Manila Vanilla

Is this the end?

2010-05-01T10:06:00.002+08:00

Man, this is tough. I'm moving to a more official website, rafebartholomew.com. That means I'll probably be writing more, which is good, but this right here has so much history. You can actually see me grow from a fairly naive Amboy to a fairly less idiotic kano in each post. I'll never forget the nights I spent slapping lamok off my ankles while trying to come up with something entertaining to say. Or how I rushed to write something about the Karl Malone to Red Bull rumors because I knew if I waited an extra day, the fact that it was pure, unadulterated bola would emerge, and I wouldn't be able to imagine what it would be like to watch the Mailman play against the Express! This blog will always remind me of the best three years of my life.

To quote a famous song: Manila Vanilla, hindi ka namin malilimutan.

Haiti has jeepneys too!

2010-03-31T19:51:00.001+08:00

My thoughts upon seeing this NPR/PBS Newshour spot on Haitian Tap Taps, which appear to be almost exactly the same as jeepneys.

They have jeepneys, too!
They stole that whole idea from the Philippines!
Did the Philippines steal that whole idea from Haiti?
Which country was the first to start painting its share taxis with a semiotic salad of family references, religious homages and pop culture icons? And can Filipinos (and foreigners who care about the Philippines) continue to point to the jeepney as a unique example of Pinoy ingenuity? Ingenuity, yes. But is it unique if other countries have developed something so similar?
OK, my man in the video can paint, but does he also outfit Tap Taps with giant Mercedes grill pieces, longhorn skulls and horns that blare Star Trek phaser sounds in traffic? If not, then our Haitian friends still have a way to go before they can stand on equal footing with the Jeepney.
Part of me resents this kind of journalism. It smacks of foreign reporters who don't know much about the countries they get dropped into, so they do stories about whatever first grabs their attention. In the Philippines, at least, there isn't a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide that doesn't include a long, competent discussion of jeepneys, multicabs and FXs. And that's where it seems like these discussions belong -- in travelogues, in blogs of tourists and volunteers, etc. Take note, so when you read my description of jeepneys and basketball iconography, you can call me out for being a hypocrite. You'll be right. But what I hope I manage not to do is exoticize the jeepney. It's important to avoid the kind of tone that makes foreign readers feel like they're on safari: "The colorful natives enjoy riding in painted vehicles!" And while the NPR correspondent here doesn't do anything that egregious, I detected a whiff of that sentiment in his report.
Finally, thanks to the Wikipedia share taxi entry (linked above), check out some of the names of the jeepney's worldwide brethren! The Albanian Furgon. The West African bush taxi. The Tanzanian dala-dala, which could work in Tagalog. The Costa Rican taxi pirata. They all sound so interesting. Exotic, even...

Bigatin na ako!

2010-02-23T02:12:00.002+08:00

No, not a Bigat10, although I once was one of those, as pretty much any tricycle driver in LP TODA can attest, but now I'm a real big-timer, because I contributed a guest blog to FreeDarko. What's even more exciting is that the post focuses on some of the unique aspects of Philippine basketball, including pektos, pag-upo sa ere, and larong buko. Not to mention, pretty amazing video of Samboy Lim, the 1996 Ginebra team and Noli Locsin wanting to make bugbog all over Bonel Balingit's face. Only our imaginations can tell us how that might have worked out for Noli, but I, for one, would not want to step to big baby Bonel.

The Samboy Lim video, by the way, is so sublime, it almost seems appropriate with musical accompaniment by Yanni. I've been watching it with breakfast every day for the past week, and I'm not tired of it yet.

Finally, if you aren't already reading FreeDarko, it's time to get your weight up, and if you haven't already seen their Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, you're missing out.

The Crispa saga continues (finally); some thoughts on Alaska

2010-02-17T22:33:00.005+08:00

My apologies for the month-long hiatus. I have myself to blame, plus other deadlines and the fact that I'm scanning these Crispa images in on a hopeless HP home scanner that, combined with a mothballed Dell desktop, takes about 20 minutes to produce one of these images.

But my oh my, is it ever worth it? As our journey through what we believe to be the 1977 All-Filipino conference continues, how's this for a comeback? A ceremonial toss between Ramon 'El Presidente' Fernandez and Abet Guidaben, who once owned a video shop called 'Abetamax.' I expect by morning in New York, I'll know who the lovely muse is. If you're expecting me to recognize martial law era starlets on sight, than I will disappoint you time and again. I was neither alive nor in Manila in 1977.

Everyone looks positively effervescent in this shot, which seems normal for ceremonial tosses, but there's a reason I'm posting this "can't we all just get along" image right now. Earlier this week, my idol Jaemark wrote a post at FireQuinito that focused on the series of wise personnel moves--especially trades--that the Alaska Aces have made over the years. Jaemark's infographics are works of brilliant simplicity; they start with general PBA truisms like "Alaska has made some great trades" or "San Miguel Corp. sister teams have looted the talent of poorer teams in lopsided deals" and lets us see a chart filled with example after example proving those cases. He tosses in some welcome jokes and analysis, but in the end, the graphics say it all.

I spent the 2007 import conference with the Aces and got to know the organization well. Even though only five players (six, if you count Tony dela Cruz, who missed that conference to play for the national team) from that championship team remain on Alaska's roster, I think I can add some perspective to Jaemark's analysis.

One of the interesting things about Alaska in the past five years has been the feast-or-famine nature of the team. They're either world beaters, sweeping Ginebra en route to the current All-Pinoy finals, winning the 2007 import conference and losing seven-game series in the semis and finals to the eventual champions of the last two All-Filipino conferences; or, they're hapless, the picture of a basketball death spiral, as they've been in the past two import conferences. Why does a talented roster that plays well together seem to collapse every other tournament?

I think part of the explanation lies in Alaska's much-admired team culture. The Aces value continuity--most of the time, when they draft or trade for a player, they intend to keep him around for years and give him a chance to develop (they've been less successful integrating talented draftees like Aaron Aban and KC dela Peña than veterans). Alaska tries to run the team with the same wholesome values that you might associate with the milk company's brand image. This isn't just marketing, but a philosophy that comes straight from owner Fred Uytengsu. The times I talked to him, I got the feeling that the most important part of owning a PBA franchise, to him, was not winning championships but competing honorably. That means creating an atmosphere of trust and respect among teammates and coaches and following league rules on the salary cap and maximum salaries to the letter. Team Manager Joaqui Trillo, the lead negotiator in Alaska's contract talks with players, once told me that when players come to Alaska from other teams and asked about side contracts and extra bonuses, all he can do is chuckle and offer them an extra crate of milk.

This team-building approach is refreshing, especially considering that Alaska's stiffest competition often comes from teams who pursue winning at any cost and assemble rosters like rival powers accumulating nukes in an arms race. But don't forget that when all is said and done, Alaska Milk Corporation is a business, and any money they don't spend on players' salaries enhances the company's bottom line or can be reinvested into the business. While I believe that the team is committed to honest competition for its own sake, there's no denying that this commitment helps keep the team budget under control. That's good for Alaska Milk, but what about the Aces themselves? It's a complicated issue for the players. Like any athlete, they're competitive and want to win every game. At the same time, they're aware that they're playing this sport professionally, and that the number of years they have to earn PBA money is limited. They're supporting their immediate families and usually extended families in Manila or the provinces. They have to be conscious of getting the best deal possible, because no one but themselves is going to look out for them.

Sometimes, from this perspective, a player might wonder if Alaska's "family values" are really about being honest and playing by the rules or just a convenient justification for paying their players less than competing teams do. Team management's challenge is to find players who might not be thrilled to be making less than their peers at Talk 'N Text, but who nonetheless are such competitors that they'll play their guts out as long as their with the Aces. For players, it's much easier to buy into the team ethic during good times. When Alaska's on a roll, the team really does feel like a family. Willie Miller's pranks will have the entire team and coaching staff in stitches, players will show up unannounced at JoLas's summertime clinics for kids and step in as coaches, and you'll find half the team sitting around a bank of Monoblock tables at Metrowalk, drinking San Mig Lights and making kuwento. Players who came to Alaska from other teams or left the Aces to play elsewhere said that while locker rooms are always tight-knit, nothing compares to Alaska.

In bad times, however, everyone seems more aware of the business side of basketball. The coaches, feeling like their jobs may be endangered if they don't produce wins, get short-tempered with the players. Fewer won-game bonuses come in, and players gripe more often and more vehemently about their salaries. They start to question the coaches' judgment: Does a younger player deserve my minutes? Why should I lead the team if there are older guys to take that role? Why do we have to spend so much practice time on the triangle?

And so the happy family devolves into a dysfunctional one very quickly, and, using recent seasons as examples, almost irreversibly. I want to stress that I haven't been with the team during their last two, disappointing import conferences. Bottom line, I am an outsider speculating about what happened. But I was once an insider, and based on the understanding of the organization I developed, I think this analysis can be useful, if not definitive. There are other obvious reasons to explain Alaska's struggles in the recent past. In the 2008 import conference, they fielded 6-8 (and that's being generous) Randy Holcomb in a conference with no height limit. Alaska hoped that Holcomb, a superior slasher, would attack the basket and get bigger, opposing imports into foul trouble. Too often, he settled for jumpers, and Sonny Thoss had to defend legit 7-footers like Adam Parada and Chris Alexander. In 2009, the Aces hired Galen Young to keep Roe Ellis's spot warm while the former Best Import finished his season in Australia. Young turned old since we last saw him lead SMB into the 2007 semifinals, and Alaska started 0-4. Ellis returned and put up ever-steady numbers, but the team was already in a death spiral, and Alaska sputtered to an exit in the wild card phase of the playoffs. The right import can make a huge difference--look at how Shawn Daniels and Steve Thomas have turned Air21/Burger King from All-Pinoy also-rans to Fiesta conference contenders year after year.

It would be crazy to blame Alaska's troubles in the past two import conferences on the team's balancing act of contracts and egos. So much more determines whether a team has a successful season. But if Alaska sometimes seems combustible and volatile, like they'll either be world-beaters or cellar-dwellers, it might be wise to consider how the team is dealing with its ever-present challenge of paying top players less than they could earn elsewhere and keeping them happy.

Crispanatic Delight #2

2010-01-17T07:58:00.001+08:00

The second installment in my project to scan an entire Crispa yearbook and share it with the Net. Here, the Redmanizers are seen celebrating a conference championship. Early indications, which we'll discuss in subsequent posts, lead me to believe it could be the first conference title of 1977. Would any of my readers with deeper Philippine basketball roots care to give a full roster of the players, coaches, managers and other personalities in this photo? I see Danny Floro, Philip Cezar, Freddie Hubalde, Atoy Co, Tito Varela (kalbo!) and a few other recognizable faces, but I also see some faces I don't know. Educate me! I have lugaw on the stove. Gotta go check it.

A Crispanatic's Wet Dream

2010-01-08T20:37:00.001+08:00

I don't know how many Crispanatics are still out there, but wherever you are, I have a treat for you. In late 2005, shortly after I arrived in the Philippines, I saw some kind of TV news lifestyle segment on Tiendesitas, the upscale Tiangge at the corner of C-5 and Ortigas Avenue, and decided to check it out. I will always remember that trip for two reasons. First, it was the day that the geography of the lower part of Quezon City clicked in my head. While sitting in a taxi headed toward Rosario, I noticed the road that takes you past Green Meadows and realized I knew how to get back to Katipunan from there. Later that day, foolishly, I decided to put my knowledge to the test, and walked from Tiendesitas to Green Meadows, then across to White Plains, past the Mormon temple, past the row of fertilizer and garden supply shops, up to Santolan, past Blue Ridge and now on Katipunan Extension, past Dannylicious and Countryside (oh the barbecue I missed that day!) over the flyover and finally into Loyola Heights and home. The trip took almost two hours but felt like seven. I realized by the time I hit the Mormon temple that I had set myself up for a miserable afternoon, but once I had committed to the trek, I refused to give up, even if it meant tripling my agony. It wasn't the heat or the exhaust fumes that did me in, but the fact that many sections of the walk I just described were woefully barren. There were no other pedestrians, just cars zipping past and taxis taunting me with their be-bopping horns. Often, I was just walking alongside high wall of a closed subdivision or an empty field or the air above the Marikina Valley. That view is actually quite splendid, but by the time I got there I was shuffling forward on little more than spite and didn't bother admiring the city.

Luckily, when I got home, I had something special to look at. A beat-up Crispa photo album from the late Seventies that I bought from an antique shop at Tiendesitas, which is the second reason I won't forget that afternoon. At the time, I don't think I really even knew who the Crispa Redmanizers were or why they mattered. I just bought the album because it looked like an important piece of history. Given how sparse the photo and especially video record is of the early PBA, I do consider this album to be a pretty meaningful find. Even before I could recognize the players in it, before Toyota #7 meant something to me, I could look at this and feel the immense passion behind Philippine basketball, and I can still look at some of these photos and feel inspired. I'm going to do my best to scan them all over the next few months and post them here for the world to see, if anyone ever finds my blog.

I'm not 100 percent sure what year this album is from. I could find out with a little more digging, but I bet some commenters will provide important clues. One possibly telling fact is that Freddie Hubalde is prominently featured in it. That leads me to believe that it's either a 1977 album, since Hubalde won the MVP that season, or it's a personal album made for Hubalde or one of his fans or someone in his family. As you can see, the very first photo in the whole album is a really nice portrait of Freddie, the only such headshot in the entire album. Enjoy reliving what many Filipinos consider to be the PBA's glory days.

Manny W. Pacquiao?

2009-12-25T04:21:00.002+08:00

The news earlier this week that Manny Pacquiao talked to God about the great power he'd one day be blessed with reminded me of the recurring kerfuffle during the Bush years whenever George W. Bush would claim that God instructed him to make certain decisions as commander in chief. One of them, it appears, was invading Iraq. God, would you like to own up to that blunder?

Anyway, now that Pacquiao is back on the campaign trail, albeit unofficially until the campaign period starts next March, his Holy tête-à-tête reminded me of Bush. Here's what Pacquiao told the 1500 lucky attendees at his 31st birthday bash in General Santos City:

In my 31 years here on Earth, God appeared to me once and told me to have unconditional faith in him. I was not yet very popular and world champion when our God appeared to me and assured me of strength and power.

Of course, the alarm bells don't sound quite as quickly in the Philippines when a politician says he's guided by God as they do here in the States. Many Americans were shocked by Bush's bald-faced Bible-thumping. We knew he was Born Again, but the idea that he would use his power in office do whatever his lord asked of him was disturbing to a country that has enshrined the separation of church and state in the bill of rights. Of course, I think the Philippines has some nominal devotion to this concept, but the inability to pass urgently-needed family planning and birth control legislation and the Comelec's ugly disqualification of the Gay Rights party list group Ang Ladlad on grounds of "sexual immorality" seem to indicate that Catholic doctrine is in many cases stronger than lofty democratic ideals.

I'm Christian and I'm looking forward to Christmas here in New York (sadly, there will be no queso de bola, no buko salad, no nothing at my noche buena this evening -- can you feel my inggit?), but I think important government decisions are better made by men and women who aren't driven by their unwavering faith in religious dogma that isn't necessarily shared by the citizens they serve.

In other Pacquiao news, Manny took the oath of the Nacionalista Party this week and made formal his alliance with presidential candidate Manny Villar, an event many people saw coming after Mr. Sipag at Tiyaga showed up at Pacquiao's Baguio City training camp to talk politics and showed up in HBO's Pacquiao/Cotto 24/7. I don't know if it matters which candidate Pacquiao sides with. There's something heartening about knowing he's officially out of PGMA's Lakas-Kampi pocket, although who knows what kind of nasty crud lies hidden in Senator Villar's deep pockets. I am impressed by the sheer gonzo nature of Villar's Nacionalista slate, which includes Bongbong Marcos, whose dictator dad imprisoned Junior's running mate, Satur Ocampo, as well as all-around lunatic Miriam Defensor Santiago and Mr. Resiklo, Bong Revilla. Which Nacionalista Party candidate will dominate this week's Metro Manila Film Festival? Wapakman or Ang Panday?

Book of Basketball roundtable

2009-12-22T03:57:00.002+08:00

For a few weeks after Bill Simmons's The Book of Basketball was released, major newspapers and media outlets seemed reluctant to review it. They may have been wary of granting legitimacy to a chatty book of NBA lists, penned by a blogger and erupting with porn references. Maybe it was a more general snootiness, a preference for books dealing with more serious subjects (as the author of a forthcoming book about basketball, I hope this isn't the case). Or, perhaps it just took about a month to cook up a review.

Even when the New York Times Book Review did publish a consideration of Simmons's book, it seemed insubstantial compared to The Book of Basketball's scope and ambition. As just about everyone knows, Simmons devoted 700 pages to his attempt to weigh in on every important debate in American basketball history. Six hundred words in the NYT book review just doesn't seem like enough.

Aside from Josh Levin's review at Slate, no pedigreed reviewer really wrote a satisfying take on Simmons's magnum opus. Until last week, when New York Magazine brought together two of its staffers, Brooklyn literatus Jonathan Lethem, Deadspin writer Tommy Craggs, Seattle author Sherman Alexie and Free Darko prime mover Bethlehem Shoals to give the big book the close reading it deserves.

I'm especially proud of Craggs, who graduated a few years ahead of me at Northwestern, and whose headshot I remember seeing above columns in the Daily Northwestern sports section.

My favorite part of the discussion is this pitch perfect Simmons imitation in New York book critic Sam Anderson's second post:

Both conversations are complex and fascinating─but trying to conduct them at the same time is like, oh, I don't know, like trying to make out with a voluptuous stripper in the Champagne Room at a smokin' hot Vegas strip joint in Vegas while also reciting (still in Vegas making out with the stripper) your ten favorite lines from The Shawshank Redemption. No matter how much you want to do both at the same time, you can't. You just can't. (I will now light my terrible Bill Simmons mini-impression on fire.)

Anderson also scores points for framing the macro- versus micro-Simmons concept that dominates the second round of posts.

How would Simmons respond to some of the critiques of his book? I bet we'll find out eventually, and when we do, I hope he tackles the weightier, more nebulous issues about race and writing that Craggs and Shoals raise toward the end of the discussion, and not just the "Simmons overrates Durant and Iverson" angles.

Happy reading!

Some links

2009-12-15T10:57:00.002+08:00

It's pretty rare that I do the links thing, but since I'm trying to update more frequently, it may become a habit. Unfortunately, I've botched one essential part of the posting links formula -- my stories are all pretty old. I found them on Friday and sat on them all weekend. However, lets hope that they can spur some thoughts and discussions of a more timeless nature.

Geoff Calkins, a sports columnist in Memphis, tries to talk himself into believing in the Grizzlies, who turned in a couple of surprising wins recently over the Mavericks and the Cavaliers. I dig it; Memphis has some appealing young players. I've been a Rudy Gay fan for a few years now, and Calkins's effort hits a lot of the standard sports columnist notes, until he goes off on this rhetorical splurge: "[Fans have] also started to notice that -- hey, what do you know? -- some of the players on the current roster are easy to like. What's not to like about Marc Gasol, for instance? What's not to like about Zach Randolph or Rudy Gay?"

Huh? Did he really just ask, without any trace of sarcasm, what's not to like about Zach Randolph? The guy might be the most maligned big man of his generation. Ask Ruben Patterson, whose eye socket Randolph broke back in the Jail Blazers heyday. Actually, I like Zach Randolph, but not in the honest-to-goodness fan's sense Calkins seems to be advocating, but because I like talented misfit players. Knicks games since they traded Randolph haven't been as much fun without Zach's couldn't-care-less three-point attempts.
A sad and slightly shocking story about James Lang, the 26-year-old D-League center who suffered a stroke the day after Thanksgiving. In college, I used to scour nbadraft.net. This was before Jonathan Givony had turned DraftExpress into a sterling, professional-style operation that routinely out-reported ESPN, when draft websites were a mess of garbled sentence fragments describing high school, European and African players I'd never heard of or seen before. The impressionistic sketches of these players' abilities and their tiny thumbnail headshots made the old draft sites about imagining a player's skill set more than absorbing an accurate scouting report. Surely, DraftExpress is an improvement, but I had more fun in the old days.
Anyway, I remember James Lang from those days, when he was just another thumbnail (I seem to recall a pointy, Boondocks-style blown-out afro in his headshot), and I was upset to learn about his health. It was hard to maintain an appropriately somber mood, however, because the Washington Times coverage of his story was so ridiculous. It includes quotes describing him as a "gentle giant" and a "special person" -- does this paper have editors? Where were they, and how did they allow these euphemisms for developmentally disabled people into the story? Beyond that, there are details about Lang hiding candy bars in his shoes and using an over-the-counter colon cleanser to shed pounds.
Then there's this, the New York Times' in-depth attempt at explaining the Maguindanao/Ampatuan massacres for American readers. I was impressed. It's something I would recommend to someone who knew little about the Philippines, the Muslim separatist movement in the South, the proliferation of warlords and private armies or the recurring trend of election-related violence. It's also heartening to see the Times giving Carlos Conde, their Filipino stringer, some room to flesh this out, even if I didn't see the story in my print edition of the paper. In the past, Conde has been stuck writing 300- to 400-word accounts of major events like typhoons, coup attempts and clashes between the AFP and rebel forces in Mindanao, while Southeast Asian correspondent Seth Mydans would be flown in to write the bigger, more meaningful pieces. That strategy didn't seem to cut it, since Mydans was spread too thin over several countries. Even before the Ampatuan massacre and subsequent declaration of martial law thrust the Philippines back into the international news spotlight, Conde penned worthy primers on the challenges of passing reproductive health legislation and Erap's presidential aspirations. I hope the paper, and Conde, keep up the good work.

Almost there!

2009-12-08T14:53:00.001+08:00

This is exciting, isn't it? It's still rough -- the images, especially the back cover, are grainy and the text is maybe a tad corny, but that's how the flap copy tends to be. Chances are, when this book is released in June 2010 from NAL/Penguin, it's going to look a lot like this. I've always been a fan of this wire image of this kid about to take down this rim with one of his air tsinelas sliding off his heel. It's superimposed over a shot of a game I saw in Sorsogon.

The book isn't quite done yet. My editor and I are still making some minor tweaks. But the heaviest lifting is done. It's based on an import conference I spent following the Alaska Aces from inside the team's locker room, where I witnessed the sublime basketball wisdom of Joel Banal (who may want to create a line of hoops-themed fortune cookies), the antics of Willie Miller, the intense planning of Tim Cone, the rat tail of Rey Hugnatan, a season-saving three-pointer from Dale Singson and much, much more. Along the way, I take lengthy detours to explore the historical milestones of the Philippine game, the impact of Billy Ray Bates and Norman Black, the quiet beauty of homemade hoops in the provinces, Crispa/Toyota, Ateneo/La Salle and even the Cebu Gems/Negros Slashers rivalry. And blended in with it all are a few personal scenes, things I experienced that were so rich that I had to work them into the narrative: My star-making turn in Bakekang, how I ended up reinforcing the Boracay Cockpit Arena Cockers alongside former Pasig Pirates PG Jonathan de Guzman in a local tournament, how I made a fool of myself in said tournament and much, much more.

One thought on completing a project like this, which I might end up repeating a hundred times over the next year, is that what feels best about finally achieving this goal (or being so close that I can taste it) is not that I'm proud of myself, but relieved that all the people who so generously gave me their time and insight are actually going to see the product of that. These were not people without better things to do, they were many all-time great players and coaches like Norman Black, Tim Cone, Baby Dalupan, Philip Cezar, Atoy Co, Ronnie Magsanoc and many, many more. They spoke to me about their careers and their own loves for the game long before I had a book deal, and for years I was haunted by the possibility that I wouldn't be able to pull it off. Talk about utang na loob; this was mine. And I was thrilled and remain elated that the people and country who gave me so much would get to see an actual book about Philippine basketball that hopefully validates the time they gave me. (Of course, to properly pay down my debt of gratitude, I will be writing puff pieces about players and coaches' Brothers Burgers franchises for the rest of my days.) I look at this book as a love letter to Philippine basketball and the Philippines in general, and I hope when it's released, readers will feel that way too.

Balunbalunan sure tastes nice on the Foreman Grill

2009-10-31T01:31:00.004+08:00

There are so many reasons to adore Manny Pacquiao. In these recent remarks to ESPN boxing honcho Dan Rafael, (in the sidebar), PacMan has given me one more reason to smile. In the spirit of Halloween, Rafael asked both Pacquiao and his November 14 opponent Miguel Cotto which boxer they'd most like to dress up as. Cotto said Muhammad Ali for all the obvious reasons. Here's how Pacquiao responded:

I would be 'Big' George Foreman. Not only because it would give me an opportunity to win a world title in an eighth weight division but in a division I would never be big enough to grow into on my own. Plus, I would be big enough to play power forward in the NBA.

For the record, "Big" George is six-foot-three and a half. Now it's possible Manny may have trouble judging height for anyone over six feet, but even though George weighs enough to bump uglies with Rick Mahorn, he's still about six inches short of the standard height for NBA power forwards. Foreman's height, however, is spot on for the four position in another league Pacquiao may have heard of -- the PBA.

Pacquiao's well-chronicled love for basketball is a constant source of amusement. HBO's video of his private games in Baguio -- the ones that drive trainer Freddie Roach crazy -- gives a hint of what kind of player Pacman is, and it doesn't look like he's a natural power forward. We see an awkward behind the back dribble and some hideous jump shot form, but like almost any Pinoy baller, he's a whiz at double-clutch lay-ups with plenty of pektos. (Basketball comes in around the 13:20 mark of this video.)

Basketball/Ondoy pictures

2009-10-19T09:53:00.004+08:00

I just wanted to share a pair of photographs that caught my eye in recent weeks, as I've watched the Philippines torn apart by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. There's not much that hasn't been said about the devastating loss of life and property the storms have caused, and it was particularly distressing for me to see pictures on CNN.com (it's number five in this slideshow) of the street in front of my old house submerged in water that would reach my chest.

Sometimes it's inappropriate to turn my one-track basketball mind onto subjects that are obviously much bigger than the game. I wrestled with that possibility and its associated guilt when I saw these photographs and felt a tinge of happiness at seeing basketball woven into the story of this crisis the same way it has become part of practically every facet of Philippine society. In the top photo, the scene is of grim resolve, people saving those few dear keepsakes that can be saved, while the bottom picture is just plain fun.

Of course, the far more important stories are the crippling effects the storms have had on people's lives, the number of people who've lost their homes and who may be permanently relocated. That alone is a frightening prospect, a disaster lumped on top of a calamity, like finding someone who's been shot and stabbing them through the bullet hole. That's not to say that slums/informal settlements aren't a problem, or that they didn't exacerbate the floods by clogging waterways with shanties, kangkong and solid waste, but the idea of the government overseeing a mandatory relocation of the urban poor is horrifying. And then there's the more positive story of the thousands of volunteers who stepped up to help those hardest hit by the storms. I'm proud that a lot of my friends contributed and continue to give to these efforts.

Spreading the blame: A note from a newly minted Wynne Arboleda fan

2009-10-17T20:42:00.002+08:00

OK that's a little too strong. I wouldn't call myself a new Wynne Arboleda fan after watching him briefly smother a PBA fan with assorted Hadoukens and Muay Thai knees. But I'm tired of the reflexive condemnation that follows anytime an athlete overreacts and confronts a fan, whether or not the scene becomes as grisly as it did in the Burger King/Gilas game.

Full disclosure. I like professional basketball players. I like them more than the coaches and more than the fans. They are the people who made me fall in love with the game when I was eight years old. They inspired me to become a half-decent player, and even though I was never good enough to go past truly dismal college ball, I still -- by now you can officially call me deluded -- think of myself as an athlete first and fan second. My sympathies run toward the players. I felt bad for Ron Artest when the NBA gave him a season-long suspension after the Detroit brawl. Likewise, I already feel sorry for Wynne Arboleda, because it seems like people are already calling for his head, and he'll be sitting for the rest of the conference at least and I'm guessing longer.

What gets me is that when the dust settles, everyone always points at the player and no one else. Yes, the player is ultimately responsible for his actions, but no one looks at the league, the franchises or the fans that through all the ingredients for a disaster into the pot and turned up the heat.

For starters, step back and look at the history of Philippine basketball. Over the years, fans have always posed a greater threat to players and referees than vice versa. From Yco-Ysmael to Crispa-Meralco to Crispa-Toyota to Ginebra-Tanduay to just plain Ginebra (that would be from the 1960s until about ten years ago), fans felt entitled to express their disapproval with bad calls or dirty play by showering the court with peso coins, spent batteries, Monoblock chairs, water bottles, beer cans and other projectiles. Teams wouldn't enter an arena without enough beach umbrellas to make payong over the entire bench. I've heard that PBA players started covering their heads with towels on the bench because it took the sting out of peso coins. By many accounts, crowd violence over the years was just as bad if not worse in the college ranks, with rivalries like Ateneo-San Beda and Ateneo-La Salle leading to regular parking lot brawls.

The point is that the atmosphere at big-time Philippine basketball games has always been wild and woolly, and I think it's fair to suggest that leagues -- MICAA, PBA, NCAA, UAAP -- have tolerated and even encouraged fan misbehavior. It spiced up games and brought in bigger crowds.

In recent years the PBA has more or less eradicated the air of lawlessness that once predominated in the stands at Araneta or ULTRA, but the legacy is still there. I'd argue that this tradition is especially important in the Philippines, where basketball games have been a place for people to blow off steam and act in ways that would be unthinkable in their everyday lives. Yes, American fans also get drunk at NBA, NFL, and MLB games and do ghastly things, but they don't have martial law in their not-too-distant memories. Outside of the Big Dome, martial law-era PBA crowds were forced to live by the Marcos slogan Sa ika-uunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan, and if they missed curfew or failed to live up to that standard of "discipline," the consequences could be grave. Inside the Big Dome, on the other hand, they could expect to see Jaworski knee somebody in the gut or Rudy Kutch clobber somebody, an if they were truly lucky a full-scale brawl would break out. They could pepper the referees with peso coins, skirmish with other fans, and scream their lungs out with the filthiest invectives that came to mind.

That release valve was probably a good thing. But these days, with the PBA striving to emulate the NBA's stuffiness and with the Philippines more than 20 years removed from Marcos's repressive dictatorship (OK, I'm aware of the PGMA parallels; let me skirt that issue for now), the power dynamic between players, fans and the league is changing. Some fans still want to blow off steam, primarily by heckling. The players can't be as rugged as they were in the Seventies and Eighties, because this is a modern league now, with "scientific" coaching and professional standards. The league wants the fans to have their fun and the players to remain beatific basketball machines, passionate only about scoring and defense, and impervious to whatever bedlam occurs in the stands. But if the league continues to allow fans to treat players like animals while expecting the athletes the athletes to "take it like a man," every once in a while a player will snap and react in a more primal manner.

That's what happened with Arboleda, and what might have happened last year, if Danny Ildefonso's teammates hadn't restrained him in a similar situation. Which calls into question the league and the arena and security. After the beatdown, BTV courtside reporter Patricia Hizon asked why security didn't try to get between Arboleda and the fan. Araneta security told her they're not allowed to touch the players, while PBA security said they're only responsible for the referees. This is tragically predictable. Anytime something goes wrong in Philippine society, the institutions responsible calmly explain that due to some strange technicality or forces greater than all of us, it wasn't their fault. Recently, we've seen Pangulong Gloria calling the Philippines a victim of global warming in the aftermath of Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. Really? Global warming is a new phenomenon? It wasn't around when rains led to the 2006 Southern Leyte landslide? Or when Milenyo hit Manila? Or when Typhoon Reming caused mudslides that buried large swaths of Albay? And those are just the major natural disasters that hit the country while I was living there. In the basketball realm, when the late Sen. Robert Barbers asked government officials why suspected Fil-shams' citizenship papers were being rubber stamped, the Bureau of Immigration pointed to the Department of Foreign Affairs who pointed to the Department of Justice who pointed back to the B of I. The serial passing of the buck is as Philippine as the tinikling. When disaster strikes, it's never the fault of the people who are actually in charge.

So it's Sonny Alvarado's fault that Tanduay and the government fixed his papers, just as all the blame for yesterday's incident will fall on Wynne Arboleda. Everyone will turn a blind eye to the other factors that lit the fuse for his explosion. The bad guys get punished, everyone moves on and nothing gets solved.

Free Donbel (They did!)

2009-10-11T09:32:00.002+08:00

Quinito Henson's Sunday column heralding the opening of the PBA's 35th season reads like a fairly rote list of transactions and announcements for the upcoming season. But a close reading reveals some fabulous laugh lines. Since I'm a terrible blogger, let the fact that I'm actually posting something about the new season be an indication of how excited I am. And I'm 8,000 miles away.

Anyway, more than any other line in Quinito's piece, this one killed me. It made me chortle a fine mist of Diet Coke on my keyboard and it broke my heart at the same time:

In the transition, several veterans were left by the wayside. Gone from the PBA are the likes of ... Topex Robinson (reportedly playing in Masbate).

What? A PBA without Topex? I guess after Purefoods re-acquired Paul Artadi, they decided they didn't need two non-shooting midget point guards in their lineup. But it's simply criminal that no one signed Topex as a backup. He was a solid ball pressure/change-the-tempo backup PG, not to mention his nickname is an acne cream! Did James Yap put the kybosh on him because of his well-chronicled love of Vicky Belo facial products? Now where will we find a 5-foot-6 guy to miraculously corral 3-5 rebounds in 15 minutes per game?

But the truly bizarre thing about the Topex line is the mysterious, almost cryptic "playing in Masbate" line. What's he doing there? He's from Olongapo! Is he playing as an import in an Interbarangay tournament in Masbate City? Is he playing as a local? Seriously, he couldn't play for a Liga Pilipinas team? Did he join the rodeo? It's only eight months until an election, I hope he gets out of there before the trigger-happy Masbateños start licking shots.

Topex, I want you back in the PBA where you belong. I remember I saw you the first time I visited a PBA practice, with Red Bull in 2005. You came over and said what's up to me right away. Maybe because you thought I was the new import. But anyway, I appreciated your kindness. I hope somebody brings you back, or that you set new records in bull-riding.

Then there's this line:

Barako and Coca-Cola are the teams with the most veteran recruits. The Bulls picked up Aris Dimaunahan, Chad Alonzo, Gilbert Lao, Aljamal and Donbel Belano.

Hallelujah! Donbel Belano is finally free from the Talk-N-Text reserve list. Let's hope the only man to ever log a quadruple double (points, assists, rebounds, steals) in the MBA still has some game left in his tank. The Phone Pals/Tropang Texters/whatever-the-hell-they-go-by-nows have been hording reserve talent for years, guys like Belano and Jonathan de Guzman who would be a joy to watch on some of the league's low-budget teams. Finally, Belano is free to share his swashbuckling, sidestepping talents with PBA fans again. (Sadly, there's a decent chance he made more money wasting away as a TNT practice dummy.) The last time he got to play consistently was during the 2007 import conference, when Jimmy Alapag left TNT to play for the national team. And Donbel tore it up! He was one toilet-bowl in-and-out miss from pulling a Rudy Distrito (not that kind of Rudy Distrito!) in the last minute of game seven of the Finals that year. If his last-minute shot went down after rattling around the rim, Alaska might have lost. He's playing on Barako Bull with the rest of the blue-light special all-stars, budget-salaried journeymen from every corner of Philippine basketball, not to mention Alex Crisano in all his tattooed, Rodmanesque glory.

One more line, the buried/misleading sports news item of the year. When Henson mentions the upcoming game between Burger King -- the team that made Japeth Aguilar the #1 draft pick in August, only to almost lose him to the Smart Gilas national team, then get him back two days before the season began by basically threatening to permanently blacklist Aguilar from the PBA -- and Smart Gilas. Here's the line:

Fans are expected to come out in droves to witness Aguilar’s transformation from a Smart-Gilas anchor to a Burger King rookie.

That's certainly one way of looking at it. If I were in the country, I'd be hoping to witness BK coach Yeng Guiao plant an elbow in Chris Tiu's neck, then send a band of his henchmen from the Thug Life Bar at SM Pampanga to make parol -- Christmas lanterns -- out of Gilas coach Rajko Toroman's bones.

Have a great season guys. I'd give anything to be there.

Revisiting Rudy Hatfield

2009-10-09T23:41:00.002+08:00

Has anyone looked at Rudy Hatfield's Wikipedia entry lately?

About the Man

Rudy retired from Basketball to follow his true passion. Teaching innercity quadrapalegic kids the wonderful sport of dodgeball. He even became a big brother to one of the kids from his dodgeball team (Matt Groundstone). It was with his time with Matt that Rudy decided to learn the Appalachian art of whittling.

"Rudy has really come a long way in his artwork. His unicorns easily sell anywhere from $500-$1500 each" says Sebastian Motiff (A whittling expert who has been seen on the Antique Roadshow in both the US and Canada).

"When I whittle, its like I'm in a whole new world. Its a happy place with flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where children dance and laugh and play with gumdrop smiles" said Rudy in his most recent interview.

Rudy has since opened up his on boutique where he sells his unicorns, and has earned the nomiker "The Unicorn Whisperer". It was his wife,Bethany, who first called Rudy 'Unicorn Whisperer' after seeing how whittling those unicorn figures from wood, just seemed to calm the rage inside of Rudy. Bethany has been Rudy's biggest fan, supporting his whittling and aspirations of making it big in the Unicorn art world.

Before the crazy rumor mill cranks up, let me state that I'm fairly positive Rudy "The Unicorn Whisperer" is a hoax. None of the names included in this description appear anywhere else on the Web. It also seems like the kind of joke worthy of Rudy Hatfield's unhinged sense of humor. I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote the whittling myth himself, and if it wasn't him then it's probably a clever fan's homage.

For those who aren't caught up on Rudy Hatfield, he was the PBA's premier rebounder and garbageman for much of this decade. He was so good that I saw opposing coaches devote most of their scouting time to keeping Hatfield off the boards and keeping his energy from spreading to his teammates. Like that other great boardsman, Dennis Rodman, Hatfield had an eccentric side. He left the Philippines in the prime of his career to try out as a professional wrestler and then attend fire department training, because "they’re crazy enough to run into a fire when everyone’s heading out and I get to wear suspenders all day," he wrote in an E-mail to Quinito Henson. "Chicks dig guys in suspenders, if you smell what the Rock is cookin’." To give you an idea of what the H-Bomb was capable of, here's the YouTube video of his immortal post-game speech after Ginebra bagged the 2007 All-Filipino championship. Wherever Rudy Hatfield is, the PBA misses him.

Recycling my comments from FireQuinito

2009-10-04T23:19:00.002+08:00

I admit it. I have a problem. I only seem capable of blogging when I've already responded to something at FireQuinito. I have excuses: I'm writing non-stop to finish this book, and will return to blogging in about a month. I hope. Until then, if there's anyone who reads my blog but doesn't read FireQuinito (message to this reader: Baliktad 'yan! You should pay more attention to Jaemark, who actually updates FQ.), here is a comment I posted there about racial prejudices in the Philippines as they relate to basketball and some other things. I was responding also to Howie Severino's blog. My take only scratches the surface, but I'm not expert enough to really get to the bottom of this subject.

It never surprised me that racial attitudes in the Philippines were a bit behind those in the U.S., since the Philippines has a much different racial history. Both countries have their baggage, but the States has to deal with the legacy of slavery, which is where racism against African-Americans comes from. There are relatively so few black immigrants or half-black Filipinos that it's not a surprise that the Philippines hasn't had to come to terms with that kind of racism.

You definitely see it in basketball, where imports are lauded as athletes but viewed with a sharp-edged paternalism, where teams spy on their black American players to make sure they aren't running wild like the O.G. Black Superman, Billy Ray Bates. When imports are in public, people try to touch their hair or ask why it's so curly, ignorant racism that most players graciously ignore. It's like because most Pinoys see relatively few black people, they've never had to update their dated, racist attitudes about them.

It's interesting that Howie Severino framed his blog in terms of Filipino-Americans, because of the generational divide in that group, where many older Fil-Ams exhibit the kind of racism Howie wrote about, but younger Fil-Ams identify with American youth culture, so much of which comes from black trendsetters. Plus, if they play basketball, their idols are black NBA players, and their teammates are probably black, too. I've heard young Fil-Ams say, sometimes with pride and sometimes with annoyance, that they're known as the blackest of the Asians, i.e. they're good at breakdancing, basketball, DJing, etc. It's a generational dichotomy that somebody who's done some real research will have to parse out better than I have here.

2009 PBA Draft thoughts

2009-08-02T23:14:00.002+08:00

FireQuinito has published the 2009 PBA draft results. Shame on Inquirer.net and PhilStar.com for not getting it up sooner. I know this story is lost in the bigger news of the week, Cory Aquino's death, and that should be everyone's lead story for a long time, but they should still be able to report on what's happening in the rest of the country.

Anyway, this post is really a comment I left on FireQuinito, and assuming I still have any American readers, let me apologize to them right now: This is going to be a fairly impenetrable read, as it references and doesn't explain mediocre Fil-Swiss centers, the PBA's limit of five Fil-foreign players per team, and 2008 MVP Kelly Williams, brother-in-law, Lamont Charles Waters, who was drafted in the second round by Kelly's team, the Santa Lucia Realtors. It's nice to see guys I played with for a couple years at Reyes, LS Greenhills and Xavier getting a chance in the pros.

Let the confusion begin:

That Burtscher pick has to be the biggest 1st Round sucker punch since Isiah Thomas drafted Renaldo Balkman, and everyone made the "did he think he was drafting Ronaldo Blackmon?" joke. And both picks were made by my respective teams. I spent a lot of time with the Alaska franchise, but I can't pretend to know the thought process here. One trend is becoming clear: If you played for Cebuana Lhuillier under coach Luigi Trillo in 2007, you can sit on Alaska's bench for a while. They drafted Bono and now Burtscher, they've hired Nico Uy and Chris Viardo as practice players, and they took on Ariel Capus as a free agent. Now, all they have to do is pick up Macky Escalona and pluck Don Dulay from RoS, and the cycle will be complete. I don't get it, but there seems to be a trend. And, as Ariel Capus and Ken Bono will probably admit, Alaska is as good a place to ride the pine as any. It's one of the few PBA franchises where Fil-Ams and locals really seem to enjoy being around each other. In fact, although the franchise is known for using their "family" approach to lowball players during contract negotiations, the family vibe does exist at Alaska. Plus, you get to be around Jeff Cariaso, maybe the PBA's classiest player, and Willie Miller, certainly the funniest (although it looks like they could both be gone by next season, and if so, all bets are off). If Poch Juiño stays on in a reserve role, you get another top-10 hilarious guy to pal around with. And as long as Bong Hawkins is on the sidelines, hijinks will ensue. All in all, I imagine Burtscher will have a fine time watching these guys play.

I would have tipped you on Charles Waters if I knew that he was no longer going by Lamont. He's in great shape, and he plays really, really hard. Doesn't have the greatest instincts, but he tries on defense and can be very tough to box out. He's also a good guy who won't mind playing limited minutes. Unless one of the undrafteds ends up killing SLR someday, you can't do much worse than that.

So if TNT is picking up Nic and Kevin White, which Fil-Ams have to go? Ali probably isn't heading back to Coke so soon. Harvey? Would they move Jimmy to make way for Castro? Whoever is on the outs, I imagine they're pissed. Nobody likes to get kicked off that MVP gravy train. Double bonus! Triple bonus! House and lot! Free load!

Idol of the day: Patrick Michels

2009-06-28T10:16:00.002+08:00

Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, my idol is Homer Se. But today, I want to honor Pat Michels, my old roommate. His feature story on a truck driver who was injured while doing contract work in Iraq (this does not at all do the story justice; read it!) recently won first place among small circulation weeklies at the national AltWeekly Awards. Congratulations!

Hayden Joe!

2009-05-30T07:34:00.001+08:00

This Hayden Kho scandal has got legs! I circulated press accounts of the video (including a download link for the world's sexiest rendition of Careless Whisper) and ensuing brouhaha at Harper's Magazine, and within an hour editors were huddled in an office, laughing their asses off at the playboy-cum-plastic surgeon. One editor sent this out:

There is something so innately hilarious about that video that you don't even
need the backstory to appreciate it. It's like they createda ridiculous Internet
meme of dancing-and-bad-singing and THEN happened to be incredibly famous and
venal just to make the meme supremely awesome, and to make it possible to enjoy
their humiliation even more.

That video definitely has viral potential. Can it break through to computer screens in the U.S.? Time will tell. I've been watching for days and I can't get over how goofy it is. Hayden doing the Alyssa Alano and mumbling his way through the lyrics he doesn't know. Katrina being so maarte that she has to towel down his sweaty chest. Doesn't she know that a glistening chest is SIZZLING HOT! The Senate hearing is also precious, with one of the many choice moments coming towards the end, where Sens. Jinggoy and Bong (Resiklo ng Saudi!) struggle to understand the mechanism that allowed Doc Hayden to transfer video from his camera to his laptop. I hope this story makes it into Harper's Weekly Review next Tuesday.

Good stuff at FireQuinito

2009-05-25T06:27:00.002+08:00

FireQuinito is a very, very impressive Philippine sports blog, and I'm not saying that only because the guy who runs it reads my stuff. The blog's take on Philippine sports is funny and right. And, coming on the heels of my Pacquiao roundup, I'd like to link to FQ's take on a classic Pacquiao post-fight development -- his being named a special intelligence agent by the DOJ -- which I'm kicking myself for not including in my post yesterday. Also, his reference to Anak ng Kumander is classic. MV and FQ may be getting lined up for a terrible movie-reference arms race, as I am determined now to work Katas ng Saudi into this blog by the end of the week. Hail Jinggoy!

Pacquiao Roundup

2009-05-24T01:08:00.001+08:00

I love Manny Pacquiao. Readers of my blog, if there are any left, will probably notice that few topics other than the Pacman can drag me out of hibernation and get me to post something new. Pretty much anyone who watches a Pacquiao fight ends up loving him as a boxer -- his hand speed, his punching flurries, the reckless abandon with which he fights, his improvisatory flair -- and you can count me among them. But my absolute favorite time in a Pacquiao fight isn't during the bout itself; it's the fallout over the next month, when Filipino politicians scramble to share a piece of his limelight and when Manny gets a chance to rest and indulge in hobbies like billiards, basketball, videoke and cockfighting.

Representing on fight night.

After the De la Hoya fight, Pacquiao brought to life the classic sports comedy scenario of the boss who puts himself on the court, when he decided to play semi-professional basketball with the team he owns in the Liga Pilipinas. He also accepted an honorary doctorate from Southwestern University in Cebu. After abusing David Diaz last year we got to witness the brief but charming Pacquiao/Kevin Garnett courtship. With June rapidly approaching, let's take a look at the tornado of hyperbole swirling about after Pacquiao's May 2 flattening of Ricky Hatton.

Exhibit A) After Manny's victory, the Philippine department of health asked him to consider remaining in California with his entourage, rather than returning to the Philippines immediately, just in case a member of Pacquiao's posse had contracted swine flu in the States. The Philippines is always proud to be one of the last countries officially hit by pandemics. I remember when I arrived in the country for the first time, in November 2005, the first thing I saw was a giant blue placard that read WELCOME TO THE BIRD FLU-FREE PHILIPPINES! I wouldn't be surprised if the government was mocking up a new version of this poster for swine flu just around the time Manny planned his return, and I can imagine Health Secretary Francisco Duque (BTW, shouldn't his nickname be Frank Dux, like the Canadian-American martial arts champion portrayed by JCVD in the movie Bloodsport?) brooding over the fact that Pacquiao's victory parade, with all that hugging and high-fiving, and how it could ruin his swine flu sign. Pardon me, Franky, but your position here seems slightly myopic, given that 1) the Philippines recently slaughtered 6,000 pigs infected with swine ebola; 2) no one is fooled by the "no recorded cases" of bird/swine flu gag, just like no one believes it when entire provinces report zero crime for an entire year; 3) the country faces public health woes far greater than swine flu.

Exhibit B) Laguna Congressman Edgar San Luis submitted a resolution in the Philippine House of Representatives that would grant Philippine citizenship to Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach. This is a nice gesture; a little silly, but I don't mind the idea of honoring Roach with citizenship. However, since I tend to see events through the prism of Philippine basketball, where Filipino ancestry and citizenship is a very contentious issue, I also have to think of the Fil-foreign players toiling in the Liga and the PBL because no one will pay to fix their papers for the PBA draft. I think of former imports like Norman Black, a PBA hall-of-famer, who chose to spend his life in the Philippines and has played a vital role in the development of basketball in the country. Black still isn't a full-fledged Filipino citizen, although he could probably become one if he called in a few favors. And what about Alex Compton, the Manila-born American citizen who has been beloved by millions of Filipinos since 1998, when he arrived in the country to play in the MBA? Of all the Americans floating around the Philippine basketball world, no one loves the country more than Compton, who has become a fluent, even elegant Tagalog speaker, who stayed in the country even after the MBA folded and it was unclear how he'd be able to make a living. Freddie Roach, merely by helping Pacquiao become such a great fighter, has made a legitimate contribution to Filipinos' lives, but citizenship wouldn't mean as much to him as it would to these other Americans who decided to build entire lives and raise families in the Philippines.

Exhibit C) Manny's money. Pera ni Pacquiao. How much of it does he have? What will he do with all of it? Who gets a piece of it? We've seen the stories about how Manny gives away rice and small wads of cash in General Santos City. My favorite was a Ronnie Nathanielsz piece on how Bob Arum, Pacquiao's promoter, wants to protect Pacquiao's money.

Arum said: "I'm not going to stick that money [fight earnings] in his bank. I am going to sit down with him and Jinkee (Pacquiao's wife) and guys like Lito (Atienza) and Chavit (Singson) whom I respect, and make sure he puts it some place where he can't get his hands on it."

Really? Manny's money will be safe in the hands of a boxing promoter, Lito Atienza and Chavit Singson? It's tough to come up with two slimier trapos (traditional politicians AKA corrupt dynasts) than those two guys. This is like Arum saying, "I want to protect Manny's meat locker, that's why I am turning it over to these two hyenas."

Exhibit D) Finally, the main event -- politics. With national elections now less than a year away, much has been made of Pacquiao's potential in politics. He's openly stated his plans to run for congress again in 2010, and Lennox Lewis is out there writing columns saying that Pacquiao will be president. Most of what has been written is brainless hype. Pacquiao's mass appeal does have a ton of political potential. But it doesn't look like Manny himself is going to be the one who exploits it. Instead, higher-ups like Noli de Castro (ninong to Pacquiao's infant daughter, Queen Elizabeth Pacquiao), power brokers like Singson and Atienza, and even relatively clean, opposition politicians like Sen. Chiz Escudero and Pampanga Gov. Ed Panlilio seem poised to campaign aside Pacquiao and ride his popularity to their own electoral victories. Pacquiao indeed has the fame to come out in the top-12 of a senatorial ballot, and perhaps to challenge for the presidency, but his political advisers (many of whom senators, senatorial candidates, members of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's administration and presidential hopefuls), for reasons that seem steeped in self-interest, seem to be steering him to more modest goals.

The American press has picked up the political angle -- A USA Today story mentioned Pacquiao's plan to run in 2010 -- and they have accepted the fools' explanation of Manny's failed 2007 bid for Congress, when he lost the race for GenSan's seat to Darlene Custodio. As the story goes, Pacquiao lost because voters thought serving in Congress would interfere with his boxing career. They were looking out for him. How sweet. Actually, he lost because he made the mistake of challenging a political dynasty in a local election. This is a correction that really shouldn't need to be made, but Conrado de Quiros set the record straight nicely in an appropriately cynical column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Pacquiao lost to Custodio because local elections are still about machinery, and Custodio's family has controlled elections in General Santos for generations. Philippine senators are elected nationally, so having name recognition like Pacquiao's could easily make him a lock for a seat.

Every time Pacquiao fights, the chatter surrounding him becomes a little more unhinged, while at the same time the political side of the story becomes more realistic. Who knows what could happen if he fights and defeats Floyd Mayweather, Jr., at the end of this year.

Conan's budget-cutting broadsword

2009-05-23T02:49:00.003+08:00

From yesterday's New York Times article on the California budget clusterfuck:

Facing a $21.3 billion budget deficit, Mr. Schwarzenegger is requesting a $6 billion loan from the federal government, and has proposed a variety of politically unpalatable cuts, including commuting prisoners’ sentences, taking away health insurance from some poor children, reducing aid to community colleges and eliminating a large chunk of financing for shelters that serve children and women who have been abused.

How much does Arnold wish he could return to the halcyon days of Commando, when he blew up mercenaries, while riding in a yellow Porsche with Rae Dawn Chong, and still had time to share a soft serve cone with daughter Alyssa Milano?

That wily Philippine Navy

2009-05-21T19:40:00.002+08:00

Earlier this month a lieutanant in the Philippine Navy, Nancy Gadian, went public with allegations that in 2007, top Navy officials skimmed funds from the 46 million-peso pot intended for the Balikatan military exercises. Balikatan is an annual joint operation between the Philippine and U.S. militaries. For a few weeks every year, soldiers get together to do public works projects and training. All that ditch-digging and handing out rice at schools must win a lot of local hearts and minds, because Balikatan is a perennial public relations shitestorm. This year, there were prostitution scandals breaking as soon as U.S. troops arrived, with papers reporting that local pimps and mamasans in the Bicol region were busing in extra girls to meet the Americans' demand.

It is also unfortunate that Gadian's revelations are also unsurprising. Catching the top brass of any Philippine institution with their hands deep in the coffer is like discovering raccoons in your dumpster. What make this case of malfeasance entertaining, however, is the Navy's recent ultimatum to Gadian: Turn yourself in to the Navy, and we won't be forced to apprehend you.

This woman is already in hiding, for good reason. The idea that the whistleblower will turn herself in to the institution she has outed is lunacy. That's why I like it.

Real-life Bakekang story!

2009-05-19T18:55:00.002+08:00

Thanks to one of my legion of fans, who remembered so fondly my role as Brad, the baby-slapping, domestic-abusing deadbeat dad on the GMA telenovela Bakekang during the tail end of 2006. For those of you who don't know, Bakekang was a prime-time soap opera on Philippine network television starring Sunshine Dizon and yours truly, although I definitely didn't receive second (or any) billing in the actual show. Dizon stars as Bakekang (a nickname that means something akin to an ugly duckling with no hope of becoming a swan), whose goal in life is to find a foreign baby's daddy to impregnate her with a mestizo, therefore attractive, child, who will then become a celebrity and make Bakekang lots of money. But Bakekang ends up having a drunken threesome with me and my African-American friend, and miraculously (impossibly, I thought until now) conceives fraternal twins by the two of us. I won't spoil the rest of the show. Actually, it would take a few thousand words to give just a bare bones description of the plot's Byzantine ins and outs, and I don't have the energy to write it all out. Let's just say that hijinks and drama ensue, and that many a tear is shed.

The real news is that the two different babies by different daddies coming out of one mommy at the same time scenario has just come true in Texas! Unfortunately, the source on this story is the UK tabloid The Sun, but before we reflect on The Sun's dubious reputation, let's allow ourselves to believe that miracles do happen, that Bakekang could actually have a shred of truth to it. Now I know never to question the logic of a telenovela. Time to go start downloading Totoy Bato in its entirety!

This could end up on Best of Craigslist

2009-04-27T23:51:00.002+08:00

The papier-maché Michael Jordan that's been sitting in the trash room of Harper's Magazine for the past 3 months, since the editor who owned it left the magazine. Of course, there's nothing "inexplicable" about the statue's tongue, but the mistake is forgivable in light of the brilliant reference to Mario van Peebles and Solo. And no, I did not post this. I've been scheming on taking this beauty for myself, not thinking about how to get someone on Craigslist to claim it.

Quick take on Thrilla in Manila

2009-04-22T14:00:00.002+08:00

I got a chance to watch the HBO documentary Thrilla in Manila tonight. I'm not sure if Joe Frazier's side of the Ali-Frazier rivalry was as untold as the documentary suggests it was. I've read a handful of boxing books, and most of them mention how unfair and malicious Ali's racial attacks on Frazier were. My father, a Frazier die-hard, had been telling me Ali was wrong to call Smokin' Joe an Uncle Tom since I was about twelve years old. But it was nice to see a nice, long take on the fight told mostly from Frazier's side, since the focus is so often on Ali.

I loved seeing Araneta in there, as well as the random shots of the hazy Manila skyline. The best bit of Philippine trivia had to be the fact that Carlos Padilla, Jr., was brought in at the last minute to referee the fight. He's related to Robin Padilla, the country's current top action star -- and, if history repeats itself, a possible candidate for president someday -- although I haven't been able to figure out if Carlos Jr. is Robin's uncle or cousin. What's more, the documentary made it sound like Padilla was the best ref of all three Ali-Frazier fights because he was able to stand up to Ali and keep him from holding the back of Frazier's head. Imagine PBA refs being summoned to work the NBA finals! Chances are they wouldn't go down in history as doing the best job, like Padilla did, but at the very least they would make some memorably boneheaded calls, and goal-tending would become legal for a series, while players leaning in to draw contact on jump shots would be called for insane offensive fouls. If Rasheed Wallace ever fell on hard times after his NBA career and wound up in the PBA, I will move heaven and earth to be courtside to witness him lose his mind and give some referee an atomic wedgie.

Anyway, back to the movie. I would have liked to hear more from the Philippine side -- how did people respond to the two fighters, where did Frazier disappear to five days before the fight when he left the Hyatt to get some peace and quiet in the countryside. The documentary mentioned the outskirts of Manila and mountains, so I'm going to guess they took him to Antipolo, but there are a dozen other possibilities. I was interested to learn that Filipino fans in the Araneta booed Ali when he was introduced at the fight. In two weeks, had he been such a loudmouth that he managed to turn fans against him? Nothing kills an athlete's reputation in the Philippines like the label mayabang (conceited). Was the fact that he was openly feuding with his wife and parading his mistress around town a factor? The side of this story that's waiting to be told is the Philippine side. And when it is told, I hope and pray that the filmmakers or researchers or writers working on it will cast the net for sources wider than Ronnie Nathanielsz and Imelda Marcos. Nathanielsz makes sense because of how close he was to Ali, but Imelda seemed to be included in the HBO documentary just because the filmmakers knew that if you roll the cameras around her, she's going to say something crazy. Imelda obliged, with her oft-repeated boilerplate about how when people raided her closet, all they found was shoes and no skeletons. Never mind Imelda's other "closet," the Manila Film Center (I'm using some poetic license here), where Imelda is responsible for more than 150 skeletons being buried in the structure's concrete foundation. Marcos also casts Nathanielsz in a different light, because in a documentary that uses just Imelda Marcos and Ronnie Nathanielsz as its Philippine commentators it becomes harder to ignore Nathanielsz' connections to the Marcos regime. Instead of focusing on his career as a sportsman and journalist, I was left wondering why the HBO filmmakers decided to push this Marcos revival. Did Imee hook them up with some cheese from one of the Swiss bank accounts?

But that's really a minor criticism. The movie is about Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, in that order, and the Philippine details were the cherry on top.

A nice nod

2009-04-10T05:26:00.002+08:00

Just want to quote and link a flattering link I received in the Wall Street Journal Daily Fix sports blog, which quoted and linked me.

It's too long and too rich in dazzling details to excerpt effectively, but Rafe Bartholomew's Seattle Weekly feature on Nate Robinson, the self-proclaimed "small guy from Seattle" who has enjoyed a breakout season with the Knicks this year, is basically the only piece you need to read on N8. If you were ever curious about how much Nate likes Will Ferrell (a lot) or how hostile crowds taunted him during his college days (by chanting "Ga-ry Cole-man"), or anything else about this fascinating and unlikely specimen of hoops excellence, this is the story to read.

New Story on Nate Robinson

2009-04-09T00:16:00.001+08:00

I spent much of my free time in March chasing Nate Robinson around. I'm thankful that he's easier to catch up to off of a basketball court than on one. I spent time with him at Knicks practices, publicity events and in the team's locker room before a late March loss to the Nets that was the beginning the Knicks' ongoing late-season collapse. Oh well. Even on crappy teams, Robinson is a lot of fun to watch, and that's sort of what my story, out today in Seattle Weekly, is about.

Also, if you've got a lot of time on your hands and a burning desire to learn more about Robinson, New York Magazine also published a short feature on him this week. Mark Jacobson did a lot of the same reporting as I did, and some readers may find it interesting to see how our stories differ. Please leave comments and let me know which you prefer. Who wins the battle of the Nate Robinson features? (Anyone who says they're equal I will assume means that Jacobson's is superior.)

Advice to an American friend

2009-03-10T09:56:00.002+08:00

This is a little different from my regular posts, but it feels right so let's give it a try. The following is copied from a Facebook message I sent to a college friend who just got transferred to the U.S. Embassy in Manila. He's been in the country for a month, and he's asking me for some pointers on living the good life in Pasay. OK everyone, let's not be suplado and make jokes about how that last sentence ended in an oxymoron. Here's to the good life ... in Pasay. Also, to any readers who live South, if you'd like to elaborate on my very basic suggestions, go for it and I'll pass them along to this guy. Enough explanation, here's the text of my letter:

Good to hear from you. The first month in Manila is tough. It's hard now for me to remember exactly what it was like, since I eventually felt so at home there. The good news is that in two years, you'll have a similar opportunity to know the city just as well.

Ahh Cuneta, how I love thee and thy "no spitting" signs.

I gotta say, I never expected the Embassy to put up people next to Cuneta. I lived all the way up in QC, on Katipunan Avenue near UP and Ateneo de Manila University, but I got around a lot and spent a significant amount of time the Buendia/Libertad parts of Pasay, mostly because I had to go to PBA games and practices at Cuneta. The league schedules fewer and fewer games there these days, but if you get a chance to go to one, jump at it, just so you can behold the exquisite mess that is the Astrodome. The hideous turquoise exterior is a pretty good indicator of what's inside. Cuneta has a ton of character. It was always worth the trip.

I don't know a ton about Pasay nightlife because I stayed so far north, but I bet you'll get to know your way around MOA pretty well. Yes, malls are tacky but I think it's better if you can just look at them as a fact of life and enjoy them for their luxuries -- reliable aircon, movie theaters, fancy food. Some of my favorite places to hang out were the grimy neighborhood beerhouses in Quezon City. Pasay is not quite as good a spot for these places -- from what I saw, a much higher proportion of the beerhouses around Libertad and Buendia doubled as whorehouses. However, normal people drink too, so I bet there are some places that just stick to beer, barbecue and cheesy music. Follow the students! The CCP Complex, on Buendia and Roxas Boulevard, has upscale but still authentic restaurants and bars, and the Cinemalaya film festival at CCP in July is great. Upstairs at the CCP Complex you will find Brad's, a kind of crappy restobar but one I feel great personal attachment to, because I played a scummy American named Brad in a telenovela once, and because they sell something called "Brad's Burst," which aside from the nasty innuendo, is one of the weirdest meals I've ever heard of. It's a giant puto filled with dinuguan and topped with pineapple chutney. Puto and dinuguan go together, but not usually encased one inside the other.

You're south, so you're near the original Dampa in Parañaque. It's near the domestic airport. Dampa refers to any large wet market where you can buy fresh fish, then have it cooked for you. You can find them all over, but the original is supposedly the best. I never went, but if it's better than the one at Farmer's in Cubao and the one at Greenhills, then it is fucking great. Dampa is really my favorite place to eat in the country.

What else... You're probably walking distance from Cartimar Market, which is famous for selling exotic pets. Now, I know what you're thinking, but it's not as intense as it sounds. Given the way other things are peddled in Manila -- DVDs, abortion elixirs, votive candles, flesh -- I thought they'd be selling giraffes and tigers and all kinds of wild stuff. It's a tamer scene than that, which is definitely a good thing, for the animals and society as a whole. Still, it's a lot of fun to walk around looking at birds and fish you've never seen before. Plus, the other side of Cartimar has some of the best bootleg NBA throwback jerseys I've seen in the country, as well as some authentic-looking G-Unit knock offs, if you're in the market for that kind of stuff.

Man, what else... You got me riled up here. Well, I probably got myself riled up. Anyway, get out there and explore. Be careful, but don't be too careful. I walked around alone all the time, all over the place, and never had problems. Besides, your fists are deadly weapons. I remember this from France. Really, there's so much to see and do. It's great fun.

Finally, more good news. I got a book deal and I'll be coming back to Manila to complete my manuscript. I have to finish off a job I took here in the meantime, but expect to see me back in my adopted native habitat in June!

Ingat!

Rafe

Guest blogging at Ricoexplainsitall

2009-03-09T23:47:00.002+08:00

In a previous life, I was a hardcore hip hop head. I was an intense fan. I had Eminem's pre-Dre albums. I had dubs of battles on West Coast radio stations. I went to M.O.P. shows in the mid-1990s and tried to have a good time without scuffing anyone's Timberlands. Those days are mostly behind me, although even today I mostly listen to rap music, only now I make room for OPM, as anyone who's heard me sing Narda knows. My friend Rico asked me to write a short piece on the Notorious B.I.G., this being the 12th anniversary of his death. Read it here. R.I.P. B.I.G.

More Pacman silliness

2009-03-01T01:27:00.003+08:00

Writing about Manny Pacquiao time after time feels profoundly unoriginal, but unfortunately the Pacman just keeps doing funny and interesting stuff. He may be the pound-for-pound king of boxing, but even outside the ring the quirks of his personal life stack up against any other celebrity. In fact, although Pacquiao is probably my favorite boxer, I think I might be an even bigger fan of his extracurricular hijinks, which include playing for his Liga Pilipinas basketball team, running for political office and recording monster ballads.

What do you mean Princeton doesn't have a cockfight pit?

Now, we can add framing a Ph.D. to hang next to the Santo Niño in his living room. Last week, Manny Pacquiao, world lightweight champion, became Dr. Emmanuel D. Pacquiao when Southwestern University in Cebu gave him an honorary doctorate in the humanities. This is certainly a little goofy, but not the travesty some bloggers have made it out to be. I don't think awarding Manny an honorary degree that he hasn't come close to earning (in an academic sense, at least) spells doom for Philippine higher education.

Besides, what other prominent Filipinos receive honorary documents? Politicians, businessmen, taipans and generals, probably, and have they really done more for the country than Pacquiao? Disgraced ex-president Joseph "Erap" Estrada received one from Ateneo. The long "public service" careers of politicians would be more aptly described as "public bilking." Philippine tycoons have to get their hands dirty to make and maintain their fortunes. Shadows of human rights abuses loom over any military man. People from all these sectors have also done good things for the country, but I want to emphasize that the troubles of Philippine society compromise the ethics of any person in a position of power, and we'd be overlooking a very messy, complicated system of moral compromises and lesser evils to just say that they are better people than Pacquiao, a superstar athlete without much formal education. At least Pacman has provided a decade of uplifting beatdowns of Mexican boxers, that have united and delighted the nation. When he gets into congress in 2010, he can complete the circle and become the pound-for-pound king of government graft.

We should also point out that bestowing dubious honorary degrees upon boxers is not a Filipino invention. Here in the United States, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and, you guessed it, "Iron" Mike Tyson have all received honorary doctorates. Pacquiao will have to work really hard to distinguish himself as the least deserving member of that group. Of course, with the possibility of a long career in politics awaiting him, Pacquiao has a chance to do that! Kayang-kaya mo, Manny!

The Pinoy Film Name Generator

2009-02-28T06:41:00.001+08:00

I'm looking at the top movie rentals page on the Web site Filipino Movie Rentals. It's a Netflix-style service specializing in Pinoy films, but since Netflix already has a pretty sparkling collection of Aga Mulach and Vilma Santos, I suspect poor little Filipino Movie Rentals won't survive much longer. That doesn't matter for us. Here is a sampling of the films that made the site's top rental list:

Loving You, One True Love, A Love Story, When Love Begins, My Big Love, One More Chance, I've Fallen For You, I Will Always Love You, Close to You, You are the One.

Here are a few others, off the top of my head: For the First Time, Till I Met You, Don't Give up on Us, Till there was You, A Very Special Love.

Notice anything? What in tarnation is going on here? Are Pinoy film producers required by law to choose from a list of 18 words for the titles of their romance films? These names remind me of that long-obsolete Internet innovation, the Wu-Tang name generator. Remember? You type your first and last name into the form boxes, click a button that says "Wu are you?" and get something along the lines of "Machete-swallowing hoodlum" or "La the Darkman" back. Oh wait, La the Darkman is a real Wu-Tang name. Anyway, I'd be willing to bet there's a Pinoy movie name generator out there, to come up with unique, heartwarming titles like "Loving you again" and "In your Arms for the Sixth Time."

Here's the problem. Since the names of these movies are all milquetoast bland and nearly identical, it's nearly impossible to discuss them without a cheat sheet. Here is an imaginary conversation. Imaginary because I'm makit it up and because hardly anyone I know is willing to discuss these cheese festivals with me.

LBoogs: Did you see One More Chance?

Rafe: Oh, is that the one with Sam Milby and Toni Gonzaga?

LBoogs: No, fool, that's You are the One. One More Chance is the one with John Lloyd Cruz and Bea Alonzo.

Rafe: Oh, I thought that was Close to You.

LBoogs: Close to You is with John Lloyd and Bea, but One More Chance is newer.

Guys, this doesn't work! Maybe it's the filmmakers' way of admitting that they are failures, that these movies are all the same anyway (same plots, same artistas, same songs, same insane 7-minute musical montages with ballads performed by the stars, even perhaps the same B-roll), so why not give them all the same names.

Secretary Janosz

2009-02-26T12:12:00.002+08:00

Doesn't this guy ...

I watched the Newshour with Jim Lehrer earlier tonight, the first half hour of which was devoted to a lengthy interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. It followed the same frustrating progression as most of the program's newsmaker interviews with Obama administration officials, which consists of Jim Lehrer asking relevant, thoughtful questions and the interview subjects evading them. This isn't much different from TV news interviews on other channels, except that the Newshour lets these segments run for almost 30 minutes. By the time it's over, I usually feel like I know less about the subject than I did before watching the interview, because the esteemed interviewee spoke at such length and I couldn't figure out a word of it.

Tonight was more of the same. While the treasury secretary never wavered from the administration's pre-ordained script, my mind wandered off in search of more nourishing thoughts. I'm pretty sure that what I came up with doesn't qualify, but it was more captivating than Geithner's talking points.

... look like this guy?

So here's my eureka moment: doesn't Geithner look an awful lot like Peter MacNicol, the character actor who played a member of President Wayne Palmer's cabinet in season six of 24? I'm not sure this bodes well for Obama, since MacNicol's presidential advsier betrayed the POTUS. To make things even worse, earlier in his career, MacNicol played Janosz, the effeminate museum employee in Ghostbusters II who becomes Vigo the Carpathian's henchman. Anyone who reads the news probably suspects that Geithner is already beholden to his Wall Street peeps, but he looks so much like Janosz, I can't help thinking he answers to another, even more sinister, dark master. And if Secretary Janosz is half as bad as his fictional lookalikes, then we better hope Obama can rely on a CIA operative who resembles Kiefer Sutherland and a kick-ass Bobby Brown song about Ghostbusting to bail him out of whatever trouble Janosz and Vigo are plotting.

Index of the Week

2009-02-19T12:41:00.003+08:00

Since January, I've had the privilege of being an intern at Harper's Magazine. For the past two issues, I've been researching the magazine's signature front-of-the-book piece, Harper's Index. The the uninitiated, the Index is a page in the front of the magazine that tells a story about what's going on in the world with 40 statistics, some of which are hilarious.

The Harper's Web site just unveiled a new feature -- a searchable Index database -- that will hopefully introduce the magazine to a younger, less print-centric audience. That's a tall order, but the online Index might be cool enough to do it. I'm going to try to include an interesting search term once a week on this blog, and you know what my inaugural search has to be: Philippines.

Here are the Index stats that come up when you search "Philippines." By the way, Index stats are often so bizarre or counterintuitive that readers might think there's no way they could be true. On the Web site, sources for the stats appear when you mouse over the lines. But beyond that, after researching two Indexes myself and seeing the magazine's process for reporting and fact-checking the stats, I can personally vouch for the truth of Harper's Index stats. The magazine's four interns spend two straight weeks reporting, checking and re-checking that one page, and two editors work with the interns throughout the cycle.

10/85Filipino journalists murdered this year: 9

4/85Percentage decrease in the gross national product of the Philippines in 1984: 5.5

11/86Amount The Triumph of Beauty, a portrait of Imelda Marcos, brought at auction in August: $27,500

2/86Percentage of the Philippines’ 300 government-owned corporations that are headed by Imelda Marcos: 10

9/87Proposed fine for selling or eating dog meat in Manila: $100

3/88Percentage of 1988 U.S. foreign economic aid that will go to Israel, Egypt, and the Philippines: 68

3/88Number of candidates in the Philippines’ January regional elections who were murdered during the campaign: 39

6/88Number of the 26 journalists murdered last year who were killed in the Philippines: 11

11/89Number of pages of his newspaper a Filipino editor says military personnel forced him to eat at gunpoint in May: 2

11/89Number of people arrested for smoking in public places in Quezon City, the Philippines, since March: 1,514

2/92Estimated change in average U.S. temperatures this winter due to a volcanic eruption in the Philippines last year: -0.9° F

Estimated number of days the Washington, D.C., cherry-blossom season will be delayed this year due to the eruption: 7

3/96Number of corruption charges still pending against Imelda Marcos in the Philippines: 306

5/01Number of pairs of Imelda Marcos’s shoes on display in the Philippines ‘ new shoe museum: 200

5/05Percentage of Filipino couples who “do not know how pregnancy happens,” according to the country’s health minister: 30

Here are my observations: The Philippines seems underrepresented. Harper's has been publishing the Index for 25 years. 12 x 40 x 25 = 12,000 Index stats, approximately. And just 15 have been related to the Philippines? Sayang. None of these stats will probably blow the mind of anyone who's lived in the Philippines for any length of time and knows an outline of martial law history. The most perplexing one to me has got to be the line about smoking arrests in Quezon City. Can someone fill me in on why people weren't allowed to smoke in public in 1989? The most vivid line has got to be the one about the Masbateño journalist being forced to eat pages of his newspaper. But anyone will tell you that Masbate politics are no joke. Print the wrong thing or challenge the wrong boss in Masbate and being forced to "eat your words" at gunpoint should probably be considered getting off easy.

Enjoy the Index, everyone. It's awesome.

The Only Place GMA meets Obama

2009-02-13T13:42:00.003+08:00

This commercial will not surprise any Filipino readers, as I'm pretty sure it was played around the clock during PBA games, TV Patrol, Wowowee and every other widely-watched program on Philippine network television. I saw at least one actual TV Patrol segment about the commercial and it's Barry O'Bomber look-a-like star, who although first rumored to be Pinoy, turned out to be Indonesian (this seems appropriate, given Obama's upbringing).

One quick side note: Look-a-likes are universally funny. Everywhere I've traveled (which isn't that many places, but at least I grew up in a diverse city), people like look-a-likes. But nowhere have people loved them as much as in the Philippines, where finding kamukhas is a tier-two national pastime just behind basketball, cockfighting and videoke. I remember traveling to a PBA game in Bacolod City with the Alaska Aces in 2007, where the night before the game I spent almost two hours sitting in front of a TV with five of the players, all of us watching and pointing out kamukhas for each other and anyone else we happened to know. When the albino Filipino comedian Redford White came up on screen, my white ass was toast. But no matter how realistic -- or, as was more often the case, unrealistic -- the resemblance between two kamukhas, the response was the same: uproarious laughter.

Back to the president. The commodification of Obama's image is nothing new. It probably culminated during the week of the inauguration last January, when T-shirt and tchotchke vendors inundated Washington, D.C., gold rush-style and even the official presidential inauguration committee got in on the action with its online store and boutique near the Mall. I'm already sickened by the flood of carbon copy books about Obama, none offering much that hasn't already been on TV or online, and I know the deluge isn't over. So it's no surprise that Obama -- or his Indonesian doppelganger -- is popping up in commercials. And while I have not scoured the Web for amusing Obama commercials from every spot on the globe, it's hard for me to imagine enjoying one more than I enjoy this one from the Philippines.

For starters, the kamukhas are great. The Obama lookalike is very close, but beyond that, he's got a slightly goofy manner that tells viewers to get ready to laugh. The Gloria Macapagal Arroyo lookalike is laughably bad in terms of resemblance, which I believe reflects the mostly negative public opinion of her in the Philippines. She was sworn into office the same day as George W. Bush, and it's looking like her presidency will end in a similar state of disgrace. I'm confident that I could find a woman bearing a closer resemblance to GMA in the ladies' car of the MRT any weekday morning in Manila. So it says something that the producers of the commercial decided to hire this more gremlin-ish character, and, of course, that they chose to slap the hyperbolic upper lip mole on her.

The commercial's jokes fall into the English-Tagalog wordplay genre, which is rife with puns that are humiliatingly corny but also irresistible.

"Try our kare-kare, it's OKs!" says GMA. Or is she saying "ox"? Kare-kare is a dish of oxtail stewed in peanut sauce with eggplant, green beans and other vegetables. "OKs", pronounced like "oaks", is an annoying Taglish way of saying OK.

"Ginataang mais. It's corn, but we use our coconut!" Ginataang mais is a dessert of corn and malagkit rice in coconut milk. "Use your coconut" is something you hear parents say to kids or coaches to players. "Use your head!"

Then, of course, the product, Motillum, an anti-nausea pill that helps with indigestion and dyspepsia, which I'd say is a suitably weird thing to be advertising with two heads of state.

But wait, there's time for one more pun. This one is by far the corniest, but also the funniest of all, because you knew it was coming, and you knew it was awful, as did everyone involved in producing the commercial, but everyone got on board and pulled it off with gusto. (This is how I understand the frequent ritual acts of mass humiliation in Filipino culture -- like Wowowee or the unavoidable fate of being forced to dance or sing at most public gatherings. There's an underlying social contract. Everyone agrees to laugh and be good natured. When your number is up, you have to act the fool. Sooner or later, everyone gets pulled into the spotlight and forced to embarrass themselves. And I must say, as someone who participated in a lot of embarrassing spectacles, that it feels pretty cathartic.)

After Motillum cures Obama's tummy ache, GMA offers him a cup of powerful Barako coffee from Batangas. "Café Baraks?" she asks, with a giant shit-eating grin that says, "You heard me. I just used the worst pun imaginable."

Then, as the coup de gràce, the camera pulls out and shows GMA and Obama standing side-by-side, with Gloria topping out about 18 inches short of Obama's head, somewhere around his sternum.

Finally, there's a current events tie-in to this commercial that I'm pretty sure the producers had no way of anticipating, but that makes it even funnier. The ongoing saga of GMA's attempts to meet President Obama or get some kind of public acknowledgment from him is a growing source of embarrassment to the Philippine president. She tried to meet him during the campaign but it didn't work out. She called to congratulate him after the election, and he didn't return her call for days. Last week, she eked some favors out of U.S. congresspeople to get an invitation to a National Prayer Breakfast that Obama attended, and again failed to get face time with the president. (Article here.) Suddenly, the desperate caricature of GMA in the commercial is starting to look much more like her real-life counterpart.

Pacman in the Liga!

2009-01-21T12:53:00.002+08:00

A real shit-eating grin spread across my face last weekend while I caught up on sports news in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star. It seems that boxing's pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao is taking a page from the book of MJ and playing minor league basketball in the Liga Pilipinas. I can tell that this news is hitting me about three weeks late, but I'm on the wrong side of the ocean, please cut me some slack.

Thankfully, Pacquiao has not exactly mimicked Jordan's adventures in minor league baseball. Although Pacquiao is playing in the semi-pro Liga Pilipinas with the team he owns, the MP Gensan Warriors (in case you can't tell, MP stands for Manny Pacquiao), he's just doing it for fun and he hasn't retired from the ring to pursue his hoop dreams. Pacquiao owned the Warriors back in the National Basketball League days, so it's no surprise that he rolled the team over into the Liga along several other franchises from the dormant NBL.

Footage of Pacquiao playing in barangay ligas and shooting around for fun is pretty common on Philippine news programs when he's not training for a fight. His love for basketball is well-documented and in-tune with the baseline level of basketball fanatacism in the Philippines. I guess you could say he's a huge basketball fan and recreational player in way that's pretty unremarkable for the Philippines.

But this latest chapter adds extra intrigue to the Pacman-loves-balling story. Not only does he own a team, but he suits up and plays for them. In a loss to Laguna last week, Manny scored two points, two rebounds and an assist in 11 minutes. One of Pacquiao's shots was swatted by Nigerian Sam Ekwe, a former collegiate MVP in Manila, which should come as little surprise since Ekwe is 6'8'' and Pacquiao about 5'5''. I know and played with a lot of guys on the Laguna, Pampanga, Quezon, Baguio and Taguig teams in the Liga, and I can't help chuckling when I think of them guarding Pacquiao at the top of the key. One Liga team even briefly asked me if I wanted to try out for them (I don't want to think about how they would have legally turned me into a Filipino), and although I wouldn't want to take the job from a local player (that's if I could, which isn't for certain), I would love the chance to say I played basketball against Manny. And, if like Ekwe, I threw his shot into the third row, I would hug him afterwards and say, "You're still my idol," just like he told Oscar de la Hoya after whipping him badly last December.

An interesting sidebar to this story is the effect Manny is having on attendance at Liga games. The league format has teams traveling to a host location for a series of games, almost like a round robin, at each host city or province, to keep the teams' travel expenses relatively low. Manny was playing in the leg that his team hosted in General Santos city, his hometown, and the crowds were deep, according to press reports. The good news for the Liga is that Manny said he plans on traveling with the team, and wherever he plays, expect surges in the box office. It's great for the Liga, which I've heard struggles for attendance in several locations, really everywhere except Cebu, where basketball always draws crowds. At the same time, it's a little bit sad that people won't come to the Liga for the basketball, but to cheer for Manny. But maybe they'll come for Manny, like what they see and continue to support the league. I do hope that the Liga builds on its initial successes, because it helps fill the basketball void left in the provinces by the Manila-centric PBA, and because it creates another couple hundred roster spots to soak up some of the glut of underemployed semi-pro ballers around the country.

Sidebar 2: The MP Gensan Warriors are yet another example of the way basketball seeps into Philippine politics. It's no coincidence that Manny revived his team and juiced its popularity by appearing in games now, a year before the 2009 elections, when he's expected to run for Congress. Likewise, it was no coincidence that the now-defunct rival league to the PBA, the MBA, launched in 1998, an election year, and the team owners included presidential candidates Joseph "Erap" Estrada and Jose de Venecia, as well as senatorial candidate Robert Barbers. JDV's team was named the "Pangasinan Presidents," and, to no one's surprise, they didn't last long after de Venecia failed to become president.

An NY Pinoy's first thoughts after recovering from a stroke

2008-12-29T04:36:00.002+08:00

This is rich stuff. The NY Times' Neediest Cases stories -- features about New Yorkers who've struggled through devastating hardships and received assistance from worthwhile charities -- are a valuable public service, but they tend to be pretty boring and I have a hard time reading past the third paragraph before my eyes glaze over and I start reminiscing on my glory days as a Telenovela villain.

Fernando Kabigting, painter extraordinaire and an early favorite to star in my prequel to Goonies.

Yesterday's Neediest Cases article, however, was an exception. It told the story of Fernando Kabigting, an accomplished Filipino painter who moved to New York in 1994 and who suffered a stroke on a balikbayan visit to Manila in 1999. The stroke jacked up Kabigting's right side and his whole family anguished over the possibility that he might not be able to paint again. Thanks to hard work, prayer, support from loved ones, help from Catholic charities in NY, yadda yadda, he managed to recover the ability to paint. If this were the whole story, I'd think, "that's nice," and move on. I have an acquired taste for Philippines-related schmaltz that doesn't seem to transfer to any other cultural product. I don't read Neediest Cases stories about native-born New Yorkers. I'm not a huge fan of romantic comedies like PS I Love You. I don't sit around watching daytime soaps. But I can read Kabigting's Neediest Case file and I soak up Pinoy schlock romance in movie and TV form -- from When Love Begins to Ysabella! -- like an extra-absorbent Bounty paper towel.

But the Kabigting article had one extra detail that really made it sing for me. Immediately after his stroke, Kabigting couldn't speak and communicated only by tracing messages, one letter at a time, on the palm whoever he was talking to. When his daughter flew from NY to Manila to visit him, and when she arrived at the hospital, the first message he had for her was "DID THE KNICKS WIN?"

I spend a lot of time researching the big ticket items related to basketball's mighty foothold in Philippine society -- PBA imports past and present, the early Olympians like Caloy Loyzaga and Kurt Bachmann, the Senate hearings related to Fil-Shams and the FIBA suspension, the legacy of Sonny Jaworski, and so on. But often times, it's little details like Fernando Kabigting's message to his daughter that really cement the significance of basketball in the lives of so many Filipinos. Taken on their own, a Growee commercial that suggests kids who drink the right vitamin syrup can grow tall enough to dunk, a multicab in Surigao City with a New Jersey Nets decal painted on its side and a reality show that highlights grassroots hoops talent like MyMVP might seem trivial. But lumped together, along with stories of Kabigting, whose first thoughts upon reviving from a stroke seem to have included basketball front and center, and countless other Filipino men and women who've made small tokens of their devotion to the sport, these little details weave together to form a mosaic of a country where basketball is deeply adored by macho athletes, painters, poets, and fishermen alike. It never fails to inspire me, and although I'm not Filipino, I feel the same way so many Pinoys do about basketball.

Ambassadors of the Philippine Game: The RP Team Part 2

2008-12-12T08:33:00.006+08:00

I've always had a soft spot for underachieving basketball players and teams. Maybe this is because the first basketball team I really worshiped was Michigan's Fab Five in the early 1990s. With Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard and company, they won with a style and attitude that seemed like the epitome of cool to an 11-year-old learning the game. And although they famously choked in their second NCAA title game against North Carolina in 1993, I love them all the same. Since then, most of my favored teams and players seem to have been cut from the same cloth: brilliant talent but lacking some essential quality that makes them winners. From bottom feeders like Marcus Banks to borderline stars like Lamar Odom, I love the loveable losers.

So in this, my second post about the Philippine national basketball team, I want to express a gentle desire for the country to be represented by a team that might not necessarily be most likely to succeed in international competition, but one that showcases the unique and exhilarating aspects of the Philippine game.

Let me say this up front: This post is pure fantasy. I don't think that the Philippine Sports Commission should follow my perscriptions for the national basketball team. The people charged with forming a national team have one concern, and that is preparing a team that can be as successful as possible and potentially return the Philippines to its perch near the top of Asian basketball. And that's how it should be. But I'm not on the PSC and I'm not a representative of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, so please permit me to indulge in my little fantasy.

Willie Miller. Da bess, pare!

Filipinos are right to feel proud of their place in the basketball world, both its history (which includes participation in the first Olympic Games to feature basketball in 1936, a bronze medal in the 1954 World Championships and the Philippines' routine domination of Asian tournaments until the late 1960s) and its present. The country may never reach those heights again, but I think they could reasonably aim for earning a spot in the Olympics or World Championships sometime in the next 10-15 years.

Aside from this overall goal, I think the RP team should be assembled with another purpose in mind: to share Philippine basketball's unique character. What, precisely, am I referring to? Filipino basketball players have a unique blend of creativity and toughness that makes them a joy to watch. One-on-one moves like the sidestep and the gallop dribble on the break don't exist anywhere else in the world. The wild yo-yo layups and pektos spin shots that players like Willie Miller and James Yap convert every game, at their most exhilarating, can be as exciting as Lebron James' dunks. Maybe I've just been around Pinoy basketball for too long, but I really believe that.

Area 51 escapee Arwind Santos claims to have been raised in Lubao, Pampanga. The truth is out there.

Another factor that contributes to Philippine basketball's pleasure factor is that the sport truly begins at a grassroots level in the Philippines. By "grassroots," I mean that many and perhaps most players learn to play in barangays and baryos, on covered courts or straight-up lupa, and they pick up unorthodox styles that spice up their games. Miller and Yap learned to play in the streets of Olongapo and Escalante, Negros Occidental, respectively, and they've blended the fundamentals and textbook skills they've picked up through years of organized basketball with the freewheeling flair of the barangay games where they learned to play. In contrast, Chinese national players are plucked from their families in early adolesence because of their ideal height or build and enrolled in sports academies where they are molded into basketball robots through endless drilling. I will admit that these robots can really play, and the Philippine team is no match for the Chinese team, but I would rather watch Pinoys play any day of the week.

So does the latest RP team, in its current incarnation, reflect my desire to showcase the unique character of Philippine basketball? In this sense, I think it's an improvement over the 2007 RP team. Willie Miller was left off that team, presumably because of his erratic tendencies, Arwind Santos was a tad young back then, and Yap was left out in favor of RenRen Ritualo. Miller, the PBA's crown prince, with all his jukes and spins and scoop shots, is like the pure id of Philippine basketball. Yes he turns the ball over and disappears sometimes, but when he's on he's better than everyone else in the PBA.

Santos is beyond unorthodox. He's otherworldly. I'm talking about his game, although the guy also happens to look like he's from another planet. He's kind of like a Pinoy Shawn Marion, although I don't think the comparison gives Santos full credit. But, like Marion, Santos is a small forward who seems like he can guard any position, who outrebounds and out-blocks most big men because of his hops and go-go Gadget arms, who consistenly sinks strange-looking three-point shots, and who's an exciting finisher on drives and putbacks. An exquisite garbageman.

Sometimes I want to give James Yap the benefit of the doubt. Then I see pictures like this.

I love how smooth Yap's game is, how easily he breaks down defenders with his dribble, and his ability to adjust his shot in mid-air on drives. I'm less crazy about his metrosexual tendencies and the constant media harping about his intrigues and, worse yet, Baby James. He's the PBA's Kobe Bryant -- annoying as a celebrity but enchanting as a player.

A reader left a comment on my last post complaining about MacMac Cardona's being left off the RP team roster, and I have to agree. No discussion of one-of-a-kind PBA players is complete without Cardona, who shoots and makes one-handed runners from everywhere on the court. I remember in the 2007 Fiesta conference finals, he was torching Alaska in the second half of a game at Araneta, and Rosell Ellis switched onto Cardona to slow him down. Cardona got the ball on the wing and tried to drive past Ellis, but the quick import was having none of it. He stopped Cardona dead in his tracks about 19 feet away from the basket, on the right side of the court. Cardona looked like he didn't know what to do, so he just threw the ball up with one hand and it went in. The guy has an incredible nose for the ball; loose balls just seem to drop into his hands for easy lay ups. His bizarre style makes him hard to scout and hard to guard, which I think could make him effective in international competition. On top of that, the guy is aggressive. Like, scary aggressive. When he goes to the basket, I think I can hear him growling like a mad dog. If he plays with that kind of energy against Air21 in front of a thin crowd at the Ynares Center, then imagine how hard he'll play for the flag! And he's DYING to play.

I also think that Jimmy Alapag's play in 2007 earned him a spot on this team, as long as he's healthy and interested. I read some comments from Yeng Guiao that made it sound like he thought Alapag was too short. After being the RP Team's best player by a wide margin in Tokushima, that shouldn't matter. Although Alapag's game is more American than Pinoy in style, he's still an exciting and tough player, and he belongs on the team.

Finally, there's Coach Yeng Guiao. I've already written at length about him, but in the context of this post, I'd like to add that I think he's a perfect representative of the old-school Pinoy style of coaching. Of all the coaches in the PBA, he's the last major practitioner of Jaworski-style coaching, which basically consists of hyping up players and freaking them out in order to make them play like desperate maniacs. The Big J worked his psychotrauma magic for decades with Ginebra, and Guiao was employing it with similar success until the most recent All-Filipino conference, when Red Bull's firesale of its most talented players finally seems to have caught up to the team. Still, Guiao's troops play like their lives depend on it, like they're worried a turnover could lead to them being chopped up and turned into Pampanga's Best longganiza. I'm not convinced this style of coaching will work with the national team, but on a sort-of Platonic basis, I appreciate the choice of Yeng Guiao as coach. He's the purest example of traditional Philippine-style coaching.

Let's dispense with one last question: What's the point of being an entertaining team if you can't win? You've got a point. But a more conservatively assembled RP Team without all the tantalizing, inconsistent talents of Willie Miller or the eccentric skill set of Arwind Santos, like the 2007 Tokushima team, wouldn't be guaranteed to do much better. If you're going to be a long shot, I say be a long shot with character, become the scrappy, wild team that's the darling of the fans, and go out in a blaze of glory.

There's yin, there's yang, and then there's Yeng: Thoughts on the RP team

2008-12-04T09:27:00.005+08:00

It's not easy following developments in Philippine basketball from an apartment in New York. Especially since there's nowhere for me to install a DirecTV dish and subscribe to the package of Filipino channels. Anyway, kawawa naman ako. I'll stop bitching.

I have been reading up on whatever I can find on the PBA's Web site, as well as the online portals of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star. It's hard to get a feeling for what's going on in the PBA because the game recaps are so basic, but I've been devouring the reports and imagining the behind the scenes gossip regarding the PBA-backed Philippine National Team that's supposed to play in the August 2009 FIBA-Asia tournament that will serve as a qualifier for the 2010 World Championships of basketball.

Although it's probably too early to tell if this will be a successful RP team, I can say pretty confidently that it will be an entertaining one. I don't mean this necessarily from the basketball standpoint, as in watching this team play will be an enjoyable experience. That may be true, but what I'm really getting at is that the selection of Yeng Guiao to coach the national team means that basketball fans will have plenty to debate.

Atak of da Bal-Hedz! Bacdafucup!

Here's what I like about Guiao: He's a character. He represents the mixed-up world of Pinoy hoops, its strengths and faults alike. The Philippines will head into competition knowing that no other coach has bigger brass balls than theirs. The standard adjectives for intense coaches -- fiery, confrontational, strong-willed -- are laughably bland when applied to Guiao. At times on the court, he's borderline insane. This is a guy who clotheslined Dondon Hontiveros in a playoff game two years ago when the San Miguel guard was lighting up Guiao's Red Bull squad. The old rumor about Guiao pulling a pistol on his players to motivate them at a Red Bull practice may or may not be true, but the story has been told so many times that it's become part of Guiao's urban legend.

Guiao is also blunt and outspoken. His wars of words with Talk 'N Text's Frankie Lim in November 2006 and his biting, sarcastic criticism of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas' hiring of Serbian coach Rajko Toroman to develop a team capable of qualifying for the the 2012 Olympics have been hilarious. Check out this quote regarding Toroman: “But if he has the technology or the system where the six-footers can beat the seven-footers and we don’t know it then I’ll carry his bag. We have to prove that, ‘Pinoy tabi ka muna because undoubtedly mas-magaling ito.’” That last bit in Tagalog, "step aside Filipino coaches because undoubtedly this one is better," is dripping with irony.

Guiao is saying that you can't coach height, and Filipinos don't have it, so don't expect foreign coaches to come in and perform miracles. Instead, Guiao would prefer for the SBP to bring in foreign coaches to run a few clinics, show some new drills, share some of the wisdom they've gained from FIBA competition, and hit the road. I think that Guiao is understating the possible value of foreign coaches, some of whom, like Toroman, really do know the European-style FIBA game better than Pinoy coaches who have less experience and who mostly were trained by American coaches and countless Filipino mentors. And Guiao's vehement opposition to foreign coaches is seems mildly hypocritical since he's been a leading voice calling for the RP team to naturalize a couple foreign big men (that's not counting the PBA's current foreign big men who've been unofficially naturalized :P) to bang with the seven-footers suiting up for other countries' teams. However, Guiao's conflicting positions reflect a certain pragmatic, if also self-serving, logic. The players on the court are going to ultimately determine the outcomes of games, so if the Philippines is going to hire foreigners to prop up the team, they might as well start with the players.

But beyond the substance of Guiao's arguments for and against naturalized players and foreign coaches, I just like the way he expresses himself. The arguments might be faulty, but Guiao has chutzpah, and I appreciate that. It will be interesting to see, however, if a roster full of bona fide superstars find Guiao's chutzpah as charming as I do. Guiao's image as the swashbuckling, tough guy vice governor from Pampanga who can drive any collection of bozos to a winning season in the PBA leans heavily on his ability to motivate players through bullying and intimidation, or at least so I've heard, and it looks that way from the outside. Will James Yap, who's married to the Philippines' version of Oprah, respond to Guiao's haranguing style the same way Magnum Membrere does, or will he ignore the voluble coach? Or will he kick Guiao in the back of the knee and then run like his life depended on it, as he did in last season's Terrence Leather fiasco? Yes, James Yap jokes are irresistible, but jokes aside, are guys like Helterbrand, Willie Miller, Asi Taulava and Kelly Williams going to let Guiao bully them? It's hard to believe, although perhaps a bunch of players in the current national team pool have played for Guiao -- Miller, Kerby Raymundo, Mick Pennisi, Cyrus Baguio -- it won't be as large an adjustment as it seems.

I do think that Guiao's simple coaching style will be good for the team. He lets the players push the ball, he lets them shoot when they're feeling hot, he lets them make mistakes. The only thing that seems to drive him crazy is weakness, whether it surfaces as hesitating to take a shot on offense or backing down from a challenge on defense. Other than that, it seems like anything goes, and I think that's good for a team with streaky guards who can really get hot like Miller, Yap, Helterbrand and Baguio. Let 'em play. And I think Guiao will do just that.

Stay tuned for another post, coming within the next few days, that tilts a wider lens at the RP team and asks, "What should be the goal of the Philippine national team?"

The Good Old Days

2008-11-24T22:55:00.004+08:00

In my last post, about a white-looking Mestizo basketball hopeful, I suggested that if his hoops career hit a dead-end, he should just become an artista. But a reader wisely shot down this notion. If the young lad indeed has blond hair and blue eyes, he's too white for telenovela directors, who prefer their mestizo actors with Eurasian features and dark hair and eyes. Olats for you, pare! This is true. When I appeared in Bakekang as the titular character's baby's daddy, I was playing a white American. This wasn't much of a stretch. I am a white American. But the director still sent PAs scurrying off to the Hi-Top Supermarket on Quezon Avenue to buy sachets of Creamsilk black conditioner to darken my coif.

My astute reader offered the consolation that the white guy could still pose for SM print ads and billboards, and I'd like to tack on a few more tacky local brands like JAG and Lee Pipes (a personal favorite) that seem to believe in the perhaps antiquated, perhaps true notion that the best way to sell junk in the Philippines is to slap a white face on it. Something inside me writhes and cringes every time I write a sentence like that, but I believe there is still hope. The "American = good" equation that is the scourge of some Pinoy advertising seems to be on the decline. From what I can tell, Philippine popular culture in the 1970s and '80s was way more saturated with clumsy Amboy-themed advertising than it is now. My basis for this observation is print ads I saw in volume after volume of old sports magazines like Champ and Atlas Sports Weekly, which I read as part of my basketball research, and old commercials on YouTube.

Check out this classic, Dragon Katol:

And then this doozy, Old Captain Rum:

And, perhaps the Philippines' greatest employer of non-professional white actors, tobacco companies. Thank you, Lucio Tan!

Looking at these commercials, I have mixed feelings. The thought that Philippine businesses have such low opinions of consumers that they aired this schlock and presumably profited from it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, advertising in any country relies on some lowest common denominator appeal, so we should get too holier than thou with the Philippines. But the racial subtext of the commercials, in which a couple of white folks slapping each other and taking Tagalog mispronunciation to dizzying new heights can sell a mosquito coil better than Pinoy actors, is a bitter pill to swallow, especially for a white guy like me who tried to live responsibly and respectfully during my time in Manila.

On the other hand, how fun would it have been to be the Dragon Katol guy? You get to wear a cowboy hat, slap yourself and butcher a language, and at the end of the day, you get paid. Does this guy know that he's a pop-culture reference now, that a generation of Filipinos can sit around laughing about the way he says "Lamok siguradong tepok!" That must be fun. Likewise, beating down a gorilla who stole your woman and then befriending him over a bottle of old captain rum is something I'd like to put on my TV resume. And playing Jai Alai for Champion Cigarettes? The bomb. In regards to starring in funky advertisements, I definitely missed the boat during my stint as a white man in Manila.

I should also mention that Philippine consumers, who may have been earnestly underestimated by the advertisers, have flipped the script and turned the question into something more confusing and meta, by re-appropriating these awful commercials as treasured bits of YouTube kitsch. The Champion commercial that I embedded is one of 84 clips uploaded by a user named Flagwavercharacter, which are titled "Pinoy Memories" 1-84. The wildly popular recent Alaska Milk commercial starring Willy Miller, which contained clips of a 1974 Alaska commercial featuring Cisco Oliver's noble failures at pronouncing phrases like "Galing mo!" and "Masarap?", brought that retro cleverness into the mainstream. It was like saying, "Damn, we were on some silly shit back then!" and everyone loved it. For months, kids ran around giggling to lines like "Alaska man!" I wouldn't be surprised if they still are.

You keep peeling off the layers, and the story keeps getting more complicated. You might was well laugh along the way.

Response to a reader

2008-11-23T13:47:00.002+08:00

Yesterday, a reader left this comment on an old post of mine about the PBA's bewildering and unpredictably applied set of rules regarding Filipino citizenship and what makes a Fil-foreign player eligible to play in the league:

Here's a real case scenario... up & coming 14yo basketball star, father Filipino Mestizo of dual citizenship, US/Filipino, mother, blond New Zealander. This 14yo was born in USA & moved to Manila when he was 1yo... given recognized Filipino citizenship as a baby & currently attends a private 'ex-pat' Manila High School.

Now here's the catch... based on above he should be considered truly a Filipino for the league right? BUT by chance of genetics he looks caucasian... blue eyes, fair skin, brown hair, speaks only Taglish at best, even though father is fluent (his parents don't converse in Tagalog so he never learned it properly).

Other Filipino kids laugh when he insists he is a Filipino citizen... yet this kid is predicted to be at least 6'4 when he stops growing... and he's good, some have their eyes on him for the future.... so will Pinoys 'accept' him as Pinoy with his blue eyes or will he be discriminated against because of his coloring & comes from a priveleged family?

Something to think about.... interested to see what your readers think, should such a kid be considered Filipino or foreign?

So let's break it down. Legally, this kid has no worries about being allowed to play in the PBA. If he's a Filipino citizen, the son of a Filipino citizen and living in the Philippines, there's no legal way to keep him out of the league. I guess he has less than one half Filipino blood because his father is Tisoy (although I'm not sure if we mean mestizo-looking with two Filipino parents, one of whom could have mixed Caucasian heritage or could just be Spanish, or if we mean one of the father's parents is Filipino and the other foreign... wow, this gets complicated fast). It doesn't matter. If the player is already holding a passport, than it is a moot point. We learned this before the draft with Gabe Norwood. Because he was issued a passport and represented the country in international competition, the Department of Justice didn't bother jumping through all the usual hoops in his case. It merely stated that he was a Filipino passport holder and citizen, hence he was eligible for the PBA draft. Norwood is a good point of comparison for our hypothetical player, since Norwood is also one-fourth Filipino, and he's in the league.

With Fil-Ams entering the league now, their paperwork and eligibility issues seem closely pegged to their abilities as players. Here's my understanding of it based on what I've heard (sometimes in conversations with the actual players, sometimes in conversations with other players/coaches/bball insiders who could just be making tsismis and sometimes from just reading the newspaper). Recent Fil-Am draft picks like Jared Dillinger, Ryan Reyes, Norwood, Joe Devance, Kelly Williams and others going back at least to J-Wash's draft, have tended to breeze through the process with few snags. In some cases, the players' eligibility may have seemed temporarily up in the air, but the problems were always resolved before the draft. Why? Because these guys are potential stars. Many of them bring NCAA Division 1 pedigrees into the league, and the teams want them. It's a little uncouth to say this, but money greases the system, and the team owners have money to burn. They make sure that these players, many of whom they've invested in through PBL and Liga teams, find their way to the big leagues. And overall, that's a good thing. The recent Fil-Am batches are all top players who are raising the level of play in the PBA, and their Filipino lineage is well-established. In some cases, the issue of whether the players' Filipino parent/s became naturalized citizens of other countries before the draftees were born is murky, but that's a bad rule to begin with.

The players who have a more difficult time establishing eligibility are the ones that teams don't care about. They're fringe guys who are probably good enough to make somebody's roster, but they aren't worth the cost of expediting their papers. So these players often miss a draft or two while they learn life lessons in futility from wrangling with the Department of Justice and Bureau of Immigration over their right to play in the PBA.

Let's go back to our hypothetical player. The league will accept him, if he's good enough to play. Will the fans? On some level, no. If he looks as white as he's been described, then he'll probably have to deal with people calling him 'Kano for the rest of his career. Scratch that, he'll be hearing it for the rest of his life, whether or not he plays pro basketball. This does not mean that he can never win the fans' approval. Take a cue from Alex Compton and learn Tagalog. He's a Filipino citizen and was raised mostly in the Philippines, it sounds, so he can probably do better than "barely" speaking Taglish. People are of course aware that Compton is a white American, but he is adored for his game and his obvious love for the Philippines, the clearest proof of which would be his fluency in the national language. Other options for our hypothetical player are to be drafted by Ginebra, in which case he will automatically become a small-scale national hero, or to play really hard and kind of crazy à la Ronald Tubid or Alex Crisano, because the fans love nutcases.

No matter what happens to this young man, it sounds like he's got a lot to look forward to in life. As a potential 6'4'' citizen of the United States, the Philippines and New Zealand, who goes to Manila International School, Brent or Faith Academy (I'm guessing) and has blond hair and blue eyes, he will be in constant demand at VTRs and modeling/hosting auditions, if basketball doesn't work out. My advice to you, young man: Artista ka na lang!

America has its Pacman

2008-11-14T04:30:00.000+08:00

This is a silly comparison, but since Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election last week, I've observed and participated in spontaneous acts of mass euphoria that have reminded me of one man: Manny Pacquiao.

Are we sure this is NYC and not the EDSA shrine?

To avoid trivializing the president-elect or the Pinoy boxing hero, I want to point out that the similarities between the men are few, but in the post-election celebrations that I saw erupt in the New York streets last week, one thing that Pacman and Obama clearly share is the ability to inspire.

When I got off work at an East Village bar around 1 a.m. Wednesday, the streets were mobbed with celebrants. A lot of them were just screaming joyous nonsense, like a guy screaming "Roc-A-Fella yall!" and another woman walking down the street alone and repeating "Obama Obama Obama" to herself like she had political Tourette's. Everyone in their cars was honking or rolling down the windows to whoop it up, there were random huggings in the street. I had never seen like it ... in the States, that is.

The widespread elation looked a lot like Manila after one of Manny Pacquiao's wins (and can you believe, that during the three years I lived in the Philippines, I never saw him lose? Pacman went 6-0). The streets would be ghostly quiet during the fight. Everyone would be inside watching or squatting outside the sari-sari stores, watching on the tinderas' TVs. Then, after Pacquiao won, my neighborhood would fill up with people cheering, shadowboxing, laughing, praying, drinking, man-hugging, whatever. Every time I saw it, and every time one of the LP TODA tricycle drivers ran up on me, put his arm around me and foisted a shot of straight gin on me while yelling something along the lines of "Tinalo si Larrios!", it felt like I was part of a public outpouring of joy -- irrational joy, probably -- that didn't happen in the States. Americans just weren't like that.

The crowd watching Pacquiao versus Marquez 2 in Boracay.

Well, it turns out we are like that, and it felt pretty cool. Now, it's worth mentioning that there are clearly millions of Americans who weren't doing the Pacman shuffle after the election, and while we're at it, let's point out that Obama and Pacquiao may inspire very different kinds of pride. But for me, the most inspirational thing about the election was seeing Americans of my generation adopt and adore a public figure the way I saw Pinoys love Manny. Now, if Obama will promise not to sully our love by becoming a light heavyweight contender, then perhaps Pacquiao will agree not to spoil his legend by entering politics in 2010. Oh, who am I kidding? Saddening though it is, Pacman para sa Senado!

Article in October 2008 issue of Rogue

2008-10-29T01:54:00.002+08:00

Readers in Manila may already have seen this, but here are scans of my story in the latest issue of Rogue, a very sleek and still commendably serious men's magazine in the Philippines. I traveled, on multiple occasions, to Cebu to watch a popular exhibition game there called the Unano-Bading Showdown. In English, that's the very self-explanatory "Midget-Gay man Showdown." For me, watching the game was a surreal and disturbing experience, but it is part of a culture that I love and seek to understand in ever-deeper ways.

Click on these images to see very large scans of the pages from Rogue, which will allow you to read the article and get a closer look at the amazing photography of Jon Unson.

Rogue October 2008 (1 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (2 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (3 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (4 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (5 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (6 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (8 of 8)

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Rogue October 2008 (7 of 8)

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What you need, Lehman?

2008-09-18T21:17:00.001+08:00

Apparently, the Wall Street credit crunch has yet to hit pawn shops on Anonas Street in Quezon City, where even in the face of declining markets around the world, you can still get a loan in FOUR MINUTES OR LESS! And the interest is probably a very reasonable 100 percent, compounding daily. Borrow now, my friends, and make your dreams come true. Maybe all the Indian Five-Six loan sharks of Cubao will band together to drag the world out of financial ruin.

Sweeter than Buck Williams. Milkier than Kurt Rambis

2008-09-18T21:10:00.001+08:00

Rebound Milk Chocolate, exhibit number 4,693 of basketball's commercial appeal in the Philippines, is a notably ridiculous attempt by some business owner to cash in on basketball's significance in local culture. The product is just a small, round piece of chocolate wrapped in tin foil with basketball designs on it. The choice to associate candy with rebounding is a mysterious one. Grabbing boards is an undeniably important part of the game, but like noted rebounders Buck Williams and Kurt Rambis, it's neither glamorous or sweet. If I had to compare rebounding to a food, it would probably be broccoli, not milk chocolate. But, since basketball is used to sell everything from tires to margarine, I won't second-guess the experts, who seem convinced that slapping a basketball on the package can improve just about any product.

The back of the bag reads: "Rebound -- a key offensive and defensive skills (sic) in basketball which results in winning the game." Mmmm, tasty! Then: "Now!!! Rebound is the new chocolate basketball that will win you and your games always."

You had me at "rebound."

Wanted

2008-09-18T20:55:00.001+08:00

Never have two simple words so captured my hopes and dreams. Alas, I think whoever made the sign wasn't asking for a place to dump human waste, but someone to sew clothes. A mananahi, so to speak.

The Secret of the Ooze

2008-09-05T19:37:00.003+08:00

Sorry about the absence, folks. I guess it's nothing new, but in this case, I've been eager to post, I just haven't had Internet at home. I still don't, but this ought to be short, so I won't lose too much money writing it at the café under Drew's bar in Katipunan.

About a year ago, I wrote about the PBA mascots. And then, a few months ago, I wrote about them again, thanks to the appearance of the Lactobacillus "condom na condom" character on the sidelines during games. But my all-time favorite mascot will always be the Omega liniment fellow. When I first wrote about the Omega man, I described his khaki shorts and his trademark dance, a machine gun pelvic gyration. Let's call it epilepsy of the crotch. At the time, I interpreted this dance as a reflection of Philippine popular culture. Aside from the Papaya song and dance, which possess a hypnotic blandness, it's hard to think of any local dance craze that didn't require agile hips -- Itaktak mo, Boom Tarat Tarat, Otso Otso, Doo Doo Doo Dah Dah Dah. I can list these for days.

But thanks to a recent rafting accident on the Chico River in Kalinga province, I now have a reason to use Omega liniment. The boat I was in flipped over in the rapids and an underwater rock smacked my thigh muscle while I held onto the side of the raft for dear life and rode out the rapids. It gave me the worst charlie horse of my life, which is still a fairly minor injury, but the muscle became so tight I could hardly walk. To loosen it up, I bought some Omega, and within 30 seconds of slathering the chalky, lime green ooze on my upper leg, I understood the Omega dance on a deeper level. All that a-pumpin' and a-thrustin' he does could be more than just the standard wiggling. It could the napalm burn sensation of Omega on your flesh. Indeed, once it's on you, for 20 to 30 minutes you feel like moving exactly like the Omega mascot dances, like fire ants are devouring your skin and you will shake your skeleton out of its fleshy shell to get them off of you.

This is only a slight exaggeration. Omega burns way hotter than BenGay and Icy Hot. Let's hope that VP Dick Cheney never gets his hand on this stuff, because people will be getting Omegaboarded like it ain't no thing.

The kalat in my mind

2008-08-18T17:43:00.002+08:00

Some scattered thoughts. Photos and perhaps videos will be added later.

1. Last night was an important first. Non-Filipinos tend to be endlessly amused by the local practice of buying soft drinks served in plastic bags with straws. It's pure pragmatism. The sari-sari store owners have to return the soda bottles to be refilled, so if you don't feel like standing around while you drink out of the bottle, you can have your drink poured into a plastic bag and take it to go. The novelty of plastic bag refreshments wore off on me years ago, but last night I saw something I thought impossible. A guy had two 500 mL bottles of Red Horse Extra Strong beer poured into separate plastic bags. Some people can't pour beer into a glass without having head overflowing all over the place. Imagine pouring it into a plastic bag. Usually, the people working the counter at a sari-sari store plod around grabbing cigarettes, cans of sardines and bags of chips in a state of semi-consciousness. Indeed, getting service often means hissing or making a loud kissing noise to wake up the shopkeeper behind the metal bars. Well, the guy working at the sari-sari last night achieved some kind of heightened level of awareness while pouring the volatile brew ever so slowly into the plastic bags. If you only saw the focus in his narrowed eyes, you'd think he was working with nitroglycerin. After his virtuoso pour, he handed the turgid, golden bags to the customer, who paid, hopped on his tricycle and motored off into the dark while sipping a liter of Red Horse from straws. The U.S. practice of brown-bagging beer bottles never seemed so emasculated.

2. I watched Game Six of the PBA Finals last night. Ginebra made it an even 3-3 in their series against Air21. The television cameramen did a nice job of panning the crowd during the timeouts and gave a sense of the atmosphere in the Araneta Coliseum, which reported record ticket sales of 2.5 million pesos for the do-or-die game. It was typical Ginebra insanity. My favorite moment was a zoom shot of five Ginebra fans proudly displaying a homemade banner that was in need of some editing: "See you on game 7!" The Gin-Kings won, so the fans got their wish. See you all Wednesday on Game 7.

This item would be funnier if I made no effort to explain a bit about Ginebra and translating Tagalog to English, but I think it would be unfair. There is really only one preposition in Tagalog: "sa." For native Tagalog speakers, this makes mastering the usage of English's myriad froms, tos, fors, ats and ons, difficult. Furthermore, Ginebra is the favorite team of the Philippine masses, the people least likely to have had the opportunity to perfect their English at schools like Assumption, Xavier, Ateneo, UP Diliman, La Salle, etc. It looks bad on a sign, but if you talked in English with Ginebra fans, many of them would be able to have a comfortable conversation.

3. Pinoy readers: Did anyone else notice Dwyane Wade's sidestep in the first half of the Greece-USA game last Thursday! I don't think he meant to do it, he was just trying to beat his man, but he definitely executed a sidestep. He was driving at an angle towards the basket on the break, and a Greek defender cut off his direct path to the hoop a step outside the key, so he planted on his left foot, sidestepped across his body and across the Greek player with his right foot, and finished the lay-up. When I saw it, I yelled at my TV: "Holy Shit! Wade just did a sidestep!"

I was excited because the sidestep is a one-on-one move indigenous to Philippine basketball. To American eyes, it looks awkward and defies description. ESPN's Chris Sheridan, in trying to explain Wade's move in his write-up of the game, called it a "right-to-left twist," which doesn't quite capture the move in words. I can't do much better, but I have the luxury of more space to work with. American players are taught to go hard to the basket and finish strong on fast breaks. Make a crossover or hesitation to get your defender off balance, then explode to the basket and finish at the rim. The sidestep, according to this philosophy, is a horrible move. The offensive player, instead of using his two steps after picking up his dribble to go straight for the hoop, uses one step to go forward and the next to hop horizontally to the side and flip up an off-balance lay-up. I have had players demonstrate to me how it is not a travel, but it still looks so weird that I want to scream "travelling" every time a player does it to me. The sidestep usually lets the offensive player get his body between the defender and the ball, so even though the sidestep usually leaves the ball handler too off-balance to jump high and finish hard, he can use his touch to loft a looping bank shot into the hoop at a trajectory out-of-reach for shot-blocking defenders.

Most people tend to agree that the sidestep's origins lie in the shortness of Filipino guards. For many of them, if they went straight to the basket and finished as high and as strong as they could, they'd probably still be running straight into a taller defender, waiting to smother the ball. The sidestep lets them get the shot off. The height factor plays a role in many of Philippine basketball's most thrilling innovations and quirks, like players' abilities to finish outrageous circus lay-ups, released from down below their waists and spun off the board with impeccable English, or pektos, as they call it.

Paeng Janjalani

2008-08-09T07:58:00.002+08:00

I unearthed this lovely photo of myself en route to Camotes Islands from Danao, Cebu. There wasn't much to do but try not to be affected by the acrid fumes rising up from the floor of the boat, where it seemed like half of the passengers had yakked in a Goonies-style chain reaction. After I mastered my gut, it was time to play camera-whore, although I think that in the standard usage of the term, you take more flattering pictures than this one. For the uninitiated, Paeng is a Pinoy nickname for Raphael, and Janjalani is the name of a notorious Abu Sayyaf guerrilla who was killed in 2006. Basilan ain't ready for this.

Arenas follow-ups

2008-07-25T04:22:00.001+08:00

Here's an image that sort of puts you in Gilbert Arenas' shoes during one of his adidas store appearances. There's just a wall of hands pointed out at you, trying to get a piece of you. Looks a little like a zombie film, or Sunday service at an evangelical church. Either way, it can be scary, and Arenas proved himself to be a cool customer by handling it well and making a lot of people happy.

Read below for a series of quick posts offering the deleted scenes from Arenas' Philippine tour. Well, they weren't deleted, but they never made it into my story.

All photos by Sandro Paredes, whose Web site has hundreds more like them.

Show your love, Apollo

2008-07-25T00:40:00.001+08:00

For a short while in the wee hours of the morning, my story was on the front of the New York Times home page. I'm also in the photograph, so not only was my story on the home page, but so was my filthy, no-good mug.

Churlish

2008-07-25T00:36:00.001+08:00

If you browse Sandro's photos, you will find little bits and pieces of me in many of them, but none so much as this one, which is really just a shot of me looking pissed off. I can't say why, however, because I was much more relaxed here, at Arenas' first appearance of the day at SM Mall of Asia, then I was 10 hours later, after three in-stores, one quarter of Ateneo-La Salle, Arenas' basketball exhibition and a new personal commuting record that took me from from Katipunan to Mall of Asia to Rockwell to Cubao to Trinoma and back to Katips, all using trains and jeepneys.

The ball

2008-07-25T00:28:00.001+08:00

Arenas signing the plush toy ball I wrote about in The Times. His generosity with the fans brought to mind the most popular local players like Sonny Jaworski and Alvin Patrimonio, who were legendary for spending hours signing autographs and posing for photographs after games. Arenas slipped into the role effortlessly.

I know what Hell sounds like

2008-07-25T00:24:00.001+08:00

There is but one soundtrack playing in Hell -- Philippine girl group Mocha -- and it afflicts the ears of the eternally damned like a million alcohol-soaked bobby pins being driven into their heads. The ladies of Mocha seem to have a lock on basketball events; they were hired to ruin Alaska's championship after party at Hard Rock Café last year, as well. Their hit 'Patcha' could rival waterboarding on White House counsel/fascist ogre David Addington's short list of party activities.

They opened for Arenas at multiple events during the tour, wearing these adidas outfits that give new meaning to the term "performance apparel." Thankfully, we were spared 'Patcha,' in favor of shoddy Beyoncé and Rihanna covers. One sure sign of Arenas' smarts was that he instinctively knew to stay away from these dames. He posed for some pictures, but when Mocha, the aptly-named leader of Mocha (in the center wearing the red top and skirt) tried to pull him on stage for some sexy dancing, I saw Arenas look more serious than at any other moment of his time in Manila and shut her down with a very definitive "no." He was comfortable being pawed and grabbed by hundreds of screaming fans, but the attention from Mocha proved too frightening even for Agent Zero.

Oh Brother!

2008-07-25T00:01:00.001+08:00

Even the La Salle Brothers were psyched about the opportunity to have their photos taken with Pope Zero.

Where's Cassell?

2008-07-24T23:59:00.001+08:00

Amazingly, hype man Sam Cassell was not hand to upstage this gathering of luminaries by chanting "Pacman! Pacman!" like he did after the Pacquiao/Diaz fight. Sam, you're slipping.

The pre-Ateneo-La Salle gathering in the Araneta Coliseum VIP room was impressive nonetheless, with Arenas and Senator Richard Gordon shaking hands in front of U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney and Manny Pacquiao. Another Arenas nomme de court is Black President, and this part of this Manila trip felt the most like an official state visit.

There's a lot to love in this image: Pacman's bewildered smile set against Madame Ambassador's neck-throbbing enthusiasm and Gordon's black on black outfit that could almost pass for a polo-unitard come immediately to mind. The country is truly screwed if a natural or man-made calamity ever occurs during an Ateneo-La Salle basketball game, because Gordon, an avid Blue Eagle follower, former Ateneo cheerleader and, oh yeah, head of the Philippine Red Cross, is not going to call in the calvary to pull anyone out of the mudslide until the game is through and he has finished pumping his fist to the Ateneo alma mater. "You're doing a heckuva job, Gordie."

Pacquiao had the largest entourage, but Ambassador Kenney's made the largest impression. A half-dozen paunchy, Caucasian gentleman dressed in Blackwater casual -- beige polo shirts, black Ray-Ban sunglasses, crew cuts, 'staches, stern faces -- followed closely behind her. They were a good deterrent to keep curious reporters like me away, for fear I might provoke a warning shot.

The adidas flasher

2008-07-24T23:27:00.001+08:00

The local ad-wizards who cooked up the promotional campaign for Arenas' tour presented a very literal interpretation of his nickname, Agent Zero. Even two weeks after his visit, every sporting goods store I pass in a mall has a 7-foot tall poster of Arenas as Agent Zero, wearing this long, black leather trenchcoat and cradling a basketball. At his Trinoma appearance, he actually wore the jacket, which I presume was meant to evoke Shaft, although to me the outfit seemed like something a flasher might wear on his way to a pick-up game.

Look at my banana pants!

2008-07-24T23:20:00.001+08:00

What basketball exhibition would be complete without interpretive breakdance? At Arenas' "statement show," supposedly the main event of his tour, where he put on a short shooting exhibition, the thousands of onlookers actually spent more time watching this dance troupe than Arenas himself. In the background, please note two-time PBA most valuable player Benjie Paras (with the shaved head and black t-shirt) assuming his "this is unbelievably wack" pose. I concur, Benjie. It's the same pose I strike while watching Bubble Gang.

Trinoma Impostor

2008-07-24T23:13:00.001+08:00

I'm not really sure what big man in the left foreground is doing in this photograph. It looks like he's trying to show off a nipple ring or something, but he was among the many, many fans lined up in Trinoma mall's adidas store to see Arenas.

The more interesting moment, however, was after the in-store, when this guy, probably the only other athletic-looking black man in the building, showed up at the mall atrium to watch Arenas' mini-performance. Although he's about 6'5'', so maybe one and a half or two inches taller than Agent Zero, and much less broad-shouldered than Arenas, he was darkly complected enough to convince more than a few onlookers that he was actually the NBA All-Star they came to watch. Kids were asking for pictures and autographs, while others just gazed in astonishment, while this guy's mischievous friend in the green hat further misled people by yelling, "Gilbert! Gilbert!"

Not impressed

2008-07-21T18:49:00.001+08:00

On his final morning in Manila, Arenas presided over the dedication of an adidas-sponsored court at a Gawad Kalinga village in Brookside, up in the Bagong Silangan wastelands of Northeast Quezon City behind Commonwealth Avenue. Getting there is an adventurous drive. One right turn takes you away from the bustle and commerce of Commonwealth and into a rapidly devolving landsape of plywood and aluminum shanties; pocked, gravel roads; and desolate, scrubby wastelands filled with brown weeds. The streets are meandering and poorly marked, offering the same sights of people squatting in the shade, others pushing 'diyaryong-bote' (newspaper-bottle) carts of recyclable trash and still others sorting through piles of scrap metal outside junk shops. These are standard sights for people living in Metro Manila, but for Arenas, whose trip until then had kept him inside the city's poshest malls and the Presidential Suite at the Peninsula Manila, it was an important trip to take. When I got to interview him, he mentioned that he was sad, of course, to see so much poverty, but grateful that he had been able to see more than just Manila's cellophane-thin layer of glam.

Before Arenas arrived, adidas officials and a small platoon of security guards got the court ready. Ronnie Magsanoc and Benjie Paras, former star players known as the Stockton and Malone of the PBA, ran drills for a group of third and fourth graders under a vicious morning sun along with Purefoods Coach Ryan Gregorio and current PBA players Enrico Villanueva and Rey Evangelista. This provided the true highlight of the morning, when Coach Ronnie told the kids they should run to their houses and change out of their school uniforms into some athletic clothes, like shorts and t-shirts. One girl yelled out, "Puwede bang pajamas?" as in, "can we wear pajamas?" and everyone just shrugged and said, "of course!" I'd pay to see an NBA team send its players out on the court in team pajamas one night.

Anyway, when Arenas finally showed up, it was brutally hot and no one was really gathered around the court because they were huddled together wherever shade could be found. He toured one of the schools in the village, and received this warm response from a charming little lady. "Stop wasting my time, Arenas. I'm trying to get an education."

Word of the Day

2008-07-21T14:20:00.003+08:00

GMA sportscaster and PBL commissioner Chino Trinidad showed up at Arenas' Gawad Kalinga appearance. After Arenas left, I rode back to Makati with some of his PR people, who complained that Trinidad ambushed Arenas for an interview on his way out of the GK Brookside community in Quezon City. What disturbed me was Trinidad's resemblance to Pee Wee Herman in these photographs, which I attribute to his rosy cheeks, waxed hair and maniacal, red-lipped grin.

You might also notice Trinidad's lovely adidas dry-fit shirt. Nearly every member of the local press corps who covered Arenas' visit came decked out head-to-toe in adidas gear at every event. I suppose they didn't want to offend the adidas employees who worked very hard to make Arenas' tour here run smoothly and successfully, but it was still jarring for me to see so many journalists sucking up to a sportswear company at the same time as they were covering it. Watching the procession of newspaper and television journalists march through the Manila Peninsula hotel lobby during the afternoon of one-on-one interviews was like watching an adidas runway show. Of course, many local media personalities are literally on the payroll of either Nike or adidas, so they have good reason to be all sipsip to their corporate masters. Also, while it's easy to take shots at the less-than-independent aspects of Philippine journalism, let's try to remember that local reporters aren't given much of a choice in the matter, because their news organizations usually pay them poor wages and expect them to make up the difference through envelopmental journalism, i.e. handouts.

Arenas story

2008-07-17T09:20:00.001+08:00

Here is my recent story in The New York Times about Gilbert Arenas' trip to Manila in the first week of July. The madness the ensues when an NBA All-Star descends on the Philippines has to be seen to be believed. It felt like I was trailing the Pope around Manila. Arenas was so impressed by the reception Filipino fans gave him that he wrote a blog entry titled "Everybody should visit Manila." He ended the post with these words of wisdom: "Just remember people, if you want to feel like a king and feel like a star, you know where to go: Manila. So, Pauly Shore, after you finish reading this, you head to Manila to jumpstart your career, baby. You’ll be back in the business, baby. You’ll be doing Jury Duty 2 in no time."

From reading his blog or watching him interact with fans, it's pretty easy to understand why Arenas has a reputation for being one of the NBA's funniest, most candid and likeable personalities.

Now that the story is published, I'll post some behind the scenes anecdotes and photos from Arenas' visit in the next few days. Stay tuned.

Basketball and Pacman

2008-06-29T16:03:00.004+08:00

I've got a long post that's been in the works for weeks now, and it will remain that way. It's hard to think about anything other than Manny Pacquiao today; that's the way it is in the Philippines every time he fights. This time, he made mincemeat of the extremely tough but fatally slow David Diaz in what was one of the most boring action-packed fights I've ever seen; there was no drama whatsoever because Pacquiao was never in any danger. It reminded me of the tattooing Arturo Gatti suffered at the hands of Floyd Mayweather a few years ago.

Every round Pacman seemed to land a dozen haymakers that should have knocked Diaz down, if not out, yet the big-boned Diaz just kept absorbing shots, even as his trunks changed colors from shiny white, to rose pink and, by the end, a deep burgundy from all the blood dripping down from his face. Moments before Diaz went down in a heap near the end of the ninth round, it started to look like Pacquiao was slowing down a touch, and that Diaz might be able to stage some kind of rally, like a real life victory by way of Homer Simpson disease. (In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer discovers he has a unique condition that allows him to absorb countless blows to the head, then enjoys a short but successful boxing career by allowing opponents to slug him in the head until they're so tired he can just push them over.) The fight also reminded me of the early rounds of a Rocky fight, the ones in which Stallone stands there and gets hammered while Adrian and Mick cringe and Pauly prepares to throw in the towel, until he miraculously summons the strength to knock out Apollo, Drago or Clubber Lang. After some of those rounds, I imagined Pacquiao sitting in his corner, exasperated, and exclaiming, "Pare! Hindi siya tao! Para siyang bakal!" (A reprise of Drago's famous line: "He's not human. He's like a piece of iron.") Alas, Diaz was neither Rocky Balboa nor Homer Simpson, and he took one of those rare beatings in a big-money fight that made you question if it was worth the $850,000 payday.

So that was the fight. I'm probably not going to add a ton of boxing insight that readers can't find elsewhere. So let me bring the discussion back to basketball. Since I moved to the Philippines, I've witnessed Pacquiao evincing the same passion for hoops that most Filipino men share, except that he has so much money and fame that his passion manifests itself in some particularly interesting and entertaining ways. Shortly after he pummeled Erik Morales in their second bout in the beginning of 2006, Pacquiao was the guest of honor at the Araneta Coliseum during game one of the PBA Fiesta Conference Finals. He showed up at halftime dressed in jack-o-lantern orange and badly missed a couple free throws. Then, after subsequent victories against Oscar Larios and Morales again, I noticed that news stories about his return to the Philippines and General Santos City, his hometown, usually showed clips of him eagerly getting back on the basketball court, playing on concrete floors in inter-barangay leagues. Then, in 2007 he became owner of his own team in the now-defunct National Basketball Conference, the MP Warriors of General Santos City. It's probable that Pacquiao formed the team not only because he loves the game, but also because he saw the basketball team as a way to curry favor with voters before his run for Congress in May 2007.

Today, Pacman added a few new footnotes to the story about his basketball connections. Several times during the fight, GMA's announcers Chino Trinidad and Quinito Henson mentioned that Manny's unbelievable stamina and energy, which allowed him to land hundreds of sledgehammer blows over the course of nine rounds, was due to a training regimen that included, among other things, daily basketball games, sometimes four each day. I doubt this really had much to do with his conditioning as a boxer, but I was still interested to learn that basketball remained a part of Pacquiao's routine throughout much of his training.

After the fight, after the ringside interviews with Pacquiao, Diaz and Bob Arum, who promotes both fighters, GMA covered a great moment in the locker room when Pacquiao posed for pictures with recently-crowned NBA champions Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Sam Cassell and Rajon Rondo. While Cassell, whose impending retirement could be followed by another great career as a hype man (Spliff Sam, anyone?), chanted "Pac-Man! Pac-Man!" and Pierce flexed a bicep, Garnett and Pacquiao had a vaudevillian tête-à-tête where Garnett, who is only a couple inches short of being a full two feet taller than Pacquiao, played the ventriloquist and Manny was the doll, and neither could understand the other. Garnett leaned down and said something into Pacquiao's ear, and the champ responded by nodding and beaming vacantly into space. A moment later, he said something to Garnett, and the same look of happy, complete bafflement washed over KG's face. Sportscaster Chino Trinidad stepped in to smooth the lines of communication by telling Garnett that this is the first time Pacquiao was starstruck enough to ask to have his picture taken with another celebrity. Garnett told Chino, "Well I'm his number one fan." Then Trinidad asked Pacquiao in Tagalog if the moment was like a dream, and Pacquiao yelled, "Yeah, yeah! My dream is come true!" Of course, he wasn't talking about joining and elite class of boxers who won belts in five separate weight classes. He was talking about standing with his arms around the NBA's former MVP, Garnett; its current Finals MVP, Pierce; and its one and only E.T., Cassell.

Addendum: Low and behold, big-time local sports columnist Quinito Henson, who was covering the Pacquiao fight as an analyst for the GMA network, devoted most of his write-up of the event to the dressing room encounter with the Celtics. Read it here, and do it fast because Philippine Star links tend to go dead fast.

Air Tsi-nelas!

2008-06-15T09:50:00.004+08:00

Anyone who's read more than a few posts on this blog or who has seen guys playing basketball at a covered court or street corner in Manila or just about anywhere in the Philippines will know that many, many Filipinos -- I'm tempted to say a majority -- play pick-up ball in flip-flops, which around here are called tsinelas and pronounced "chee-né-las." I could probably fill a few reams of looseleaf with a list of things I admire about the Philippine brand of basketball, but players' abilities to sprint, leap, slide and stop on a dime with nothing but a rubber pancake between their feet and the ground is simply awe-inspiring. I try to imitate the sidestep and other classic Pinoy one-on-one moves, although like most Americans, I will always think it's a traveling violation, but I would never dream of stepping onto a cement court in my tsinelas and shouting "Sige na nga! Game na!" I would be the first person in history to play in tsinelas and a couple of 10-pound ankle braces. Maybe it's a fear thing. Sometimes, when I watch guys jump stop and slide in the paint like tennis players on a clay court, I get a feeling of nervous anticipation like I'm about to witness a gore-soaked highway collision. Kinakabahan ako, I believe, is one way to say it in Tagalog -- "It's giving me palpitations." Yet the tsinelas-clad warriors play on with no fear, and it's usually me, the guy wearing ankle armor and downmarket version of Nike Shox, who hobbles off with a minor sprain.

Playing in flip-flops is an iconic symbol of Philippine basketball, so much so that it has been immortalized in song. My friend Ryan put me on to this rap song by a group called Legit Misfits, "Air Tsinelas."

There were no lyrics for the song online, so I transcribed these myself, then had Ryan fill in a few blanks that I couldn't make out by ear. Thanks, Ryan! Without further ado: "Air Tsinelas"

First Verse

Air Tsi-nelas!
De-hins nadudulas like Jolas
Gamit panlaro pag kami'y dumayo
Siguradong iiskor, kalye man o gym floor
I sting like Relosa, kung sumabog like Loyzaga
Tirang Fabiosa laro pang Cuneta
Like Patrimonio we got the skills
Tulad ni Gonalgo we get the steals
Bakas! Bakas! Pag napapalakas madali ang pustahan
Napapaharas. Back up! Back up! Pare, atras
Sa sobrang lakas ng my tsinelas.

Chorus

Patas sa Adidas, ang aming tsinelas
Patas sa Puma, ang aming tsinelas
Patas sa Nike, ang aming tsinelas
Cause our air tsinelas, hindi nadudulas

Beachwalk ang tatak ng aking tsinelas
Spartan ang tatak ng aking tsinelas
Ito ang tatak ng aming tsinelas
Cause our air tsinelas, hindi nadudulas

Basketball, Basketball
Wearing our tsinelas we're standing tall
Subok sa tibay, subok sa lakas
Ang aming tsinelas, hindi nadudulas

2nd verse

Pass it here, pass it here, I'm in the clear
Here I come, here I go, the rookie of the year
Blastin' past your ass like Benjie Paras
'Cause like Jaworski I'm built to last
Excite like Alvarez, Meneses or Limpot
Triggerman like Caidic pag tsinelas ang susuot
Strong like Cardel, tough like Shell
Rebound, rebound, grab it like a habit
Like Nelson Asaytono, destroying like Distrito
Going coast to coast like Pido Jarencio
Going above the rim, like Samboy Lim
Tabi lang pare ko kung ayaw mong tumikim

Chorus

3rd verse

Pass the ball, pass the ball, yes yes y'all
I'm wearing my tsinelas pag ako'y naglalaro
I'm doing elegant shots like El Presidente
Ume-ere pa ako parang Freddie Hubalde
Strong like the Beermen, slams like Villamin
Here comes Manoy the Bicolano Superman
Shooting threes with ease, I can feel the breeze
As I hit the spot, (Here's Nash with a shot)
Swish...
Alley-oop, Alley-oop, I'm taking it to the hoop
Stomping my tsinelas with the Misfits group
So forget the Ewings, Shaqs or the Jordans
Sa aking tsinelas, you know I'm soaring

Chorus

Talo ang lahat sa aming tsinelas
Talo ang lahat sa aming tsinelas
Talo ang lahat sa aming tsinelas
'Cause our air tsinelas, hindi nadudulas

And now, my unofficial English translation:

Air Tsi-nelas!
Never slipping like Jolas
Using them to play when we go to other courts to challenge teams
Definitely gonna score, on the street or on the gym floor
I sting like Relosa, on fire like Loyzaga
Fabiosa-shooter playing in Cuneta
Like Patrimonio we got the skills
Like Gonzalgo we get the steals
Stamping footprints, when we're strong the bet is easy
Harassing you. back up! Back up! Dude, back up
From the awesome strength of my tsinelas

Equal to Adidas, there's our tsinelas,
Equal to Puma, there's our tsinelas,
Equal to Nike, there's our tsinelas,
Cause our air tsinelas never slip
Beachwalk's the brand of my tsinelas
Spartan's the brand of my tsinelas
Here's the brand of our tsinelas
Cause our air tsinelas never slip

Basketball, basketball, wearing our tsinelas we're standing tall
Tried and proven stamina, tried and proven strength, our air tsinelas never slip

Pass it here, pass it here, I'm in the clear
Here I come, here I go, the rookie of the year
Blastin' past your ass like Benjie Paras
'Cause like Jaworski I'm built to last
Excite like Alvarez, Meneses or Limpot
Triggerman like Caidic when I'm wearing tsinelas
Strong like Cardel, tough like Shell
Rebound, rebound, grab it like a habit
Like Nelson Asaytono, destroying like Distrito
Going coast to coast like Pido Jarencio
Going above the rim, like Samboy Lim
Step aside bro if you don't want to try me

Pass the ball, pass the ball, yes yes y'all
I'm wearing my tsinelas when I'm playing
I'm doing elegant shots like El Presidente
Still hanging in the air like I'm Freddie Hubalde
Strong like the Beermen, slams like Villamin
Here comes Manoy the Bicolano Superman
Shooting threes with ease, I can feel the breeze
As I hit the spot, (Here's Nash with a shot)
Swish...
Alley-oop, Alley-oop, I'm taking it to the hoop
Stomping my tsinelas with the Misfits group
So forget the Ewings, Shaqs or the Jordans
In my tsinelas, you know I'm soaring

There you have it. I'm a little worn out from that, so I'm going to cut my analysis short, but I like the way the song gives a roll call of PBA greats. It's a Philippine answer to Kurtis Blow's "Basketball," which is also kind of corny but extremely lovable. I was thrilled to hear Jojo "Jolas" Lastimosa -- who may be Manila's biggest Obama booster -- get the first shout out in the song. Another former Alaska Milkman, Bong "Mr. Excitement" Alvarez, is notable for his athleticism and for getting traded shortly after he was shot in the butt outside a massage parlor. El Presidente is Ramon Fernandez, sort of like the PBA's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a big man who was around forever and leads most of the career scoring categories. He even had the elegant shot, a patented running one-hander that has a name and reputation like the Sky Hook.

There's plenty more to say, but I'll let the Web community add more stories about guys like Rudy Distrito, Samboy Lim, Allan Caidic, et. al. Oh, I can't resist one Samboy Lim story. He's about 6'2'' and was known as the Skywalker. A month ago a beachfront restaurant owner in Palawan cornered me and spent an hour and a half regaling me with Samboy stories. He claimed to still have a poster of Lim dunking over Sam Perkins in the 1985 Jones Cup in his mother's house in Manila. Readers, please feel free to add stories about any of these players, playing in tsinelas or just to clean up my translation!

The Academy ... err, Society has Spoken

2008-06-11T16:17:00.001+08:00

Move over Oscar! The Society of Professional Journalists, Western Washington Chapter has honored me with an award for writing the 2nd-best sports story in an Alternative Newsweekly in 2007. That's an awful lot of qualifiers, but it's still a great thrill to be recognized. You can still read the story, about import Rosell Ellis' season with the PBA's Alaska Aces, here.

Archival Footage!

2008-06-10T23:14:00.002+08:00

The die-hard Manila Vanilla fans will no doubt be disappointed by this clip, which -- unlike my fabled turn in GMA 7's Bakekang -- features neither my hairy chest nor my attempts at acting. However, I managed to appear somewhat composed and intelligent for 10 minutes with local sportscasters Bill Velasco, Boyet Sison and Jinno Rufino, whose quickfire repartée can feel a little intimidating to an intruder/guest like myself. Our subject is -- what else? -- Ateneo/La Salle. I got more mileage from writing about that rivalry than any other subject in Philippine basketball, and while it is a rich and interesting story that reveals a lot about Manila society, I don't know if it deserves its preeminence over the rest of the basketball world. I know why the Green Archer/Blue Eagle rivalry gets top billing, however. The same elite alumni who pack the Araneta Coliseum each time the teams meet are the people who have the disposable income to buy Ateneo/La Salle gear, the people who drove my NY Times story to #2 on the sports page's most-E-mailed rankings and the people who control local media outlets that analyze the rivalry ad nausea.

So, without further ado, enjoy the video.

One final note on accents: My American readers, especially those who know me personally, might wonder why I'm talking with a put-on Filipino-English accent. I'm not exactly sure why. All I can say is that foreigners who end up staying here for long periods of time end up using the local English accent and some of its irregular idioms like "open the light," "go down from the bus," and "craving for rice." It just feels natural to respond to people in the same manner they talk to you. It's easy to look at this from another angle, however, and say that my adoptive accent is an ugly example of pandering racism. I would never walk into a Chinese restaurant in New York, for example, and say, 'Herrow my fwend! I would rike sum poak flied lice!" Of course, Chinese-Americans and Chinese immigrants living in America don't speak like that anyway, but I wouldn't use any voice other than my own while ordering at Hunan Pan. Yet that's exactly what I do here.

Here is the difference, as I see it, between the Chinese restaurant example and my experience in the Philippines, are these: First, the Philippines has a stronger claim on English than many other nations outside of the United States and United Kingdom. Of course, it is the same gnarled claim that other former colonies have, in which native cultures and languages have ceded ground to English, which has become lingua franca and in the Philippines' case, a second national language. The colonial experience was ugly and too complicated to unravel in this short post. Regarding the language/accent issue, I believe I'm not pandering to Filipinos' accents, but speaking a Philippine variant of English that may sound odd to American ears the same way American English sounds crude to the boys at Eton.

PBA Mascot Update -- Condom na Condom!

2008-04-21T10:04:00.002+08:00

We're almost a month into the PBA's new import conference, and it's been pretty uneventful to date. The imports are all solid, with a few recognizable names like Aaron McGhee, who was on the Hollis Price Oklahoma team that went to the Final Four, Darius Rice, who used to bomb threes for Miami in the Big East, and Randy Holcomb, who was one of those west coast players who was always listed in Street and Smith's as the conference's top gun, but you never got to see him play. But it's still too early in the conference to report many developments on the basketball end. If Saturday's Red Bull/Alaska game is any indication, however, that may soon change; Alaska's coach Tim Cone was ejected, Alaska's import Holcomb broke Rich Alvarez's nose on a flagrant foul, then Red Bull coach Yeng Guiao nearly attacked Holcomb before Red Bull won the game in overtime. We've only just begun...

But one of the wonderful things about the PBA is that even in the absence of interesting basketball, there are boatloads of other intriguing tidbits to focus on. Here, once again, I point to one of my favorite continuing themes in Philippine basketball: commercialism and, specifically, the PBA sponsors' mascots. Anyone who's visited Araneta this conference will have noticed that some old friends -- Mr. Softee, the Xtreme Magic Sing Mic Man and the Casino Ethyl Alcohol guy -- are M.I.A., but their replacements are charming. The first is the Yakult bottle. Nothing too weird here. Just a smiling bottle of yogurt drink to make your digestive system happy. As you can see, little girls in fuzzy tiaras go wild for live yeast cultures in their morning drinks.

But the real inspiration for this post -- and I apologize for being coy and holding the punchline for the very end; it's very un-reporterly of me -- is the cream-colored "L" thing. The consensus in the crowd is that it's a dead ringer for a condom. Its little mohawk looks like a reservoir tip. The first time I saw it, I was sitting a row behind Alaska reserve center Poch Juinio, and as it walked by, he yelled, "Condom na Condom ito!" Basically, "It's a condom!!!!!!!!!!" Later, I was informed that the "L" stands for Lacto-something-ol, and that it's a cousin of Yakult. Ask anyone at the Araneta, however, and they'll tell you it's a condom. Of course, the kids love it, too.

It also makes me wonder: Just how long will it be before the PBA accepts sponsor money from Frenzy or one of the other local condom brands and allows them to parade an actual walking condom around the games. Would it be a wrapped condom, or a giant, grinning, strawberry-flavored, rose-colored phallus? I'm going to give the league the benefit of the doubt and say that the higher-ups would have the good sense to protect whatever minuscule shreds of family-friendliness and dignity that it still has, but it wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing I've seen the league do.

Alaska Commercials

2008-04-15T11:00:00.003+08:00

I've got plans to start posting much more regularly. Those sound like famous last words, but I've read a handful of alarmist stories -- here in the New York Observer, and again, in the New Yorker -- about the demise of print media, and since audiences are migrating online, I'm going to try to blog more often.

I'll start off simple with You Tube links to a couple Alaska Milk commercials. I had the pleasure of spending a conference with Alaska's PBA team, the Aces, last year, and whenever I manage to write something decent about Philippine basketball, much of it will be thanks to the access and information they provided me. Alaska recently came out with a fabulous new commercial starring their extremely telegenic -- when he's not flashing you -- star player, Willie Miller. Miller explains that Alaska has been involved with sports for a long time, since even before he was born, then they just let a 1974 TV ad do the rest of the talking. Let's watch it first, then review some of the highlights.

Some thoughts: 1. I'm not sure if this is as hilarious to people who don't know much Tagalog and don't hear the language spoken around them on a daily basis, but Cisco Oliver's Tagalog phrases are classic. "Galing mo!" -- you're good! "Masarap?" -- "Delicious?" He spits the words out like he accidentally got a mouthful of ants in his cassava cake.

2. Cisco Oliver, from what I've read, seems to be the prototype for the modern import in the PBA. Although commercial league teams had hired Americans to reinforce local squads since at least the 1950s, Oliver was one of the first high-scoring, loose-living, flamboyant black imports. I mention race here because there really is racial bent to local thinking towards imports. Teams that hire white players become the punchlines for jokes between players, coaches, sportscasters and other league insiders. From what I could tell, Oliver played on a lot of terrible teams and scored a ton of points, and for some reason was allowed to play even during All-Filipino conferencces. The same for an old-school bruiser named Billy Robinson who looked like the ex-wrestler the Junkyard Dog. I'll try to get to the bottom of this.

3. The Alaska boy! Even in his native language he sounds ridiculous. I've been trying to perfect his "Yeah" for the past three days. Promoting your product with a blond American boy seems antiquated, even in the light skin-coveting world of Philippine pop culture. Nowadays, advertisers tend to go for mestiza children who look only partly American or Chinese. Alaska, however, still has this Children of the Damned blond boy on their milk boxes, and it makes the company's name even more confusing, since Alaska has nothing to do with the 49th state. It's really "alas ka" -- "you're an ace" in Tagalog." But why name your product in the local language, then slap a foreign face on the box? It's a moot point, now. That boy is iconic, now, and the company has to keep him for brand awareness reasons.

All in all, kudos to Alaska for putting together a funny commercial. It sure beats the commercials from a year ago that featured animated maxi pads doing calisthenics.

Commercial number two is the Alaska girl basketball spot. I worked as a sports consultant on this shoot, trying to make the girls look like they knew how to play. The lead, Sara, was pretty good and easy to teach. In some cases, the directors actually had an easier time getting her to execute the basketball moves than to emote properly on camera. My favorite part of the shoot was when the director explained to Sara that he wanted her to "Jumujordan." He turned Jordan into a Tagalog um-verb. I think everyone wishes they could Jumordan.

The Dream is Dead

2008-03-03T09:13:00.002+08:00

Reporters. They're always checking the facts. It's usually a good thing, but this time, with Salt Lake Tribune reporter Steve Luhm checking out the Karl Malone-to-Red Bull rumor, it's just a killjoy.

Luhm called Malone at home to see what was really good. The Mailman's response: "Steve, I don't know what you're talking about." Then a pause. "Steve, you know me, don't you? Do you think I miss it that bad? No. Hell, no."

Well, it was fun while it lasted. As for Luhm, nice job reporting, but you could have filed the story without all the cheap shots at the Philippines. But, you know, what else do you expect from somebody who lives in Utah?

The Mailman Cometh?

2008-03-02T07:37:00.003+08:00

The mailman, as in an employee of the Quezon City postal service, rarely comes to my house. Or, perhaps he does come, but by the time he arrives my correspondence has already found its way into a trash fire in the Nia Road shantytown next to the post office. None of it matters, because the real Mailman -- Karl Malone -- may be coming to Manila.

Yee-haw! Karl's coming to town and he's bringing enough Rogaine for everybody.

I'm rushing to get this post out because it's only a matter of days before this fairly ridiculous rumor gets shot down. For the time being, however, this story, originally published in the Manila Bulletin and then reprinted in the Salt Lake City Deseret Morning News and on ESPN.com Insider's NBA rumor page, has enough suckers biting that I want to get my piece of the pie before reality turns it to vapors.

The PBA's Red Bull franchise is reportedly negotiating with Malone to suit up as the Barakos' token American in the league's import conference, which begins later this month. And what a token he would be -- one of the NBA's 50 Greatest players, the league's second-leading career scorer and arguably the best power forward in NBA history.

Let's say this up front before getting ahead of ourselves: when Red Bull GM Tony Chua says the team is "awaiting [Malone]'s decision," it could mean anything. It could mean the Red Bull coaching staff was sitting around a few buckets of San Miguel Beer somewhere in Pasig City and one of the coaches said, "Hey, Karl Malone would be an awesome import!" And that was the end of it. Someone could have actually reached out to Malone or his agent, but not gotten much farther than that.

Or, Malone could actually be considering a trip to the Philippines. Money wouldn't be a factor, since the PBA caps imports' contracts at $12,000 per month, with under the table incentives that can push earnings up to about $20K. But Malone is married to a Filipina, and it's possible that she could be encouraging him to take Red Bull's offer. If that's the case, the Philippine legislature may take a break from the latest round of corruption hearings about the president's role in a ridiculously bloated broadband contract to add Malone's wife to the list of National Heroes. Bringing Karl Malone to the PBA would be that big.

From the NBA to the NRA to the PBA. There's some good possum-huntin' here in the Philippines.

And then there's the X-factor. Malone has always been something of a wild card. Everything about him seems to defy the conventional image of an NBA superstar: from his down-home Louisiana persona, which is reminiscent of Forrest Gump's pal Bubba; to hobbies like hunting, cattle ranching and professional wrestling; to Malone's ride, an 18-wheeler that he used to drive and make actual deliveries in during the off-season; to his endorsements, which include Rogaine and the NRA; to a wardrobe that is home to several cowboy hats and Malone's legendary draft-day suit; and finally, his NBA pals like John Stockton, who everyone seems to hate. Malone is just different, and maybe, just maybe he gets it in his head that playing in the PBA and living in his wife's motherland for six months would be fun, and he follows through with it.

So, pretending that Malone actually does choose to play for Red Bull, what would it mean?

1. The Mailman would pose for roughly 50,000 cell phone pictures per week. His first month in town would likely rival Beatlemania, and he would be consistently mobbed in public. The percentage change in Filipino babies named Karl could be quadruple digits. People in PBA circles are still geeked over the season that former Chicago Bull Dickey Simpkins spent in the league, and that was 4 years ago. I'm sure that other PBA players will run to the sidelines after the game to get their cameras and pose with Malone and their families. I wouldn't be surprised of some players even figure out ways to pose with Malone during the actual game, most likely during time outs or on the foul line. There would undoubtedly be some awkward moments, particularly for the Mailman, who might have a hard time figuring out why the guy who has been holding him by the jersey, kneeing him in the back and grabbing his index finger when he tries to jump for a rebound is now asking him to say Cheese and hold his baby.

Malone's signature short tie from the 1984 Draft will be selling like hotcakes at Shoemart.

2. This raises another question. The attention and fanfare Malone would receive off the court would absolutely be matched by the attention opposing teams would give him on it, only during games, at least, there would be none of the affection. The good coaches would devise elaborate schemes to harass and stop him, while the less clever ones would just toss out a zone and tell everyone to cheat towards Malone. Every team would trot out their aging, burly enforcer, whose only concerns would be provoking Malone and pounding him under the boards.

Just how good would the 44-year-old Malone be in the PBA? My guess is that he'd be very good. Although 44 is very old for professional basketball, Malone had one of those human muscle physiques that looked like it would stay chiseled into perpetuity. He also seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn't let his body go the way of the Barkley after retirement. He probably won't be too quick out there, but I don't think his conditioning would be an embarrassment. His offensive game would be a great fit in the PBA. I could see him scoring between 20 and 30 per night on mid-range jumpers alone, then picking up a few more buckets inside.

If the PBA's only other unlimited height import conference, back in 2005, is any indication, then Malone won't be competing against anyone who's likely to make him look bad. The talent pool for players taller than 6-9, where most teams recruit for an unlimited height conference, is smaller than at 6-6, and teams in 2005 had a tough time finding big guys willing to fly across the world and play for less money than they'd make in Europe or even China. It was a big-stiff convention and teams had the highest turnover rate of imports of any conference in the last seven years. Red Bull, the team that Malone would be going to, set a dubious record by cycling through 10 imports during a 16 game season, and a couple other teams nearly matched them. If the league sees a similar shortage of imports capable of running and chewing gum at the same time, Malone shouldn't have too much trouble.

But still, if Malone has any doubts about his ability to come in and dominate this league, he should stay away. Two years ago, when 9-year NBA veteran Darvin Ham led Talk-N-Text to a quarterfinal loss against Air21, he was lampooned in the press. He left the country bitter and angry over the way the media pounced on him, which he compared to the kind of propaganda one might see on a "bin Laden tape." The expectations on a league MVP like Malone will be outrageous, and if he doesn't expect to win the best import award and deliver a championship for Red Bull, he may want to save himself the headache.

Yeng Guiao: Like, Redman, he's not to be fucked with or played with. Photo by Patrick Michels.

3. The Guiao factor. It's no secret that Red Bull coach Yeng Guiao is a tad on the volatile side. Sometimes, when you watch him prowl the sidelines and stand there glaring at his players with his arms crossed, you think he's just an intense guy who wants to win. Sometimes, then he attacks the scorer's table, audibly threatens referees and clotheslines opposing players (as he did in the 2007 All-Filipino semifinals to DonDon Hontiveros), you think he's straight-up unhinged. Occasionally, Guiao, who is the vice governor of Pampanga province, gives the impression that he will have his private army "salvage" (martial-law era slang for killing someone and dumping them in the Pasig River) anyone who gets on his bad sign. Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure Guiao doesn't have a private army, and I'm positive he wouldn't have anyone killed. I'm just suggesting, in a silly way, that he is a demanding coach with a reputation for challenging his players in a bold manner.

So would Guiao step to the Mailman? Nevermind Malone's wrestling credentials (he once took on Hulk Hogan and Dennis Rodman in a tag-team match). But would Coach Yeng call out one of the NBA's 50 Greatest? If he was disappointed with Malone's performance, would Guiao replace him? My guess is yes. And it will be interesting to see how a player of Malone's stature would respond in those situations.

4. The Red Bull factor. PBA followers may notice some irony in Red Bull's potential hiring of Malone. The franchise, which is rumored to have financial problems stemming from a lack of support from Red Bull's international side, is known for developing talent and selling it to wealthier teams in extremely uneven trades. Their enabling role in last season's trades that sent rising star Enrico Villanueva to San Miguel and established vet Rommel Adducul to Purefoods, with Red Bull receiving chronic castaway Don Camaso is the most notable example of the team's habit of propping up revenues at the team's expense. For them to turn around and sign the biggest name import the PBA has ever seen would seem uncharacteristic, although the team actually wouldn't have to pay more for Malone than any other import.

As an aside, it's a pity that the Mailman could not end up with the Air21 Express, a team representing a local FedEx-style courier company. He delivers!

5. Malone, teaming up with Fil-Australian center Mick Pennisi, to form a high-low tandem that, depending on how you look at it, would be one of the most fearsome or most funny the PBA has ever seen.

If Malone and Rodman don't battle beneath the boards at Araneta, maybe we can get them to wrestle.

6. A possible ripple effect, in which Malone inspires other calcified, NBA greats to join him in the Philippines to relive the glory days. I'm mainly thinking of Dennis Rodman, who never seems to miss an opportunity for a publicity stunt. Rodman and Malone took their rivalry, which was formed in the late-'90s NBA Finals match-ups between the Bulls and Jazz, to the mats of the WCW (thank you, YouTube). Why not take it to the PBA? With some luck, Rodman could convince other past-nemeses -- can you say Frank Brickowski? -- to join the fray.

7. Finally, it would give me my choice of fabulous clips in newspapers and magazines across the nation and add another rich and ridiculous chapter to the book I'm writing about Philippine hoops. I'm all for it. Bring the Mailman to Red Bull ASAP!

The Collison Encounter

2008-02-17T04:58:00.002+08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece for Seattle Weekly's basketball blog, which later made it into the front of the print product. It's about my Basket List -- the roster of professional or otherwise noteworthy ballers who I've played with or against over the years -- and the day that Seattle Supersonic Nick Collison showed up at a pick-up game and landed on my list. Of course, if I had included all the well-known basketball figures in Philippine basketball I've had the good fortune to play with, my list would be five times longer. The only problem there is that no one outside of the Philippines will be impressed when I boast, "I played with Alvin Patrimonio!"

Here's a link to the Seattle Weekly Basket List blog. Enjoy.

You Rogue

2008-02-16T00:03:00.001+08:00

The quickest way to get material up on the blog is to use stuff I've already written! So, even though it's not the original, exclusive, Clueminatti-type ish readers are used to here at Manila Vanilla, I'm reprinting an essay I wrote about the Ateneo de Manila/De La Salle basketball rivalry for Rogue magazine, a gorgeous 6-month-old glossy in the Philippines. It's hard to imagine a magazine with huge, thick pages and spectacular-yet-costly art surviving financially in the Philippines, where its potential readership seems restricted to a small, elite audience. Rogue seems to be catering to the Manila Polo Club crowd with a fairly equal ratio of society pieces to semi-serious journalism. Still, Rogue is backed by the seemingly limitless Zobel fortune, which means they can afford to produce it at a loss pretty much indefinitely without making much of a dent on the family income. For now, however, let's hope that the magazine turns a profit on its own and keeps producing some of the most lively writing in the country. Some of the articles are duds, but their profiles of broadcast journalist Ricky Carandang, Manila Mayor Alberto Lim and the band Rivermaya have all showcased something that I had never before seen in the Philippine media: brainy, entertaining feature writing that's not FHM men's magazine blather.

Of course, with pictorials featuring the likes of cover girl Jasmine Maierhofer and MTV Asia VJ Kat Alano inside, Rogue tries to achieve the feel of an upscale laddie magazine, like FHM's older brother. The arty photography works toward this end, although the accompanying stories aren't much different from Maxim Philippines' innuendo marathons. Maierhofer, however, is worth mentioning because she's the sister of La Salle star Rico Maierhofer. If my editors at Rogue had told me that the sister would be the cover girl, it would have made for a nice paragraph about the paths from basketball to high society (showbiz, politics, business) in the Philippines, especially at these two universities, where the diamond-crusted alumni remember their players' heroics for decades.

As an aside, the Maierhofer siblings' rise to stardom in basketball and modeling is a telling story about the Philippine social ladder -- their Swiss dad married a Filipina, opened a resort in Sabang, Puerto Galera, and the kids were each discovered with star potential thanks, in large part to their kalahati ("half" in Tagalog, and a way to refer to people with mixed blood), biracial background. That Swiss Miss in their blood almost surely contributed to Rico's height (around 6'2'' or 6'3'') and Jasmine's exotic look. More on the Bakekang phenomenon another time.

A taste of the madness to come: Grown-ass La Salle fans holding a poster of a Green Archer slaying a Blue Eagle.

Well, there's my intro. Enjoy the article. I'll throw in a editorial asides for my Western readers when it seems necessary to explain a term or reference that might not be on the radar for people living outside of the Philippines. For background on Ateneo and La Salle, click here and here for previous posts about the schools and their rivalry, including my New York Times article on the rivalry. Finally, as in the magazine, all photos from the games were taken by Kat Palasi.

Now, the text of the article as it ran in Rogue.

Basketcase
by Rafe Bartholomew

When these ladies see me on the Katipunan strip, they're looking at me. I might not be the real Captain Kirk, but I'll beam them up.

It was a good rainy season to be a 6-foot-3 American on Katipunan. Thanks to a much-hyped season of college basketball and another white six-footer, Ateneo’s prize freshman guard Kirk Long, I couldn’t stroll past Sweet Inspirations without bumping into a throng of jubilant Blue Eagle fans who thought they’d spotted Long himself. Never mind that I’m more than five years older than Long and a couple inches taller; being a pale beanpole and wearing a pair of basketball shorts was enough to have people slapping me five and asking for autographs, bakeshops offering me free chocolate crinkles and college girls eyeing me like a pair of 15,000-peso jeans. For three glorious, ethically dicey months, I hi-fived them back, gorged on crinkles and returned the ladies’ smiles. The way I saw it, I earned the right to enjoy this case of mistaken identity: A year ago, I couldn’t step outside without hearing someone shriek, “Naku! Daniel Smith!” (Smith is a U.S. Marine who was convicted in late 2006 for raping a Filipina after leaving a Subic Bay bar with her. He, like Kirk Long, doesn't actually look like me, but he's white.)

The hoopla surrounding this 70th UAAP campaign was especially rabid thanks to La Salle’s return from a yearlong suspension for two cases of academic fraud that were revealed at the tail end of 2005. This could only mean one thing: the resumption of the country’s biggest sports rivalry. The schools don’t exactly offer a striking contrast. It’s the affluent, educated Jesuits of Ateneo versus the wealthy, sophisticated Brothers of La Salle, yet those similarities allow the sports rivalry to take center stage. With so much in common, the annual basketball games have become the way for the students, alumni and faculty of each school to distinguish themselves from each other. The victors earn the right to call themselves – sometimes a tad too pompously – richer, smarter and Holier.

The teams this season made up for last year’s absence by facing off a whopping five times, twice in the elimination rounds and three times in the postseason. All the games showcased college basketball’s trademark triptych of sloppy play, poor shooting and roughhousing underneath the basket, but they also provided enough crunchtime drama – J.V. Casio’s string of off-balance jumpers and kamikaze drives towards the end of the first elimination game and Chris Tiu’s double-clutch lay-up that clinched game one of the semifinals come to mind – to make us all forget the first half doldrums. Besides, everyone already knows what happened. Ateneo beat La Salle three out of five times, La Salle beat Ateneo when it counted and went on to win the championship, and even though the players supplied the action, the real show was always in the crowd.

San Miguel/Magnolia star Olsen Racela, came to watch his alma mater, Ateneo.

Call it what you want: an alignment of stars, an eclectic brew of elites, a bloodthirsty madhouse. The throng at an Ateneo-La Salle game is a Philippine original; it’s where a joint session of Congress encounters a CEO-filled Makati boardroom, mixed with the Luna awards, a PBA All-Star game and a Binibining Pilipinas pageant. (The Lunas are like the Oscars. Binibining is like Miss America.) There’s enough eau de toilette in the building to give Araneta Coliseum a pungent sweetness, and a sampling of failed attempts at the tasteful donning of blue and green barongs that would be unimaginable in any other setting. Yet, amid all the glamour and pomp, it’s heartening to see a couple of the same haggard drag queens who never miss a PBA game get their hands on the hottest tickets in town; a perverse hint of social justice to remind everyone that Araneta is also the habitat of Ginebra, the space of sabong (cockfighting), the milieu of the masses.

Before a game, the arena fills up in reverse order, with green and blue foot soldiers staking out territory in the upper decks long before tip-off, followed by the well-heeled alumni in the courtside seats, who trickle into the arena moments before the jump ball. Don’t be fooled, however, by the leisurely arrival of the most highfalutin supporters. They pulled every string to get those seats; some have bribed media pals for press passes, some have flown in from Jakarta and New York, and others have paid scalpers more than 5,000 pesos for tickets with a 200-peso face value. Thus, they defend their hard-earned seats like hyenas guarding a juicy carcass, and the handful of interlopers who arrived early with hopes of squatting on front-row seats are swiftly removed.

MVP, on the right with arms crossed, watches intently while his homeys get loose before tip-off.

Soon the entire arena is packed with the exception of one row near the court. There, alone, is Manuel Pangilinan. It’s sometimes hard to figure out what comes first for MVP, being a telecommunications mogul or the godfather of Philippine basketball, but on this day there’s no question. The basketball programs at Ateneo and San Beda, Talk ‘N Text in the PBA and the recently formed Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (Basketball Association of the Philippines) would be in the poorhouse if not for the beneficence of MVP, and his solitary row seems to be a collective gesture of deference. As he sits with his arms folded in front of him, peering intently at players in their lay-up lines, Pangilinan is visited by a slew of upscale hustlers eager to get on his good side. They shake hands; some choose to beam their widest smile, others opt for a steely, professional demeanor; they wish each other good luck, and then, having paid their respects, disappear to their proper seats. The procession of well-wishers continues for an improbable 10 minutes, until Coaches Franz Pumaren and Norman Black have put the finishing touches on their pre-game speeches and the referees’ whistles are heralding the start of the game, when MVP is joined by an Atenean of equal stature – some might say infamy – Senator Jinggoy Estrada, and moments later the empty seats are full.

Her excellence, her neutralness, Ambassador Kenney.

Across the court, fronting the proverbial sea of green, is U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney, guest of La Salle luminaries José T. Pardo and the Araneta clan. It doesn’t seem very diplomatic at first, but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that even though Kenney sits with the Animo crowd, she always wears a modest blue blouse or holds a pair of Ateneo balloons. Although Kenney currently serves a Republican administration, the she plays both sides of the crowd is pure Clintonian triangulation, and with her cropped blond hair, perky composure and clever neutrality, Kenney brings to mind President Bush’s near opposite and possible successor, Senator Hillary Clinton. Of course, Kenney’s aides say that attending Ateneo-La Salle games has nothing to do with her diplomatic agenda; that she has been a basketball fan since her college days at Clemson University, but her presence at UAAP games seems more meaningful than everyday public appearances. Kenney watched four out of the five Ateneo-La Salle games last season; in comparison, she makes it to one or two PBA games each year.

Elsewhere in the lower decks we find the posers, who bogart courtside seats in chunks of five for themselves and their bodyguards. It makes an impression (congrats! You’re important!), but when you ask people about the guy in the brown shirt with his private army in tow, no one can identify him. Really, guys, take a cue from the U.S. ambassador and leave the SWAT team at home. The Quezon City government and PNP have already pledged nearly enough manpower to occupy some small nations, and they’re in plain sight, huddled together in camouflaged cabals beside each entrance to the arena.

The lovely ladies with the flammable hair.

Standing in a courtside corner near the players’ entrance are three Binibining Pilipinas contestants looking like they got lost on the way to prom. Never mind; the Ateneo-La Salle provides more than enough pageantry for the beauty queens, who seem as concerned with posing for the photographers prowling around as with the game. Their heavy duty makeup reminds me of that popular American style of histrionic fandom – face-painting – only these sports fashionistas lack beer bellies and have thrown glitter into the mix. Their hair is teased up into shimmering black meringues, held together with enough hairspray to cause a minor explosion should a lit match or cigarette fall from the rafters.

But beyond the world-class people watching, what sets the rivalry apart, what makes it not just notable but phenomenal, is its ability to transform everyone involved in it. Players start as teenagers from the provinces and become household names, striving to fulfill a mythical, gladiator ideal and become heroes to their own side and villains to the other. The young athletes are transformed once more after a loss, sending the losing side into a state of childish blubbering. The warm friendship between Black and Pumaren, longtime San Miguel Beer teammates and members of the same coaching staff, is transformed into a cooler and more cautious relationship, because the past is the past and the rivalry owns the present.

You won't see them using this kind of body language in the board room.

The Ateneo-La Salle games have the power to change the fans, some of the most well-mannered, best-educated members of Philippine society, into raving madmen and feral femme fatales. What else could make Senator Richard Gordon, the former Ateneo cheerleader, sneak behind Pumaren at a restaurant and whisper “La Salle bulok!” in the coach’s ear ("bulok" basically means "rotten trash")? What else could make the senator jump on the scorer’s table during a time out and start pumping his fists to whip the Blue Eagle crowd into a frenzy? What else could make executives and socialites flip their middle fingers at each other, curse the fans of the other team and occasionally shower the court with peso coins and full cans of San Miguel Beer? The rivalry allows society’s crème de la crème to forget the years of socialization and layers of wealth that distinguish them from the masses; it allows them to become an irrational, passionate mob, the kind you might expect to find at on of the PBA’s Barangay Ginebra games.

And as its most remarkable trick, the rivalry transforms the individual into the many. Throughout the games, the each side of the crowd acts as one. They have one voice, booming out the familiar “Get that ball” and “Animo La Salle” chants. When they’re upset with a referee, out comes the pikon point, fifty shame-filled fingers burning a hole through the offending official. And at the end of the games, the rivalry’s ultimate gesture of collectivity, the synchronized fist-pump that accompanies the schools’ alma maters. Ten thousand people chanting and punching the air in slow, rhythmic unison sounds like something out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, and for that brief moment, the fans of La Salle and Ateneo are brainwashed, too. The domineering personalities and personal ambitions are swept away, and 20,000 people become two entities: La Salle and Ateneo.

The sublimation of self, or the zombie-fication of fans. "Must eat brain. Ateneo must win."

The rivalry teases out the human side from the Philippine elite. Sophistication, etiquette and self-control go right out the window and they cry like babies, hurl invectives like street-corner drunks and chant together in a zombie-like trance. It may be unbefitting of such luminaries, but it might also be necessary. These crazed fans are many of the country’s leaders of business and government. Their actions and decisions play a role in the lives of millions of Filipinos, and, even though some of them could take this responsibility more seriously, the Ateneo-La Salle games provide a break from the weighty issues in their lives. For an afternoon, they weep and rejoice, argue and curse, tune out of their lives and tune in to one cathartic fight. (A reference to Ateneo's rallying cry: "One big fight.")

Blowing myself up

2008-02-15T04:59:00.001+08:00

I'll soon be back in Manila, so it's time to start blogging again. Let's warm up with this modest horn-tooter. My March 2006 story in the Chicago Reader, Have Game, Will Travel, was selected in the honorable mention section of the 2007 edition of The Best American Sports Writing. I discovered this while leafing through the book in the Union Square Barnes and Noble. Of course, this is a huge honor. I'm also encouraged by the fact that this story, written only a couple months after I arrived in the Philippines, isn't my best work. After two years of living in the Philippines, I've been able to pull from a broader understanding of local culture and basketball's role in it, and my writing has improved. Hopefully, it means bigger accomplishments will follow.

Back in Print

2007-12-13T09:25:00.000+08:00

Up to this point in my time in the Philippines, I think you can consider this story from Seattle Weekly to be my magnum opus on the PBA and imports. It's about "Mr. Everything" Rosell Ellis, winner of the PBA's Best Import award last conference and the man who's about 40 percent responsible for Alaska's 2007 Fiesta Conference title (that's a pretty large share when you think of all the other guys on the team and the coaching staff). Ellis is a great storyteller and he's had a very impressive overseas career, which has also led him to some hilarious situations around the world. I hope people enjoy reading about him as much as I enjoyed spending time with him.

You Tube Highlights

2007-12-12T09:44:00.000+08:00

I have about an hour to blow before playing basketball -- I try to arrive at the Barangay around 10:30 a.m., when it's officially too hot for any sane individual to be running and jumping, juking and jiving, etc. -- and that's not enough time to do any real writing, so here I am!

Although I have no demographic information about the Manilla V. audience, only a few hints from comments left by readers (most of which I suspect are Pessoa-like heteronyms created by my father), I'm pretty sure that most of you are Americans or non-Filipinos. That may be changing slightly, but how many Pinoys really need to read about basketball and life in the Philippines? So, in the name of exposing the world at large to some of the finest examples of local culture, I figured a little tour of Philippines-related YouTube videos would be instructive.

The country has enjoyed a bump in Internet popularity in recent months, mostly thanks to some zany YouTube videos that caught the eye of millions of people online and eventually garnered international media attention.

The valedictorian of this group are the dancing prisoners from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. They do these giant, North Korean Mass Game-style synchronized dances of songs like "YMCA," the Black Eyed Peas' "Bebot" and my favorite, an innuendo-laced Tagalog song called "Jumbo Hot Dog" by the Masculados. Of course, their most famous performance is a near exact reproduction of the dance moves in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, which has been viewed more than 9 million times. I'm going to embed a medley they performed in front of the Cebu provincial Capitol in August. Once you view one of their videos YouTube will throw up links to all the others with hardly any prodding. It's impressive and hilarious stuff, but one or two videos is enough for most viewers.

Then there's the Weng Weng Rap! Who was Weng Weng? Thanks to Andrew Leavold, an Australian documentary filmmaker who has devoted years to researching the 2-foot-9 actor's life (keep up the good fight, bro. You're not the only one obsessed with the minutiae of Philippine culture!) and who has also written this ridiculously thorough biography of Weng Weng on IMDB, we know that Weng Weng starred in a handful of spy/action spoof films, two of which are available through Netflix. The obvious and sole gimmick of these films is that the shortest lead actor in the history of film was out there kicking ass and taking names. My favorite piece of Weng Weng trivia is this wickedly ironic tidbit: His first hit, "For Yu'r Height Only," was the only film from Imelda Marcos' uber-notorious 1981 Manila International Film Festival to be picked up for major distribution. Instead of showcasing the best of Philippine talent and culture, Imelda exported a freak show, which, in some ways seems appropriate. Weng Weng, who died in 1992, has been reborn on the popular YouTube video "Weng Weng Rap," which was recently highlighted by Will Ferrell on Funny or Die. I think we can all agree that the "tiny human being" line takes the cake.

Let's keep the Little People theme going and look at another clip, "Bayot Basketball," which points the spotlight at an exhibition game that has taken the Visayas by storm over the past few years, Aksyon Radyo Cebu's Unano-Bading Showdown. The game pits midgets (unano) against gays ("bading" in Tagalog and "bayot" in Visaya) in a choreographed, Harlem Globetrotters-style game. I have been to this game, and let me say, as a fan of lowbrow entertainment, this stretched me to my limits. I heard from Peace Corps Volunteers in Cebu that this video was shot by an American friend of a PCV who was vacationing in the Philippines. That explains the goofy commentary and intertitles, which just drip with mean-spirited superiority complex. Then again, foreigners can live here for years and never know better, so I won't make too many excuses for the videographer. It might be hard for some to watch, but there's no point in denying the footage exists, so here it is.

We have time for one more: Bakekang. Americans who watch Ugly Better may have some understanding of the Telenovela, but that show is really novela-lite. Multiply the love triangles by 10, square the tear-filled reaction shots and remove any sense of responsible broadcasting, and you have the straight dope. I would need a crack team of intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, UP Anthropologist Michael Tan and Cornel West to parse the multi-layered racism and post-colonial decay in this clip, but man, the acting is FANTASTIC.

Five-figure discount

2007-12-11T08:20:00.000+08:00

Oh snap! I went to bed last night, woke up and saw that this Web site has had more than 10,000 hits since May 2007! Sarap-buhay naman! How sweet it is. I especially want to thank my father, who I'm guessing is personally responsible for about 8,000 of those hits. You make me look good, pops!

NBA names

2007-12-08T09:55:00.000+08:00

Remember my post about PBA names from a couple weeks ago? They're compiling a list of great NBA names over at Seattle Weekly. I had to nominate Priest Lauderdale. How could my favorite 7-4 man-mammoth get overlooked like that? I think this means we need to do a list of PBA import names soon. Watch out Cisco Oliver and Pig Miller, I'm coming for you.

Opening up the vault

2007-12-06T22:55:00.000+08:00

I'm busy writing some other stuff but don't want to completely neglect the blog, as I often do. I came across this short essay about Philippine basketball's eternal conundrum: Why are Filipinos so devoted to basketball? I mention some of the oft-repeated theories, but basically conclude that there's no definitive answer, they're all true in varying degrees. On top of that, there's something else. You can feel it, like invisible glue that holds it all together, but for the time being it eludes description, and you just leave it for what it is: basketball is a part of Filipinos' lives in a way that's different from any other nationality.

Basketball and Culture (inspired, in part, by Nick Joaquin's History and Culture)

Ask a Filipino why he eats menudo and he’ll probably look at you funny. What do you mean, “why?” It’s a part of his culture. Filipinos have been eating it for generations. There’s nothing to question.

Ask why he plays basketball and you’ll get the same look. After months of searching for the answer to why Filipinos love the sport so much, I’ve become convinced that the lack of a precise explanation is the best indicator of how deeply basketball is ingrained in Philippine culture.

The question is as much a riddle to the elder statesmen of the local game as it is to me. Their responses range from zen-like koans to complete surrender. “Somehow, basketball caught the eye of the Filipino,” said Mauricio “Moying” Martelino, a former commissioner of the Philippine Basketball League and one-time secretary general of the Asian Basketball Confederation. “Why, for heaven’s sake, even I cannot understand it.”

Commissioner Jun, Rest in Peace.

Emilio “Jun” Bernardino, who served nine years as commissioner of the PBA before assuming his current post atop the NCAA, offered this vague maxim: “Filipinos took to basketball like a fish takes to water.”

While the origins of the hypnotic spell basketball has cast upon the Philippines are hard to grasp, certain events in history have surely helped boost the game’s popularity.

For decades, the country was among the world’s best basketball-playing nations. The first Philippine Olympic team in 1936 placed fifth, but lost only one game in the tournament to the gold-medalist United States. When the Philippine team returned from the 1954 world championships in Brazil with a bronze medal, team captain Caloy Loyzaga told the Philippine Free Press that the team was “lionized at the airport and given a rousing welcome which I will never forget to my dying day.”

The immense pride Filipinos took from their basketball team pushed the sport to greater heights. “Winners will always generate followers – not only spectator followers but player followers,” Martelino said. “And we kept winning and winning.”

Although Americans introduced basketball through the public schools in 1911, the Philippine game is more than post-colonial imitation. The Filipino novelist and cultural critic Nick Joaquin called colonial influences tools, which Filipinos would internalize and use in their own ways long after foreign rule had ceased. “Ultimately, it seems, every invader fades into whatever tool he may have brought along,” writes Joaquin in his essay “Culture as History.”

Scenes like this aren't going anywhere.

Americans may have brought basketball to the Philippines, but Filipinos have made it their own. The sport is a tool, in Joaquin’s sense of the word. It has become a part of the Philippine identity, something Filipinos living all over the country share. It has become, irreversibly, a part of local culture.

This fact, however, doesn’t stop critics from complaining that basketball’s role in society is too large. They say the nation has long since fallen from its perch as one of the powers in international basketball, so Filipinos should drop the round, orange balls and pick up pool cues, boxing gloves and badminton rackets instead. These critics might as well argue that French cuisine is healthier and more delicious than Filipino food and encourage people to trade in their sinigang for seafood bisque, to fork over their sisig for a plate of steak frites. It will never happen.

Basketball is intertwined with the lives of generations of Filipinos, and its role in local culture can’t easily be extinguished. Joaquin wrote the following paragraph about aspects of Spanish cuisine that were absorbed into Philippine culture. But if you substitute the word “basketball” each time Joaquin mentions “adobo and pan de sal,” the paragraph still makes perfect sense:

“If you tell the Pinoy-on-the-street that adobo and pan de sal are but a thin veneer of Westernization, the removal of which will reveal the “true” Filipino … , the Pinoy may retort that, as far as he is concerned, adobo and pan de sal are as Filipino as his very own guts; and indeed one could travel the world and nowhere find … anything quite like Philippine adobo and pan de sal.”

Lost in Translation

2007-11-29T11:17:00.000+08:00

In the latest chapter of the Philippines' never-ending brouhaha over extrajudicial killings and disappearances, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston delivered his final report on the killings, blaming the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police for most of the dastardly deeds. This is not news -- his preliminary report said the same exact thing and it's what just about everyone assumes -- but rather another opportunity for posturing on all sides, with leftist groups trumpeting their cause, the military proclaiming innocence and the Arroyo administration feigning ignorance while promising justice. But, amidst the thick miasma of self-righteousness, you occasionally get a gem like this quote from opposition Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero in today's Inquirer:

"Many of the extrajudicial killings that happened there were just five kilometers away from the nearest police or military camp. The modus operandi is always the same: the perpetrator wore a bonnet, was on board a motorcycle, and used a .45-caliber pistol. And until now, not one suspect has been arrested. In these circumstances, I am not surprised that the findings point in the direction of the Philippine National Police (PNP), if not the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP),” Escudero said in Filipino.

When you see that bonnet -- start running. 'Cause when you see that bonnet -- I'm coming.

Come again, Chiz? Little Bo Peep is out here in Sorsogon riding on fools! Capping Communists left and right and her bonnet ain't even shift an inch. I would love to hear Escudero's quote in its original Tagalog form to see what word the Inquirer translated to "bonnet." Father Leo English, the author of one of the best English/Tagalog dictionaries on the market, tells me that there is a word, "bonete," taken from Spanish, but it's hard to imagine Escudero really describing a bonnet-wearing assassin. The more common Spanish loan word for hat in Tagalog is "sombrero," which also brings silly images to the not-so-worldly, raised on Looney Toons American mind. Maybe if the AFP changes its story and blames the killings on Yosemite Sam, Alston and the United Nations will buy it.

PBA Home-cooking

2007-11-28T11:52:00.000+08:00

It's hard to find people involved with the PBA who have a lot of confidence in the league's referees. Cynicism is the rule, and the officiating is as much a running joke for PBA insiders and observers as are the league's wacky mascots, lethargic cheerdancers and corporate-sponsored team names. Players and coaches enter games with a mindset that at-best, the refs will blow obvious calls. At worst, they fear the refs will totally screw them. Even when this happens, the one-sided calls are common enough that members of the losing side just shake their head and move on. It takes some truly shameless refereeing situation to provoke an emotional reaction, and that's what happened last week at the end of the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants' 87-86 win over the Alaska Aces.

Purefoods came into the game with a 7-1 record, the best in the league. Alaska, champions of the most recent import conference, were 4-3, but both teams expected a hard-fought game. Purefoods is one of the three San Miguel Corporation-owned jewels in the PBA's crown. The team, along with Barangay Ginebra and the San Miguel Beermen/Magnolia Beverage Masters, are among the league's oldest franchises and its most popular. When teams from outside the San Mig empire play one of them, they expect the balance of the calls to go against them. The refs were doing a surprisingly good job until the final seven seconds of last Wednesday's game. Alaska benched league MVP Willie Miller for arriving late and got off to a slow start. They fell behind by as much as 19 points but were able to claw back in the third and fourth quarters to take a late lead. Up 86-85 in the final minute, they needed one defensive stop to hand Purefoods its second loss. That's when the refs' worked their magic.

Here's what you're watching in the last 6.9 seconds of the game. After a Kerby Raymundo missed jumper, Alaska Center Sonny Thoss and Purefoods guard Brandon Cablay got tied up with the loose ball and the refs called a jump ball. Alaska must have felt pretty confident with the 6-7 Thoss jumping against 6-footer Cablay. It's possible that the tension of the moment affected the referee, because his first toss sailed about five feet to the side of both players. Thoss never came close to the ball and Cablay reached out and caught it. Boom -- that should be a game-clinching violation. If one of the jump ball participants catches the rock, then his team forfeits possession. Well, that would be an anti-climactic ending to a pretty exciting game, so the referees took a cue from the playground and called a do-over because of the bad toss. That's nice enough for pick-up games at the Loyola Heights barangay covered court, but at the country's highest level of professional basketball, it's embarrassing. The second toss was equally bad, yet, presumably because Thoss tapped it out of bounds and the possession stayed with Purefoods, the officials let the game continue. Now, with less than 6 seconds to play, Purefoods inbounded the ball from beneath the basket. Kerby Raymundo received the ball on the baseline and took one dribble towards Alaska defenders Thoss and John Ferriols. He had nowhere to go, so he jumped in the air, double-pumped the ball, looked to pass, saw no one, and landed. There's really no room for interpretation with this call -- it's a travel. No one knocked the ball out of Raymundo's control or tied him up in the air. He just jumped up and came down. When he landed, with about 1.5 seconds left, everyone stopped for a split second, anticipating a whistle. None came. Like someone who stumbles and does a quick hop-step to play off his goof, Raymundo acted like nothing happened and quickly shoveled the ball to Romel Adducul against the suddenly passive defense. Adducul dropped in a lay-up at the buzzer, the refs counted the shot, and Purefoods ran off the court in a hurry.

Alaska's players looked stunned like the members of the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that got jobbed in the final seconds of the final match against the Soviet Union. The coaches, on the other hand, stormed over to the officials' table and started raising hell. Head Coach Tim Cone was loudly berating Perry Martinez, head of the PBA's technical committee at half-court and assistant coach Bong Hawkins reared back like he was going to break a clipboard over one of the refs heads WWE-style, then caught himself and slammed the board to the floor. Cone followed Martinez and the refs into the tunnel and kept cursing them in front of sportswriters and TV cameras for five more minutes. His furor peaked when Martinez promised to review the call, like that meant something, and Cone shot back: "What the fuck is that gonna do? They're still 8-1 and we're 4-4."

The word for this kind of fixing is "luto," the Tagalog root for words related to cooking. Like "they cooked the books," but instead they cooked the game. Later that night, I bumped into Alaska players Poch Juinio, JunJun Cabatu, Willie Miller and Jeff Cariaso at Metrowalk, and they couldn't stop talking about the game. They blamed themselves for falling behind early, but mostly decried the refs' hostile takeover of the endgame. Poch kept saying how the game was "mahirap makalimutan" -- hard to forget.

What made the greatest impact on me was how upset the players were over the game. PBA players have a reputation of being motivated mostly by money; the characterization has some truth to it, although, by and large, the players are not the greedy hoops mercenaries they're sometimes depicted as. Yes, they play for money, but they also play to win, and that kind of loss smarts in a way that money can't sweeten. On top of that, players like Juinio and Cariaso have been in the league for more than a decade and Miller is a two-time MVP; cooked games and horrible officiating are nothing new to them. Their dejected response to this game shows just how bad the refereeing was.

Even Purefoods knew the win was a gift. I heard rumors of a handful of their players admitting that Raymundo's move was an obvious travel, and Coach Ryan Gregorio's sheepish comments to the press about the last play are pure comedy:

“I was closing my eyes and I was praying. Honestly, I didn’t see the play. I thought my prayers were answered with that last shot."

You know something is fishy when a head coach won't take credit for the game-winning play.

Bad Santa

2007-11-24T04:51:00.000+08:00

A kind shopkeeper at a sari-sari store on Xavierville Avenue gave me this poster, which needs little analysis. A couple observations. For all the fans of the old Upright Citizens Brigade show on Comedy Central, remember the Santa Liqueur sketch? It was funny because the idea of Santa giving his special liqueur out was totally outrageous. Well, apparently not in Manila, where Santa arrives in his red tricycle, handing out tagay shots of Tanduay rhum. Please note the frightening intensity in Santa's eyes in this poster. He's staring at you with a hypnotic, glazed look that says, "Drink this rum or I'll shove a lump of coal up your ass." He reminds me of the evil portrait of Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters II. I guess that makes me his lackey, Janosz.