The Job that isn’t Reporting from ‘Neverland’

The Job that isn’t Reporting from ‘Neverland’
By Francis Ochoa

OF COURSE, it’s the free passes. It’s the front row seats.
I mean, no one ever goes through four years of journalism school inhaling the sweet scent of typewriter ribbons, saying: “I’m going to be a sportswriter someday, so I can save the world.”
It’s about getting right into the action until you literally rub your face against it.
It’s about sitting in the sidelines, watching the Tigers of Santo Tomas four-peat their way to University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP) immortality. And then watching them a decade later pull off the most improbable UAAP championship in the history of collegiate basketball.
It’s about giddily listening to Kobe Bryant as he narrates how he sneaked out of his hotel room past his web of tree-trunk-forearmed bodyguards for a lazy afternoon stroll at one of the posh Makati malls only for someone to see through the cap and sunglasses, shout his name, and stir up a mob that forced the then basketball prodigy into holing up in a popular restaurant.
It’s about listening to T-Mac talking about trying out isaw and wanting to try it out with the New York Yankees. In the same sentence. It’s about staring Shaq eyeball-to-eyeball while he raps an entire coliseum to its feet. It’s about listening to Tiger Woods gently urging a lucky kid to putt gently, but firmly.
It’s about buzzer-beating shots that you write about, hoping to capture the poetry, the elegance, and the drama in a 3,500-character article with your boss right in your ear saying he wants the piece done yesterday.
It’s about sitting on a P25,000 seat and watching such money-lined politicians and showbiz personalities—or both—like Chavit Singson, Sharon Cuneta, Bong Revilla, Lito Atienza, and their ilk walk past you and take a seat a row behind you while Manny Pacquiao pummels another hapless foe into a shapeless, senseless pulp.

Neverland
Yes. It’s true what was once said in the movies. Sports writing isn’t a grown-up’s job.
Maybe that’s why the beat is generally the journalism world’s Neverland. And the people who make a living out of it never seem to grow old.
In the headquarters of the PSC-POC (Philippine Sports Commission-Philippine Olympic Committee) Media Group, the organization of sports writers covering what is perhaps the most serious beat in the Philippine sporting world, where it is regular fare to follow paper trails of lost or unliquidated financial allocations from the government, there is a glass cabinet which could house archived literature or other reference materials. It has been turned into a showcase for hard-to-find toy models of cars and action figures.
Yes. We never grow up.
We wake up, get dressed, and most of us proceed to the playing venues of some of the hottest tickets in town and settle in to choice seats that even scions of the most prominent clans in the country would kill for—and believe me, not a few have tried.
After which, we head for locker rooms and talk to some of the biggest sporting names in the country and in the world, even. Then we sit down in an air-conditioned press room, try to fit in a good example of creative nonfiction into a 20-minute deadline and hit the nearest beer joint to unwind.
It is a stressful job, but someone’s got to do it.
And we do it without pretensions.

Surrender
As much as we often gloat over bottles of beer about the leads we cook up to make our story interesting, we know nothing we write about will lower inflation to manageable levels, help defray the rising cost of living, alleviate poverty, or—despite our constant efforts to hunt down those who abuse government donations in the PSC—eradicate corruption.
Living standards are not going to improve the day after we write about Pacquiao flooring Erik Morales in the final battle of their climax-filled trilogy and keeping him fused to the canvas until all Mexican machismo escaped his body and all he could afford was a meek admission of surrender.
Gasoline prices are not going to spiral downwards after we hammer out an article about the latest conquest of basketball’s Team Philippines in a lowly regional tournament abroad.
But hey, admit it. You like the way we take you there.
And there is where the action is.
When you’re worlds apart from the concern about the thinning stack of bills in your wallet, you pick us up and read us not simply to know what happened the night before. You read to be there,  the night before.
As the words flow from the paper to your mind, your hair stands on end as you read how the  5-foot-8 Bal David got the ball off an inbound pass, made a dizzying spin move to split two defenders before burying a jumper that kissed off the glass that reduced Talk ’N Text’s Goliath of a center, Asi Taulava, into a huge mass of tears.
Or how, from the comforts of your Manila living room, you are suddenly transplanted to the loud Thomas and Mack Arena of the  University of Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, surrounded by bright lights and even brighter celebrities.
And your hair bristles from the time Michael Buffer announ-ces pompously that yes, “let’s get rrready to rrrrumble…” until the time a glassy-eyed Morales shakes his head to let his corner know  he’s had enough.
You love the way we make you hear, in the quiet privacy of your bedroom or your corner office, how loud the din was when a wisp of a girl named Marna Pabillore grabbed a flag attached to a pole twice her height and triggered a booming din inside a Cebu coliseum by running around the coliseum carrying the nation’s tri-color after winning a Southeast Asian Games gold.
And you hurt the way we did when we saw first-hand, and you later read and relived, how a Korean hotshot named Lee Sang Min buried a dagger of a triple that nipped the Philippines by one and eliminated a bunch of big-name superstars from a once-in-a-lifetime shot at taking on China in the finals of the Asian Games.
We took you there. Wherever the action was, we pounded every word on our laptops with the knowledge that our job is to take you there.

Footnotes
Sometimes, we fail. And for a person whose career that will amount to nothing more than footnotes when put beside those of people who have covered wars, revolutions, beatifications, and presidential oath-takings, those failures get pretty frustrating.
Because, yes, it’s really about the tickets. It’s about the front-row seats. And we don’t have any pretensions about saving the world or, at the very least, making this country great again.
But when you smile at the story of a forgotten sports hero, when you’re teary eyed with pride as the words recreate the latest achievement of a countryman in an international competition—or when you simply start feeling good reading about how your favorite team snatched an improbable victory from looming defeat, remember.
Remember it was us, those who never grow up, those eking out a living in what is not a grown-up’s job, who took you there.

Francis Ochoa, assistant sports editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer,   has been covering sports for the paper since 2004. Before joining the Inquirer, Ochoa worked for nine years as sports writer for the now-defunct Today.

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