I spent more than a thousand words on my review of Rafe Bartholomew’s Pacific Rims, and it’s a good thing GMANews.TV still published it:

AS A SPORTS BOOK, however, Pacific Rims really shines while detailing Bartholomew’s 2007 PBA Fiesta Conference stint covering the Alaska Aces, who welcome him with open arms, but not before giving him the same Filipino nickname that was given to Panchito in several Joey de Leon movies.

Here’s where the inevitable comparisons to David Halberstam’s classic "Breaks of the Game" are drawn, and these comparisons are not entirely unwarranted. Bartholomew’s writing sparkles as he paints portraits of several members of Alaska, making the characters leap out of the pages: Tim Cone, the coaching lifer who taught himself the Chicago Bulls’ triangle offense; Jeffrey Cariaso, the team’s spiritual leader who bridges the divide between the team’s locals and Fil-Ams; Dale Singson and Aaron Aban, former college basketball stars who have bonded at the end of the Alaska bench; Rosell Ellis, the world-weary import seeking basketball redemption; and Willie Miller, perhaps the book’s most indelible character: equal parts jester, enigma, and unstoppable scoring machine. The funniest anecdote in the book involves Miller playing a prank on teammate Tony dela Cruz that gives new meaning to the former’s “Willie Thriller” nickname.

Read the whole thing here.

Also, the great Tom Ziller from Fanhouse called the book a sequel to Breaks of the Game. The classic by Halberstam featured, among many memorable characters, the mercurial Billy Ray Bates. Pacific Rims quite literally picked up from where Breaks of the Game left off, chronicling the Black Superman’s years in the Philippines, which Deadspin posted as an excerpt today. Go read.

UPDATE: My buddy AJ reports that the book is also available in Australia, while commenter RPM writes that he got his copy at Powerbooks Greenbelt, where there are still a handful of copies.

To follow-up my previous post about the Black Superman, here are a couple of YouTube videos about Billy Ray Bates in his days 1983 stint with the Crispa Redmanizers.

Manotoc even hints at Bates’ alcohol problem, which PBA teams over the course of the next few years were only too willing to ignore as long as Billy Ray put up the buckets.



After the jump, game footage of Billy Ray Bates’ Crispa taking on Great Taste Coffee, powered by Norman Black.

A couple of nights back, I was chatting with Rafe Bartholomew to congratulate him on making it to Quinito Henson’s column (an honor that falls somewhere between his Fulbright scholarship and his Bakekang television appearance). Quinito quoted Rafe, who wrote a feature on the Knicks guard last season for Seattle Weekly, as texting that Nate Robinson might have Filipino blood through his mother, and the Philippine Star columnist raised the possibility of the defending NBA slam dunk champion playing for the country in international competition.

Needless to say, message board fanatics all over the Internet virtually wet themselves over the idea. They started discussing what it would take for Robinson to eschew playing for the Knicks and the NBA after the season to concentrate full time on Smart Gilas. Others, meanwhile, were cool to the proposal, saying that Robinson’s entry to the team would hamper the development of Smart Gilas ace point guard Mark Barroca. Anyhoo, I’ve been hearing that the SBP has since been in contact with Nate Robinson’s mother.

The conversation between Rafe and I though moved quickly from Nate and Quinito to another sky-walking figure in Philippine basketball, Billy Ray Bates. “The Black Superman” was recently honored as the 40th greatest player in Portland Trailblazers history by the Oregonian, and Blazers beat writer Jason Quick was able to track down the former import in New York for a feature that came out the day before Christmas. It paints a bleak picture of Bates, who has been in-and-out of jail and rehab since his playing days: “He is desperate for employment, and says he is attending a Back to Work program in Manhattan that offers job referrals. However, in order to work he must first gain a New York identification, which requires a birth certificate, which he can't find, but is working on, and should be done tomorrow. He has no bank account and usually no more than five dollars to his name. When he does have money, it's because he has flatly asked someone for it. He is intensely engaging, highly likeable and willing to speak of his missteps.”

I don’t know if the feature is sadder than the series of stories Quinito himself wrote on Bates last year. Bates tracked Quinito down via Mico Halili, telling the writer that he was planning to fly to Manila to do personal appearances for the PBA to reconnect with his fans, and asking for help in contacting his old sponsors, a sneaker company that have closed down a long time ago. Quinito glossed over Bates’ sad personal history, and played off the former import’s Philippine return as a real possibility, even teasing a comeback of Bates’ old sneaker company; to me, it came off like a very cruel joke on a sad old man.