker punches.
  
  Players lucky enough to play in the basketball-crazed provinces are often punished for underperforming with a hailstorm of 5-peso coins thrown by crowds. The dirtiest players have tricks that amaze the American imports for their creativity, like slipping their feet under jumping players so they land on them and sprain their ankles or stepping on guys' feet before they jump up for a rebound, so that when they try to leap their knees will buckle and possibly tear ligaments. I've seen guards retaliate against defenders who stole the ball from them by running them down and delivering full-speed, mid-court hip checks that send recipients flying to the sideline.
  
  The famous 1970s Toyota-Crispa rivalry in the PBA was punctuated by an all-out brawl between the two teams that landed all the players in jail for a night.
  
  It's only a matter of time before a player steals a page of Chong Li's book from Bloodsport and starts carrying a fine powder that can blind opponents for up to 20 minutes. Then, it's clobbering time! He just better be careful not to try that one on any diminutive Belgian mixed martial arts masters.
  
• Unfortunate Acronyms -- Some jokes never get old. The freedom fighters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front did nothing to deserve this. They're just some Mindanao O.G.s who want to live the dirty south thug life without the Philippine Army and government sweating them. If the country hadn't been so haphazardly annexed by God- and gold-loving Spaniards, those southern islands might be a part of ethnically and religiously similar Indonesia. I'm afraid saying this may land me on a terrorism watch list, but I feel for the Filipino Muslims stuck down in the ass-end of a nation full of Christian die-hards.
  
  But while they're probably unaware of this, the Moros made one very serious mistake. They named themselves after an acronym (MILF) that's already widely known in the United States as Mom I'd Like to Fuck.
  

  Not only is she sexy, but she also believes in something: self-rule for the Muslim south!

  
  So when I'm reading the newspaper and see a headline like this -- "Soldiers, MILF rebels rescue 2 kidnap victims" -- I can't help laughing. I hope when I'm kidnapped, some soldiers and a couple of plucky, smoking hot maternal types come to my rescue.
  
  God forbid the people in the California porn industry ever get wind of this funny coincidence; between the steamy jungle locale and the freedom-fighting nymphomaniac mothers, we might witness the invention of a whole new genre.
  
  The sad thing is that I read something in the paper about these guys nearly every day, and after a full month in the Philippines, I still chuckle to myself and make mental quips about Stifler's Mom from American Pie.