26 years and counting

One man with courage makes a majority. – Andrew Jackson

I’d almost forgotten that it’s been 26 years since I first entered broadcasting and journalism, and found fulfillment doing what I love the most. Twenty-six years of seeking stories of greatness, checking off places, people and events on a never-ending bucket list I’m proud to have trimmed down. Twenty-six years of adventures in real life and in writing life. Twenty-six years to be grateful for.

It was 1986, a month after the EDSA Revolution that my batch graduated and went out into the world, full of idealism and breathing the air of new opportunity. That would run headlong into the real world. The values were there, planted and sprouting. How strong were they? And what was I planning to do with my life, a life that had started out with weakness and infirmity, uncertainty and lack of confidence?

Fast forward a quarter of a century later. I have had a front-row seat to thousands of transcendent events, earned a living being witness to achievements other people pay enormous sums to see. I’ve gotten onto the basketball court with some of the best players in the world and hidden my awe. I’ve watched as athletes have invested their lives in exhausting, painful routines with no guarantee of success, and won. I have been storyteller to some of the greatest tales of human achievement in our country’s history.

But perhaps the greatest story is how all these enormous blessings were granted to me, a skinny shrimp of a boy who had asthma, scoliosis, migraines and flat feel, a grocery list of birth defects. Two turning points marked the change of my life’s direction, propelled by people who simply chose to care. 

My mother, Lirio, had decided that her son was not going to be a wimp. Heaven help her, she was going to make sure I had every advantage she could give me. She put me in swimming class for two years, banishing my asthma. She took me to a doctor who taught me how to straighten out my spine through a year of painful calisthenics and stretching. She nudged me into running sports to strengthen my body and my will, and so I would ignore my flat-footedness. And because of all that, I outgrew my migraine headaches.

Then in high school, I was searching for my passion, though it was already there in front of me. I was the only one from my grade school class to qualify for the honors section in high school. It was lonely and scary, until a small, big-eared, balding gentleman befriended me, and changed my life. He was my first-year homeroom teacher, Onofre Pagsanghan. He taught me how to throw myself into what I do, how to accept that loving someone or something was always accompanied by pain, but that pain is also a sign of growth.

Because of all those life lessons, I decided to throw myself into giving back to sports, to trumpeting the best in human achievement. In sports, the results speak for themselves. The purity of the accomplishment – and failure – does not lie. There is an honesty about sports that is hard to find anywhere else, the results are there, set in stone. Hard work and persistence will always win the day.

So on this journey, on this path, I have been blessed to have seen the world, and how people evolve, some for the good, some not. Yet I always look back on the days before graduation with gratitude. Mom died last October. Mr. Pagsi will turn 85 on June 12. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of either of them, or of something they taught me that made the tough choices easier. With the mistakes I’ve made, they’ve brought out the good in me, too.

I have become the storyteller I am because of them.