If you’re a singer, everything looks like a song.
If you’re a sportswriter, everything looks like a game.
SAME with a player or an athlete in different sports disciplines. We live life and see life in the analogy of sooo exciting, challenging, ever daunting and ego-tripping nuances of the game.
That’s why we always love to compete. And excel is but the greatest motivation for us to dare explore the path less trodden.
There’s always the G-spot. The guiding range to aim your target or something “authentic” that you need to believe in. For a blind allegiance to anything absurd can get you killed, honey.
“To thine own self be true,” as the saying goes. But in truth, the first thing we have to do in order to prosper is kill all the “sipsip” (obsequious) around us hehe...
Seriously though, I’m happy that my life’s journey has not taken me to a place to defile, demoralize, or damage anybody.
When I started with Gold Star Daily, some three decades ago, then a brief stint with Daily Tribune that quickly turned into SunStar Cagayan de Oro as still a young writer (they used to tease me as such until now), I felt like experiencing everything for the first time. Yeah, always the first time!
I never questioned anything—the sun and the moon, the difference between loyalty and royalty, promotion and demotion—unlike when midlife crisis arises. The whys of it all!
As PBA star John Paul Erram and beauty queen Katrina Acaylar would like to assimilate, a certain period in life where you want to find that angel of thunderstorms that will put out your internal fire.
Is imagination more important than knowledge?
And you know, life’s metamorphosis: From boxing to billiard and chess to basketball and plentiful more of basketballs. From Beatles to Aero LedZepmith, Guns `n Roses and back to Rolling Stones. Still, very old school rock `n roll. From being purely innocent to naughty, green and horny. Ahh...melodic chords progression along the human curves.
Could be the reason why I’m a sportswriter and a ‘lil bit songwriter—because I’ve lived through the changes of not knowing anything...to knowing just a tip of almost everything.
This paper’s only sports correspondent Jaime Joshua Frias II, whom I mentored passionately from A to Z, could be the best interpreter of what I’m talking about.
My thought, my sensitivity, my honest-to-goodness brutality altogether run deeper into his writing veins.
“Never mind the style, the flowers and the bees. Get possibly all the solid facts and details and you will never come home boy a beaten child,” I used to tell Jaime, my partner in crime young enough to be my son.
Be the best?
Then, persevere and keep that roaring flames in your heart.
Sing as though no one can hear you. Laugh uncontrollably. Never regret anything that makes you smile. My favorite lines from the rock `n roll world of Steven Tallarico.
And be a sportswriter. “The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be,” as legendary wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart would love to project himself atop the ring.
The one with the Holy Grail always ready to be among the anointed grandsons of the great old Procs Maslog. (Want to know him?)
Of course, do not forget. Yeah boy, don’t you ever forget.
When loneliness sets in, when you got rain in your heart or when you’re out in the cold like the now brothers-less Barry Gibb from Bee Gees, also try to write a little song in your spare time.