Remembering Billy Ray Bates: The Legend of 'The Black Superman'

    Billy Ray Bates playing for Crispa in '83

From his signature 'Black Superman' Grosby kicks, his Karate Kid style knotted cloth of a head band, to his thundering dunks and graceful layups that defied the laws of gravity, Billy Ray Bates captivated Philippine basketball in the 80's like no other foreign player before and after him. 

I was just a young lad in the infantile stages of my basketball addiction when I first watched Bates on TV playing for one of Robert Jaworski's Ginebra teams. I can still vividly remember fragments of Bates' sensational performances on the basketball court that left an indelible impression on me as a child. I instantly became a fan of the player the commentators called 'The Black Superman' who glided to the hoop with relative ease. Alongside the legendary commentating of the late Joe Cantada and the no-look behind-the-back passes by The Big J, Bates' offensive outbursts amidst the chants of "Ginebra!! Ginebra!! Ginebra!!" makes up most of my fondest memories of that great era in Philippine basketball. Not to mention how Ginebra fans would shower the court with coins, flinging them at players of the opposing team and officials every time their squad suffered a loss. 

It was like watching LeBron James against a bunch of college kids. Bates had career averages of 46 points per game which would've been higher had he focused solely on playing ball and took care of his body. Yeap, no typos there. Bates dropped 46 per in a career that spanned from 1983-1988.

I was a big basketball fanatic growing up like most people in the Philippines. I always said that basketball is my wife, the woman I always come home to, while boxing is that sexy mistress you simply can't shake off. Lately I've been spending more time with the mistress. But you have to understand, basketball was larger than life back in the Philippines when I was growing up. It's perhaps why authors like Rafe Bartholomew had taken an interest and penned some of the most captivating recollections from Philippine basketball's storied past in his book titled Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball which also provides great reference regarding Bates' career in the PBA.

Bates opened my eyes on the disparity of the black athlete compared to the local crop in terms of athleticism, size and physical capabilities. My aunt who worked for the La Tondena company that owned the Ginebra teams Bates played in would always take me to games and I got to personally witness Bates single-handedly made the game his. One time my aunt had one of the ball boys bring me to the locker room to meet the players before the game and I can remember how I looked up at Bates thinking he was some form of basketball god.  

So as I further dived in to tracing the story of 'The Black Superman', I found out that as much as his hardwood exploits are stuff of legends, so were his off-court antics. Bates was notorious for his partying and drinking ways, which were the main reasons for his exile from the NBA. 

Here are excerpts from an article by Deadspin.com adapted from 'Pacific Rims' on Bates ventures in the Philippines:

'Bates actually tried to stay clean when he first arrived in the country. In many of his preseason interviews with local sports columnists, the conversation touched on how he had become a changed man after rehab. By the end of these interviews, however, Bates was usually finishing off a bottle of beer. 

I also found out that Bates grew up hard. As hard as any black man's son growing up in an environment that did not prepare him for the fast life and the trappings that come with it,

' Bates was born in 1956, yet his Mississippi upbringing seemed straight out of the nineteenth century Reconstruction South. He was the second youngest of nine children living in a sharecropper's shack on a white millionaire's farm in Goodman, a hamlet on the outskirts of a small town, Kosciusko, in rural Attala County — the godforsaken dot within the dot on the map. Their home had no plumbing and no electricity. Their alcoholic father died when Bates was 7 years old, and Bates and his siblings worked the fields to support the family. He spent his youth picking cotton and soybeans, breaking clods of fertilizer behind tractors, and hooking logs for lumbermen; later, he credited his powerful physique to a childhood of manual labor. Bates went to school only to play basketball, and although he never learned to read full sentences in class, he was able to dunk by his sophomore year. Basketball became his sole purpose in life.

In some ways it was fitting, because there was seemingly nothing he couldn't do on a basketball court. In high school and then at Kentucky State University, if Bates wanted to dunk, he'd dunk. If he wanted to shoot from 25 feet out, he did it. He may have been one of the most naturally gifted players to ever lace up a pair of high-tops. But because he had so few other opportunities in life, he became a basketball savant.

He had little more than his instincts, which served him well on the hardwood but failed him almost everywhere else.'

Bates had a hard time fitting in. And even when he got his break in the big league, he was an outcast among his teammates who grew up not knowing how life was in Bates' shoes and the effects it had on him. Former Portland Trailblazers teammate Jerome Kersey described Bates' career as 'an example of what can happen to players unprepared for NBA life in urban environs". He didn't know how to handle his newfound fame and fortune any more than handle a social balance in his new lifestyle. He was lost. He was misunderstood. He imploded.

Bates easily held his own against the best guards in the league even dropping 29 points on former NBA Finals MVP and 2010 Hall of Fame inductee, the late Dennis Johnson. Basketball always came easy for Bates. It was what went on outside it that made things difficult. After four seasons, and managing to post playoff career averages of almost 27 points and 4.2 assists, he was out of the NBA. 

CONTINUE ON TO PAGE 2 >>> TRAGEDY STRUCK BATES' TROUBLED LIFE AFTER HIS DAYS IN THE PBA. FLIP TO PAGE 2 TO CONTINUE READING. (CLICK HERE)