Juanito V. Jabat: 1930-2015. A great icon has left us

I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Mr. Juanito "Nito" Jabat, former editor and publisher of The Freeman and Banat News, whom I regard as a great friend, a confidant and mentor. Nito wrote his witty columns, "Have Bat Will Strike!" When I travel abroad, I would gather the newspapers in the countries I would visit and gave it to him as my "pasalubong" for his use, even if these are not in the English language.

Nito Jabat and I have gone a long way. Long before I became a journalist he was a correspondent for a Manila-based newspaper that featured sporting stories. So when we held our first Motocross races (before Motocross, it was called Hare and Hound Scrambles) in what is now the Port of Cebu offices in the Cebu North Reclamation he would feature it in a Manila Sports news and of course The Freeman. Later when we created the Cebu Archery Club, he also covered our local and national tournaments held at the Baseline Restaurant grounds. Later he included covering our local and national shooting events at the Cebu Pistol and Rifle Association.

But on July 1986 when Mr. Jabat learned that the late Sir Max Soliven, then the publisher of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and later Publisher of the Philippine Star took me in as his Cebu Bureau Chief, he then asked me to write columns for The Freeman. I started writing thrice-a-week columns as what I would call my "On-The-Job" training. My first column in The Freeman appeared on August 5, 1987. That's 28-years a long time ago!

Then something happened that very few people know about and I guess it is time that our readers know this part of my journalistic history because Mr. Jabat was part of this story. It was then that the late Wilfredo "Boy" Veloso, who was then the number one columnist of Sunstar Daily, began attacking my columns. Boy Veloso was very harsh in his attack on my person, especially when I was still new in this media game and thus, he forced me to return fire in my self-defense.

It was then I learned that no one ever dared to confront Boy Veloso tit-for-tat in any newspaper. These tirades went on for two straight weeks, with Boy Veloso dishing it out to me, while I responded to his tirades in my thrice-weekly columns. After two weeks of bombardment in our columns, Nito Jabat asked me for a meeting and there he intimated to me that he had a long and serious talk with Sunstar Daily's editor, Mr. Pacheco "Cheking" Seares about the ugly situation that I was in with Boy Veloso, which was not healthy for Cebu journalism.

In that meeting, Mr. Jabat asked me to stop attacking Boy Veloso. I responded to him saying, "Sir Jabat, Mr. Veloso started this word war without any provocation from me, so please inform Mr. Seares that I am amenable to a ceasefire only on one condition, I will write one more column against him and if he would no longer respond to that column that will be the end of it."

That ended that short word war between two columnists from different newspapers. For his sake, I won't mention anymore the issues I used against Boy Veloso as I have long buried it and forgiven him. Later in the year 2000 when I took command of CITOM, Boy Veloso became my ardent defender of my traffic policies even if I did not ask him to do so.

One day, I invited him for lunch at the Chika-an Restaurant and we became good friends, to the point that I visited him in the hospital when he was gravely ill and went to his funeral when he died some years ago.

Indeed after that word war with Boy Veloso, Mr. Jabat knew that this resulted in my sudden rise in my popularity as a straight-shooting columnist. A year after writing in The Freeman, Sir Max Soliven asked me to go to the Philippine Star office to be interviewed by Ma'am Betty Go-Belmonte, the mother of our Star Group of Companies' Mr. Miguel Belmonte. It was then that I began writing columns for the Philippine Star, which I still do today.

When Mr. Jabat asked me to write columns for The Freeman, I told him that this was not going to be easy for me for I never wrote any essay in high school, not even during my college days. More so, I never took up a course on Journalism. It was then that I learned from him that in those days, very few people had any journalism degree for the simple reason that our schools and universities did not offer courses on journalism, unlike today where journalism is already commonly taught in our universities.

Another incident where Mr. Jabat was involved was when I exposed the Environmental Legal Assistance Center for using The Freeman to further their crusade purportedly against companies that degrade our environment. I wrote columns to defend the Katahira Corp. and the Tsuneishi Shipyards. ELAC threatened to file a libel suit against me and I stood my ground. Noel Pangilinan then our editor demanded that I make an apology. But I refused and Mr. Jabat supported me because he knew my reputation of telling only the truth.

May God grant you eternal rest my dear friend Nito.

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected] or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.