Stinking gossip

In one of the national sports pages last week were three stories related to one another in that they dealt with the ongoing NBA championship series between the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat.

One was the main story while the other two were what we call in journalism as sidebars, or smaller stories that dwell on interesting sidelights to the main item. Had journalism been a dinner table, the sidebars would have been the dessert. You have them last to cap the meal.

But on that sports spread that day, the head or title of one of the sidebars just leapt out at you, grabbing your attention away from the main article. That it was written by one of the country's most respected sportswriters added to the attraction.

" Does Nowitski stink? " was what the title said, or asked. For those who, this late, still need to be filled in, Nowitski is none other than Dirk Nowitski, the German NBA superstar forward playing for the Mavericks.

At the time the story saw print, the Mavericks have already lost two of the three middle games in Miami, with the normally high-scoring Nowitski clearly playing way below his regular and playoff season averages.

Thus, it would not be surprising if other people would take the title of the sidebar item to mean something other than an olfactory condition. Perhaps the writer is suggesting that Nowitski stinks in the way he has been playing.

But Filipinos are not bound to trip over what the word " stink " meant. Tsismosos to the bone, they immediately knew what the sportswriter was suggesting. This may be the sports page, but you are being served certified ( comes with a byline ), delicious, unadulterated gossip.

You melt. Gossip has the charm to earn the ear of even the pope ( don't ever believe the sanctified halls of the Vatican are immune to gossip --- where else do you think all those holy text jokes emanated ). You read the sidebar first.

As you read, your gossip-fired intuitive Filipino capability to choose the right suggestive influences gets reaffirmed with this latest acquired tidbit of useless information. As the writer himself claimed to have experienced up close and personal, Nowitski stinks.

Why, somewhere toward the end of the article, the writer even used the term " dead rat " to nail the German to his celebrity coffin of ignominy, even if he attributed the term to another NBA superstar from the opposing team, unnamed, but whose identity is as tall as a tree.

After you finished reading, you pass the article to the other members of the family, the daughters in turn texting the information to their friends. And, despite the gross suggestions you can almost smell yourself, the story did whip up appetites around the dinner table.

And then it occurred to you. If gossip can take the place of nutrition, certain writers would drive food and beverage giant San Miguel Corporation to the ground in just a few days or weeks of publication.

After a while, though, and after you finally got a good grip on yourself, you began to feel a little embarrassed. You realized you gave too much of yourself to gossip. Why, you did not even get around to reading the main story. You just enriched yourself with hollow glee.

You blame the sportswriter, whom you clothed in loyal following for the most part of his distinguished professional life. But not even the majesty of his name, the imprimatur of his byline, could make that gossip item more dignified than what it really was, just a gossip item.

Even if you relished its telling, it still stunk up the page on which it was written. And why blame only the message and the messenger. The message was written because it was bound to be welcome reading. The writer was merely charging as much as the traffic would bear.