Interview with Rafe Bartholomew, Author of Pacific Rims

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Pacific Rims by Rafe Bartholomew. Even after the first few pages, I could tell the book would make a lasting impression on me. There are the portraits of athletes throughout the book and the Filipino culture that are both entertaining and enlightening. Then there is Bartholomew’s writing that reveals his passion to learn about the nuances of Filipino basketball, athletes, and culture. The words become evidence of an author who truly loves his subject. Recently, Bartholomew was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Pacific Rims. Also, be sure to check out more about the author at his website, RafeBartholomew.com.

Is there anything you’d like readers to know about you before diving into Pacific Rims?
My background is that I was born and raised in lower Manhattan, which nowadays people probably associate more with litigious talent than hoops skills, but back in the early nineties we had a lot of good players downtown, most notably Smush Parker, who was my teammate on traveling teams until we were about 16. Anyway, I grew up playing and loving basketball, and when I learned about the sport’s role in Philippine culture, I went out there on not much else but inspiration and faith that I’d find the basketball-mad country of my dreams there.

Given the in-depth nature of your research into another culture (I think you referred to it as “amateur anthropology”), I’m sure you gathered a great deal of material for this book. Can you describe the process of deciding what to include and cut out?
Yes, my amateur bona fides are legit. But since academics have tended to overlook basketball’s place in Philippine society, I was happy to dive in and do my best. Over three years, the xeroxed newspaper and magazine articles, gigabytes of audio interviews, and spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks certainly piled up. I tend to write with a pretty loose outline, sketching out a theme for each chapter in my head and a couple scenes I plan to include, and then let it flow from there. Alaska’s 2007 season, being the narrative backbone of the book, determined a lot of what made it into and out of the book. I think having that arc makes Pacific Rims a better read, but it also made it hard to fit in a lot of PBA history that just would have taken me too far away from the narrative to explain.

I would have loved to write more about some of the great players and moments in PBA history—Ramon Fernandez, Samboy Lim, Bong Alvarez, Allan Caidic, and many more. Instead, they’re mentioned very briefly. And then there are the players who aren’t all-timers but who just appealed to me—imports like Shawn Daniels and Anthony Johnson and local oddities like Ryan Bernardo and Jimwell Torion. I wish I could write about all of them. Hopefully, someday I will.

You wrote about the differences in how the homegrown Filipinos, Filipino-Americans, and even the import players interacted with each other. Was there a difference in the way these players interacted with you?
For sure. A lot of the time imports just seemed happy to be talking to someone else from back home. Even though Fil-Am players also grew up in the States, they tend to have very settled lives in Manila, with stately homes, large families, and household employees to oversee. They just don’t have as much time to sit around and gab after practice. Imports are in the opposite situation. Aside from basketball, their entire lives are thousand miles away, so they have all the time in the world to go shopping, watch bootleg DVDs, sleep, or, in my case, spend afternoons and evenings telling me about their experiences.

Fil-Am players were easy to get along with. We shared a lot of cultural touchstones—often the players were only a few years older than me and had grown up listening to the same music, watching the same movies, and admiring the same basketball players. We usually had an easy time relating to each other.

Because of language and cultural differences, it probably took the most time to get to know the born-and-raised Pinoy players. These guys were often the most courteous members of a team. They would always greet me when I arrived and left from practice, and they’d make small talk about what I’d done the previous night, etc. But they seemed the least comfortable in direct interviews, partly because my Tagalog was not as strong in 2007 as it is today and also because there isn’t a very strong tradition of probing sports journalism in the Philippines, so when I asked for an “interview” they often thought of a 90-second quickie about the upcoming game, while I was thinking of a 90-minute session that included questions about their childhood and where they first played and all kinds of things that usually didn’t come up when they spoke with the media. Over time, however, we got more and more comfortable with each other and I was able to learn a lot about the players through direct interviews and regular old observation.

Describe the process of selling American publishers a book on Philippine basketball.
I didn’t exactly have agents and publishers banging down my door for a chance to sell this book. Awareness of Philippine anything—not just basketball—is woefully low here in the States. I received several rejections telling me that I had a really interesting story to tell but that they feared there was just no audience for it. It took more than two years from the time I signed with my literary agent to the day that I received an offer for Pacific Rims, and in between came several rounds of proposals and rejections. I never got too phased by it, however, because I really loved what I was doing (playing ball, following a pro team around, living in Quezon City) and I felt pretty confident that eventually, some editor would see the project the same way I did. It didn’t matter how many publishers rejected me as long as one of them didn’t.

Was it difficult to get acclimated to the culture in the Philippines?
It’s hard to answer this question, because my brain now tells me that I feel more at home in the Philippines than anywhere else and it can’t really make room for other realities. But if you look at my early blog posts from the Philippines, I think you can chart my acclimation, from a typical, semi-thoughtful visitor who had never lived in a developing country before to someone who’s interested in writing about something deeper than quirky nicknames and technicolor jeepneys.

How much Tagalog did you pick up during your time there?
Over the years I became a very adequate Tagalog speaker. I get a lot of compliments for my language skills, not all of which I think I deserve. Because most foreigners put forth so little effort in picking up Tagalog or any other Philippine language, the handful of people who manage any respectable level of proficiency get plaudits up the wazoo. I think if I were Filipino American and spoke the same exact Tagalog as I do today, people would consider it decent but also tell me endlessly how stilted my grammar was and how foreign my accent sounded. Still, I’m very proud that I can converse fluidly in the language, as well as read and write it pretty well, and I’m still studying so hopefully I will only get better.

It wouldn’t be very Filipino of me if I didn’t ask you about the numerous mentions of food throughout the book. Tell me about the best/worst foods you ate in the Philippines.
The best food, hands down, was the seafood. Crabs in coconut milk, grilled tilapia and lapu-lapu with tomatoes and onions stuffed inside, squid adobo. It was always fresh, unbelievably cheap, and unfailingly delicious. But I miss street food—squid balls, barbecued pork intestines, bananacue, and kwek-kwek—the most. The only thing I had a hard time eating was papaitan, a stew with broth made from goat bile. Serious gag reflex there.

What will you write about next?
I’m not sure. I’d love to continue writing about the Philippines. Every day in the country I felt like I saw something that would make a great story. But as we already talked about, it’s not always the easiest sell. Hopefully, after Pacific Rims, the publishing world will be a little more open to books and articles about the Philippines.

*Author photo is from the Pacific Rims Facebook page.

Book Review: Pacific Rims

Being half Filipino and growing up in Hawaii, much of my youth was filled with the sights, smells, and tastes of my grandmother’s Filipino cooking, as well as the sound of her chatting up other old women in Tagalog, their native language. I’ve eaten some of the food and know a small selection of Filipino phrases (the naughty ones), but that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge. I’ve been told by a number of Filipinos that I need to go see my homeland. I would be all for it, but I wouldn’t know where to start, since I have no idea where in the Philippines my family came from or when my grandparents moved to Hawaii.

I’m telling you this because Rafe Bartholomew’s Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’ Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball is as much about Filipino culture as it is about basketball. Bartholomew, an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine and 2005 Fulbright Scholar, embeds himself with the Alaska Aces of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) for a season. The PBA is the second-oldest professional basketball league behind the NBA. Like other PBA teams, Alaska was named after its corporate owner, in this case, the Alaska Milk Corporation (the Aces arch-rivals are the brewery sponsored San Miguel Beermen).

That the immense popularity of basketball in the Philippines makes a franchise an effective marketing tool is only one hint of how the sport permeates through Filipino culture. PBA players and coaches often translate their basketball fame into government positions. Politicians build high-end, roofed courts not only to appease local constituents, but also because courts are often used as community centers.

Bartholomew catalogs the basketball culture by linking its introduction to the history of the Philippines and pointing out that its popularity is not as unlikely as his title suggests. Like Catholicism, which was brought to the country by Spain, Bartholomew writes, “Basketball was also introduced by a colonial power,” this time the United States. The Philippines embraced it, created their own style of circus lay-ups instead of flashy dunks, and even became a dominant international basketball powerhouse from the early to mid 1900s.

Basketball is everywhere. Bartholomew begins the book by finding a pickup game simply by following the sound of dribbling basketballs. Many kids learn to play on makeshift hoops with backboards of planks of wood nailed together. Jeepneys—”a form of public transportation from U.S. military vehicles that once carried GIs around the American naval and air force bases”—are often painted with NBA team logos and players’ faces.

Pacific Rims also boasts its share of fascinating characters. There is Willie Miller, the Aces’ star player and PBA’s “clown prince,” providing moments of levity. There is Rosell “Roe” Ellis, the Aces’ star import player. Roe attended Rainier Beach High School, the same high school in Seattle as Nate Robinson and Jamal Crawford. Roe’s history is presented with the clarity of amazing self-awareness. Before diving headfirst into the events that brought Roe to the PBA, Roe begins his story of how he ended up in the Philippines by asking, “You know I choked a ref, right?” Then there is the unforgettable Billy Ray Bates. Bartholomew picks up Bates’s story where David Halberstam left off in Breaks of the Game. The pages devoted to Bates are simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking. They tell the story of a tragic-hero type figure finding and losing direction through the game of basketball.

Like any good sports book, Pacific Rims has its sequences of cinematic highlights, including a suspenseful game recap where I found myself turning the pages, wondering what would happen next, and rooting for the Aces to pull off a hard-fought win. But the best parts of the book are when Bartholomew links basketball to Filipino culture. When speaking to Michael Tan, who researches gender, sexuality, and public health in the Philippines, Bartholomew writes:

The sport had become not just a pastime for young Filipino men, Tan explained, but a rite of passage. When boys reach adolescence, they receive privileges. Their mothers begin to allow them to roam their neighborhoods freely, getting into trouble but also learning how to carry themselves as men. Inevitably, these boys end up playing basketball, first in their own neighborhood, but then branching out to compete against kids in other areas. These early trials teach them masculine virtues like teamwork, aggression, and machismo…So basketball is there to make friends, build alliances. It even crosses class barriers.

Finally, there is the passage that reminded me of my childhood family dinners, my grandmother’s cooking, and her sitting around the table, chatting forever with her Filipino friends: “Togetherness is one of the most rigid social norms in Philippine culture, and it played a major role in the chemistry of PBA teams. There’s a powerful urge in Philippine society to be part of the group, whether it’s a family, a bunch of classmates, or a basketball team.”

There’s a wealth of information on the internet regarding Pacific Rims. Bartholomew’s website is a good place to start (and has links to order the book, which you should do ASAP). Check out the book’s Facebook page, which also includes a bunch of photos of Philippine basketball. Last but not least, be sure to check back here, where I will be posting an interview with Bartholomew in the near future.