 (first published in Sun.Star Cebu, March 14, 2006)
WE call it the lead paragraph and sometimes spell it as lede. And its purpose is to grab the headline-scanning reader by whatever hanging appendage is available and to keep him glued to the ink stains that form the news story.
The nice, crisp, snappy, interesting and informative ones, or at least we try to make them that way, are usually on the news pages.
But the sports section also delivers nice hooks. It has to. It needs to. If only to give tribute to those who've offered their lives to the pursuit of doing that one thing that no one else in this world can do better:
"Straddling the top of the world, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently at the vast sweep of earth below. I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care." - John Krakauer, Into Thin Air, Outside Magazine.
"Against its reputation as a pastime of drunks, against the notion that it is stupid, arm wrestling does most efficiently what sport is asked to do, which is translate the muddle of success and failure in life into the knowable: who wins and who doesn't and why. In these terms, arm wrestling looks consummately elegant, the lockjaw articulate and the grunting sublime. Your arm, your will, and victory or loss. There is precious little equipment, no brain damage, and you can walk away from it. It is a clear and possibly heroic moment in the smudged, fudged modern world. And if there can be an undisputed world champion in a sport as regionalized and marginalized and fractionated as arm wrestling, Cleve Dean of Pavo, Georgia, was once it and is vying to be it again." - Padget Powell, Grappling with a Giant, Harper's.
"It's the third day of the Feast of La Virgen del Mar on Spain's Costa de Sol, and the Hotel Torreluz has barred its glass doors against scores of squirming, giggling nymphets. Through the heavy etched panes, they are mouthing the names of their heroes: 'Enrique!' 'Emilio!' 'Fran!' Those not dressed in Gap T-shirts and Reeboks are wearing bright doll-like flamenco dresses, little mountains of ruffles sweeping to the sidewalk; when they turn away, the deep V-cut backs reveal an iridescence of Andalusian tans - flan, olive, cognac, chestnut, café con leche. 'Besos de Carmelo,' by the rock-flamenco group Aurora, pours deafeningly from an over amplified sound system in the tiny plaza outside. Nearby, horsemen in traditional flat riding hats and elaborate chaps pick their way trough a gridlock of diminutive cars." - Tony Hendra, Man and Bull, Harper's.
"Russ Bertram was three stories high, clutching his shins in a triple somersault dive, when one wet hand slipped. He spun out of control and hit the water and 35 miles per hour, ripping his shoulders out of socket." - Linda Robertson, Platform Pitfalls, Miami Herald.
"Alone in her bedroom, alone in a forty-room mansion, alone on a seventy-acre estate, Marge Schott finishes off a vodka-and-water (no lime, no lemon), stubs out another Carlton 120, takes to her two aching knees and prays to the Men. To Charlie, the husband who made her life and then ruined it. He taught her never to trust. To daddy, the unsmiling father who turned her into his only son. He taught her never to be soft. To Dad Schott, the calculating father-in-law, whom she may have loved most of all. He taught her never to let herself be cheated." - Rick Reilly, Heaven Help Margie Schott, Sports Illustrated.
"What difference a day makes." - Glenn C. Michelena, Sun.Star Cebu correspondent, writing about how the Team Philippines contingent to the sepak takraw double regu event during last December's Southeast Asian Games lost all their matches on the second day of the games despite getting off to a promising start on Day 1.
All the selections, except the last one of course, come from George Plimpton and Glenn Stout's 1997 book, The Best American Sports Writing. I got the book from the newsroom library and gobbled it up over the weekend in an attempt to better myself in the discipline.
Ten years ago today, I nervously approached Ms. Nini B. Cabaero at the Sun.Star building roof deck - she was news editor then - and asked her for a job, offering nothing except a promise that I'd try my best. Ten years later and I'm still trying. This, i guess, is my pursuit .
 | I admire that realization, my friend. You keep doing that thing you do best--and at the same, we will keep enjoying the pieces you do. |
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