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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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The PBA is well beyond the stage of questioning the logic behind its habitual athlete shrinking. The important thing is that it's always worked: If a team wanted to sneak in a tall import, it could always finagle a way to do it. That's starting to change now. Just before the current season got underway in March, former Seton Hall standout Kelly Whitney got the boot for being too tall. Whitney was done in by a new measuring technique. In 2005, the PBA began measuring imports lying down. Players are forced to lie flat on the ground with their feet against a board, while league employees pin down their knees, shoulders and heads. As of yet, nobody's figured out how to cheat this new system.

When you think about it, it's a wonder that the PBA permitted height fraud throughout most of its 32-year history when such a simple solution was available. Bernardino told me that when he was commissioner in the 1990s and early 2000s, every team was allowed to witness the measurements and thus couldn't complain about the results. Coaches who watched players droop and bend their way into the league acquired a bemused fatalism similar to the outlook many Filipinos have toward their famously corrupt politicians—they couldn't stop the cheating, so they laughed at it. The recent change to lying-down measurements seems to have been motivated by nothing more than a changing of the guard. Perry Martinez, head of PBA officials, told me that when his office took over measurement duties in 2005, they chose the new method because it yielded the most accurate heights.

There have been no official complaints about the stricter rules, but there have been unintended consequences. Last season, Alaska signed Victor Thomas, a two-time veteran of the PBA's 6-foot-6-inches-and-under tournaments. His coaches assumed that Thomas would make height and didn't bother attending his measurement. Shockingly, Thomas had sprouted and now stood taller than the limit. Alaska brought in a less-experienced player and was eventually swept in the playoffs. Thomas, for his part, found that being too tall for Philippine basketball was no career kiss of death. An Argentine team scooped him up shortly after his dismissal from the PBA, and he's since gotten another gig in Brazil. Victor Thomas may be too small for the NBA and too big for Southeast Asia, but in South America, he's just right.

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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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