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The Incredible Shrinking Basketball PlayersHow to make it as a hoops star in the Philippines. Step one: Get shorter.

By Rafe Bartholomew
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007, at 11:54 AM ET

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A basketball player getting measured in the Philippines. Click image to expand.

Everywhere you look in the Philippines, there's a jerry-built basketball game. In farming towns without paved courts, kids dribble on dirt and bank shots off of two-by-fours lashed to coconut trees. On Manila street corners, players who can't afford sneakers run the court in flip-flops or bare feet. The country's professional players, however, play on state-of-the-art courts and wear top-notch apparel. Still, the Philippine Basketball Association is missing something just as fundamental to the game: height.

Basketball is a tall man's game. But in the Philippines, where men are short and hoops is an obsession, something's got to give. Several native "big men" are barely taller than 6 feet 3 inches, the standard height for NBA guards. Dunks are so rare in the PBA that the league has toyed with the idea of making slams worth three points. The league adds a dash of high-wire athleticism by allowing each team to hire one foreign-born star. But permitting American 7-footers to play would wreak havoc among the Lilliputian locals. As a result, the PBA bans imports taller than 6 feet 6 inches.

The rule works. The PBA's foreigners are a versatile bunch: pure shooters, workhorses who do a little of everything, burly inside operators. But while the imports typically dominate games, they still leave room for the best Filipino players—guards who whirl through defenses and score on twisting layups—to do what they do best.

The height limit may be good for the PBA, but it forces tall players into a Catch-22. After a lifetime spent exaggerating their height to look more appealing to scouts, players must try to become shorter to play in the Philippines. The teams, too, have an incentive to sneak in over-height imports—every inch gives you a competitive advantage. As a result, foreigners in the PBA, and the franchises who bring them over, have come up with several shrinking techniques. Some of the methods are tricky, some are pseudoscientific, and others are just plain batty.

The league's original height-altering technique was a trip to the barber. Weeks before he died of a heart attack in March, former PBA Commissioner Jun Bernardino told me that in the 1970s and 1980s, teams tried to shave inches by shaving players' heads. This practice has lapsed somewhat as large hairstyles—Afros, shags, flat tops—have gone out of fashion. The technique isn't foolproof, either. As teams sometimes discovered, it's not big hair but pointy skulls that disqualified their imports.

Need a quick fix, and a shaved head won't cut it? Coaches swear that intense exercise in the hours before a measurement will knock as much as an inch off a player's everyday height. Conventional wisdom in the PBA holds that shoulder presses and squats compress a player's bone structure, while running in the tropical heat will shrink you via dehydration.

The science behind this notion is, well, nonexistent. A quick survey of orthopedic surgeons at New York University Medical Center revealed a mix of outright contempt and polite skepticism. "We know of no method to shrink people," replied Dr. Joseph Bosco. The kinder, gentler Dr. Donald J. Rose offered this explanation: Weightlifting could compress the soft, fluid-filled disks between the vertebrae, and aerobic exercise could cause dehydration-related shrinkage in the disks. The resulting loss in height would be in millimeters, not inches, though.

The easiest way to shrink a basketball player has proven the most effective. Before the league allows a player to suit up, he must pass an official measurement. To appear shorter, players simply hunch over and bend their knees. Other temporary shrinking techniques include tucking your head into your chest and wearing billowing shorts that conceal bowed knees. Since as early as 1990, the PBA tried to counteract this technique by hiring men to push on players' knees and attempt to straighten their joints. Despite the straighteners' best efforts, the hunching player would hold the position and claim it was his natural posture.

Players and coaches get overcome with giddiness when discussing these finer points of height manipulation. Nic Belasco, a 10-year PBA veteran, gleefully re-enacted the bent-knees, tucked-chin stance for me after practice one afternoon. Tim Cone, head coach of the Alaska Aces, demonstrated how an import could lose an inch or two by leaning against a wall.

Alaska's current import, Rosell Ellis, has displayed a miraculous ability to shrink and grow over his five PBA seasons. In 2001, the league capped height at 6 feet 4 inches, and Ellis measured a shade over 6 feet 2 and a half. This season, with a 6-foot-6-inches height limit, he came in at almost 6 feet 5 inches. It's safe to say that Ellis, 32, didn't have a growth spurt. He told me that before his measurement in 2001, a coach advised him to make himself as short as possible so he could play in tournaments with even lower height limits. Ellis recalled the PBA's knee-pushing henchmen doing their darnedest to straighten him out, but he locked his joints and pushed his head down toward the base of his neck. Behold, the amazing, adjustable-height basketball player!

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Rafe Bartholomew is a former U.S. Fulbright scholar living in Manila, where he's working on a book about Philippine basketball.
Photograph of player being measured courtesy Rafe Bartholomew.
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