The Crispa Files

Rafe Bartholomew is the author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball. He has previously written for FD about style in Philippine hoops. Monitor his every move at @rafeboogs, and visit his website.

Five years ago, about a month after I first arrived in the Philippines, I bought a photo album. I was shopping at an upscale swap meet in Metro Manila. After eying a case full of antique watches, some bearing the likenesses of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in gold and silver relief, I noticed a crate of Frank Sinatra and Paul Anka vinyl LPs on the ground, and next to it a stack of basketball photos. I found the album underneath the single prints. It was nearly thirty years old, although I had no way of knowing at the time. All I could tell was that it looked ancient—tattered and coverless, with the wax paper between pages humidity-bonded to the photos themselves. Each image was devoted to the game, and even though I couldn't yet recognize the players, I had already heard of the name on their jerseys: Crispa. Almost as soon as I landed in Manila to learn about the Philippines' unparalleled basketball jones, sports writers began telling me about Crispa. This team, along with its 1970s rival Toyota, turned the Philippine Basketball Association into a force in popular culture whose reach and influence rivaled that of politics, the local film and television industries, even the Church.

I bought the album because it looked cool. A hundred or so worn, black and white pieces of basketball history couldn't hurt my research on Philippine hoops. It would take years of interviews and library digging before I understood how important it was. Much has been made of YouTube's role in creating a video archive of basketball history. I can watch Wilt Chamberlain catch lob after lob in a 1957 Kansas victory over my alma mater, Northwestern. What I can hardly watch any of, however, is a Philippine Basketball Association game from the late Seventies, an era considered the golden age of professional basketball by most Pinoys old enough to remember it. The players in these photos are their country's innovators, the Philippine anologues to Oscar Robertson, Clyde Frazier, Bird, Magic and Kareem, the athletes who set the PBA game on its course to the high-skilled, high-scoring, flamboyant modern era.

Now imagine not being able to see Clyde on D, Magic on the break or Bird on a hot streak. With rare exceptions, that's basically the case for Philippine basketball. When the PBA released a five-disc set of classic game DVDs, the oldest game chosen for the series was played in 1990. The Toyota-Crispa DVD showed a reunion game from 2003, when most of the players were in their fifties. If the mother lode of early PBA footage exists somewhere in the Philippines, it seems to be as well hidden as Yamashita's gold, because in three years of research on Pinoy hoops, I never saw a second of tape from the Seventies. The television networks that played the games are either kaput or unrecognizable in their more recent incarnations, and few, if any, records of their PBA broadcasts seem to exist. When I met Crispa greats like Atoy Co and Philip Cezar and they asked me if I had found footage of their old games, I realized how grim the situation was. For Co, the silver lining was that he still possessed betamax tapes of several Crispa games; he just needed a functional betamax player or a machine to convert his tapes to a modern format. Presumably, the PBA has a video archive, although I never gained access to it.

So this album, finally digitized, is not just a cool-looking score from an antique shop. It's one of the best records I've seen of 1970s professional basketball in the Philippines, and although we can't see how Atoy Co set up his split-legged jumpers or assess Freddie Hubalde's bank shot from the wing, we can get a sense of how vibrant the Philippine game was back then, both on and off the court. You can almost smell the funk in wide shots of packed, humid arenas filled with cigarette-smoking patrons; you can sense the speed and intensity of the Philippine game in the players' stretched, splayed, soaring bodies; and you can feel the depth of the nation's passion for the sport in the solemn expressions on the faces of fans, coaches and players alike during the lulls in and around games.

Here are a handful of photos that stand out, with a few thoughts devoted to each. Most of the comments are based on my previous research, although I also consulted Jay P. Mercado, an amateur PBA historian of legendary stature on Philippine basketball message boards. Do yourself a favor and check out the entire album, because I've been digging into the history of Philippine basketball for years, and I've never seen anything quite like this.



Most of these pictures come from the 1977 PBA season, which might explain why so many of them feature Crispa's Freddie Hubalde (#10). Hubalde was the back-up small forward throughout Crispa's first two PBA seasons, playing behind Bogs Adornado, who won the MVP award in '75 and '76. Bogs blew his knee out before the next season, and Hubalde more than ably filled Adornado's shoes by winning his own MVP trophy that year. Adornado was a gifted mid-range shooter who needed little more than shot fakes, jab steps and a sliver of daylight to be an effective scorer. Hubalde was more of a slasher and hustler; if images like this jumping jack knife move are any indication, Hubalde must have spent much of his career airborne with legs akimbo.



Crispa Coach Baby Dalupan and manager Danny Floro sit in the center of the frame, praying for, among other things, victory. The identity of the woman shooting the extremely salty glare into the camera is anybody's guess. It appears obvious, however, that she disapproves of bringing the hoopla of professional basketball into church. Not that there's much she can do about it. The Pinoy basketball universe is as fervently Catholic as the rest of the country. (See Manny Pacquiao's recent stand on birth control.) On my second day of following a PBA franchise through the 2007 season, I bowed my head with the entire team and their families at a special mass to bless the forthcoming campaign. A true believer would say it paid off; the team won the championship.



When imports are allowed to play in the PBA (the season is typically split into separate mini-seasons called conferences, one All-Filipino and one or more where international ringers can be hired), they are the kings of the league. Cyrus Mann, a 6-10 fourth-round draft pick of the Celtics in 1975, wound up anchoring Crispa's defense during several title seasons in the late Seventies. There's something very regal about him – his long, loping gait, his silk shirt, bellbottoms and hat. Crispa Manager Danny Floro leads him across the court, with a child that is almost surely Mann's son in tow. Trailblazing imports like Mann, Byron “Snake” Jones and Andy Fields were the first to taste the PBA's royal treatment.



Here we see “Fastbreak” Freddie Webb, the brightest star of the Tanduay Rhum franchise in the 1970s, who retired from basketball to become a sitcom star, film actor and politician. He was a senator from 1992 till 1998 and has been all over the Philippine press this week, because the country's Supreme Court overturned his son Hubert's extremely specious conviction on rape and murder charges after the younger Webb spent 15 years in prison. Webb is generally credited as one of the more successful and useful athletes-turned-politicians in the Philippines, although rumor has long had it that Webb's political enemies were involved in his son's frame-up.



Felicisima Bais, AKA Mommy Crispa, is probably the best-known fan in PBA history. Truth be told, every team has a Mommy Crispa, a den mother figure to lead the flock of pseudo-professional die-hard fans who receive free tickets and usually a per diem to form a cheering section. Crispa's Astroturf pep squad was known as the Crispanatics, and because Bais led the troupe devoted to the PBA's most-storied franchise, she gets the nod in history books as the league's preeminent superfan. Her accidental death in 1978, after falling down a flight of stairs, only amplified her legend.



Four Crispa players stretch before a game while a ballboy watches. From left to right, Tito “Kojak” Varela, Freddie Hubalde, Rey Pages, Abet Guidaben. In the olden days, this was about the extent of PBA players' physical training. There are probably as many photos of these guys lighting up cigarettes as there are of them limbering up before games. Many players back then believed weight training would ruin their shooting touch; others thought knee braces were for sissies. Practices were simple—sprints and scrimmages. A handful of all-time greats from this era supposedly had a hard time dribbling with their off-hands. Yet even though the skills may have been a bit underdeveloped and the sweat may have reeked somewhat of nicotine back then, few have ever claimed that the game was anything less than electric.

The Pinoy Invasion

Most of you remember Rafe Bartholomew, who back in February wrote a ferociously awesome post on style in Philippine hoops. Anyway, tomorrow Rafe's honest-to-god book on the subject, Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketballarrives at stores, or sites, near you. I have lent my good name and most effusive words to the back jacket of Pacific Rims, and I meant every word of it; this is a phenomenal piece of basketball writing that belongs on your nightstand whether or not you even knew the PBA existed, or could care less about the island nation it calls home. Brilliant stuff, and you're remiss as a reader of FD (however occasional) if you don't cop that.

Rafe will be stopping by later in the week with a guest lecture, but until then, be checking his site for updates on his every move, or photos from his time there. I know he's doing something for SLAM Online tomorrow. His previous blog, Manila Vanilla, is chock full of good stuff if you simply can't wait. The above archival was jacked, in a hurry, from MV—here's the story behind it. And really, you need to support this book if you want sports writing with a brain to continue on this planet.

If you miss me at all, check out this thing I wrote yesterday about Kobe, Bron, Wilt, Russell, and man's need to destroy each other.

FD Guest Lecture: Where Magaling Happens

Paeng Bartolome (aka Rafe Bartholomew) blogs at Manila Vanilla and has written a book on Philippine basketball, to be published in June.

When I was growing up in early 1990s New York, I thought everyone played ball. Shammgod, Ron-Ron and Steph were still in high school, and back then all we could talk about was their handles, not—as they moved on to college and the pros—how coaches should handle them. Of course, hoops didn't actually hold the entire city in its grasp, but it felt that way. I wore Olaf's shorts under my jeans every day in ninth grade; everyone I knew played ball, and anyone who didn't play I had no reason to know.

Alas, I grew up. I had to go to college, get a job, widen my frame of reference to acronyms beyond the PSAL, NAIA, NCAA and NBA. The sport was no longer my life, just a part of it. That's pretty typical for most kids who possessed some talent but nothing special and had to figure out plan B. Still, I missed the feeling of being surrounded by the game, of living in a place where everyone seemed to have a connection to basketball. A year after I finished school, I was lucky enough to find that place again, but I had to travel 8,000 miles to get there—the Philippines.



I had an idea of what I might find there. A few scenes of Filipinos committing out-of-this world acts of hoops devotion in Alexander Wolff's Big Game, Small World tipped me off, but nothing could prepare me for the depth and richness of the Philippines' basketball culture. The first time I stepped off an airplane in Manila, I saw passengers boxing out for front-row spots around the baggage carousel. At first I dismissed it as a hopeful mirage whipped up by researcher bias, but then I saw one passenger attempt to backstroke the person in front of him out of the way. He slid his hand under the other guy's armpit and pretended to yawn while raising his arm and pushing the other traveler behind him. It almost worked, but the guy in front kept his outside foot in front of the stroker's and denied the ensuing attempt to step through. Their technique was too pure. It was undeniable—basketball had seeped into the most mundane acts of everyday Philippine life.

Let's compress the messy and not-particularly-pretty history of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, not because it's unimportant but because it's difficult to explain in a paragraph, and I'm trying to stay focused on basketball. The vital fact, as far as the sport is concerned, is that Americans brought basketball to the Philippines in 1911, just twenty years after Naismith hung a peach basket on a wall in Springfield. Filipinos were probably the first people after Americans to play the sport seriously, and by the 1930s college and commercial leagues had become first-rate entertainment in Manila, events where society types fanned themselves in courtside seats and everyday fans dangled their feet from the rafters.

The conventional wisdom regarding Philippine basketball is that it is just like the American game, only the players are six inches shorter at every position. Blame the long shadow of colonial history for this misconception. American influence has been overstated by foreign writers who stayed a week in Manila, noticed that Filipino guards had more shake than their counterparts elsewhere in Asia, and credited Uncle Sam. Filipino columnists have been equally guilty of spreading the lie, often as part of a rhetorical argument (that has little to do with reality on the court) against U.S. influence on Philippine national affairs. The truth is that basketball has been a marquee sport in the Philippines for the better part of a century, time enough for the game to develop on its own, spinning off new styles like successful mutations, and evolving into something uniquely Filipino.

That ought to be enough context. Now, with some help from YouTube, here are five terms to describe the basics of the Philippine game.

•Umupo sa ere – translation: To sit in the air. Most Filipino players lack the height to pull off SportsCenter-worthy dunks. They don't, however, lack hops. Slashers in the PBA, Manila's professional league (also the second-oldest in the world, after Boss Stern's Association), have substituted the circus layup for the dunk as the ultimate expression of basketball artistry. Shots that look like once-in-a-lifetime lucky chucks are actually taken by design. Well, not exactly design, because for players like Samboy “Skywalker” Lim, the subject of two lengthy tribute videos (first above), the plan is to get into the lane and into the air. After that, there is no plan, other than to “sit in the air,” spinning and twisting, pumping and clutching until a chance to shoot materializes. In the American game, mid-air improvisation more often seems like a last resort, a flash of brilliance made necessary by a challenge, like Vince Carter's last-second squirm to dunk over and around Anderson Varejao on Sunday; it's more of a strategy for Filipino scorers, who will look to break down their opponents in the air, rather than on the ground. Samboy may have the longest highlight reels with the most sublime musical accompaniments—Yanni and Kenny Loggins—but he is certainly not the only player to master these hoops flights of fancy; Vergel “The Aerial Voyager” Meneses and Bong “Mr. Excitement” Alvarez, helped Lim perfect the art in 1990s, and guards like Cyrus Baguio and Arwind Santos keep it alive today.



•Pektos – translation: spin. If you're going to jump before deciding how to finish the play, you better be able to score from all angles and from an array of release points. To that end, PBA scorers like Lim and his modern day forebears James Yap and Willie Miller, combine spin and touch with scoops and finger rolls to bank shots like they were born with a Spalding in one hand and a protractor in the other. They may have grown up speaking tongues like Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilonggo, but their use of shot-making English could leave H.L. Mencken at a loss for words. Spin is such a necessary part of the Philippine game that when large numbers of Filipino-Americans started coming back to play in the Nineties, guys from Cali received earnest instructions to imagine they were unscrewing a lightbulb while shooting layups.

The emphasis on pektos is due in part to the Philippine penchant for improvisation, but it also has to do with the lack of standardization in basketball courts and training techniques around the country. The Philippines is a poor nation, and although a startling amount of public money has been spent on constructing cement courts with roofs, overhead lights and fiberglass backboards, thousands more jerry-rigged hoops pepper the nation, built by people who decided to make do with a flat patch of earth and a rusted car hood lashed to a coconut tree. Countless Philippine pros learned the game in ad hoc style on homemade courts, mimicking their uncles' moves and trying out their own shots. These guys had little exposure to proper hardwood or knowledgeable coaching until high school or sometimes college. Of course, they eventually learned textbook basketball, but by then their self-taught skills couldn't be unlearned. Thus, almost every player possesses his own, abnormal genius—unteachable shots born of the extra-wide gaps between the two-by-fours that passed for a backyard backboard or a piece of rebar bent into a too-small rim.

•Gulang – translation: craftiness. This word is actually the root of the Tagalog term for parents, a neat double-entendre that emphasizes the built-in respect for experience in Philippine culture and, by extension, basketball. A player who has been around long enough to master the sport's dirty tricks has earned the right to take advantage of younger opponents. These dark arts include the holding and pushing that occurs on courts across the globe, but a special appreciation is reserved for sneakiness. You'll almost never see these acts caught on camera, but a few afternoons on Philippine playgrounds or a night of drinking with one of the PBA's retired defensive specialists will reveal a litany of basketball deceits. My favorite is hand- or finger-holding. Set a high screen in the Philippines, and chances are when you try to roll you won't be going very far. Ditto for when you get ready to jump for a rebound and find yourself tethered to the ground. What happened? Someone latched onto your index finger and tugged just enough to kill your momentum. You've been made a victim of gulang, which, in English, would be kind of like saying you got sonned.



•Ginebra – This isn't a term, it's a team, which is named after a brand of gin. It's also something of a movement, the runaway most popular team in the Philippines (although recent surveys suggest this title is not so clear-cut) that is synonymous with never-say-die basketball and its most famous practitioner, Robert Jaworski. This hoops Methuselah might have played to the death if being elected to the Senate in 1998 hadn't forced him to vacate his role as Ginebra's player/coach at the tender age of 52. When Jaworski was with Ginebra, the crowd was so notorious for showering the court with peso coins and AA batteries that opposing teams kept beach umbrellas under the bench and opened them up for protection from the inevitable fusillades. Nowadays, that frothy fandom is mostly channeled into chanting “Hee-neh-brah!” loud enough to shake the 15,000-seat Araneta Coliseum. That devotion also shows up in comically intense YouTube tributes like the “Princes of the Universe” video. If you can get over the words “I AM IMMORTAL” scrolling across the bottom of the screen when Jaworski appears, you'll see some splendid footage of one of the PBA's most exciting teams of the Nineties.

You may also notice Noli Locsin (6), the archetypical Philippine undersized power forward. That is, a 6-foot-3 bruiser who moves like Baryshnikov. Enough bulky fours – Nelson Asaytono, Alvin Patrimonio, Ali Peek—have combined agility and beefiness to make the miraculous blend seem fairly unremarkable, but none so dramatically as “The Tank” Locsin, who looked like he ate a kilo of rice at every meal and hung in the lane like he was riding Aladdin's carpet.



•Larong buko – translation: coconut game. The opening clip in this countdown is a reminder that the Philippine game embraces a healthy amount of silliness. These loose ball carnivals are common and popular enough to have earned the colloquialism larong buko, which suggests the players are handling the ball so poorly it might as well be a coconut. Aside from the surprising frequency of such moments at the professional level, it's worth noting that these are often the crowds' favorite parts of games. Fans will reward ten seconds of the ball squirting around like a greased pig and the players diving and sliding in pursuit with a few minutes of standing ovation. It goes back to the participatory nature of Philippine basketball—Filipino fans don't just admire the game, they play it, and nothing seems to please them more than the free-wheeling, frenetic, occasionally sloppy style of ball that they practice on their own neighborhood courts.



Watching these videos, someone might conclude that Samboy's virtuoso finishes and Noli's round mound act are cute novelties, but that these players can only pull off their moves because there are no shot-blockers in the PBA. They're probably right—the PBA game is played, by and large, below the rim, and if you dropped Josh Smith into these games he'd gobble shots like Pacman. So what? A country's basketball style develops according to the physical constraints and cultural intangibles that—in criminally general terms—make Americans the cagiest ball-handlers and strongest finishers, Eastern Europeans the most accurate shooters, and Filipinos the finest layup artists. I don't care that the Timberwolves could beat Ginebra by fifty; I care that the Philippine Basketball Association showcases a gorgeous and joyous brand of hoops and makes its own kind of amazing happen.