Crafting a career path

AS I approach my 60th year of earthly existence, allow me to take you to memory lane with some of the most forgettable moments in my lifetime.

Fulfilling, disappointing, enriching, crestfallen, hilarious, ecstatic and stimulating were among the mixed emotions I have experienced through the past six decades.

The long and winding road traversed, no matter how difficult and rocky, is what has made me today – strong, determined, compassionate and at peace in the face of any adversity or tragedy (death in the family) in life.

The destination is only the icing on the cake, so to speak.Michael Jordan once admitted in an endorsement commercial for a major U.S. shoe and apparel company, he had missed so many shots in his National Basketball Association (NBA) life.

The number of times he had failed made him stronger – it’s true, what does not kill you makes you stronger – and eventually his distinguished career was defined by the times he had risen after each fall and succeeded after each failure.

Then there was this line from one of the latest “Spiderman” movies that I had watched where Uncle Ben told a young boy by the name of Peter Parker: “Don’t just follow the path, make your own trail.”

The words of Michael Jordan and Uncle Ben are what have shaped my life. Instead of joining the family’s handicraft business after my school days, I got to craft my own career path.

Officially, I became a professional sportswriter on June 5, 1981 when my first materials on basketball, particularly the NBA scene, got published in a weekly sports magazine.

More than two decades later, here I am still churning out one column/article after  another. While it’s true the monetary benefits gained by a journalist won’t make him a Bill Gates, the “mental nourishment” aspects of writing simply are immeasurable.

Believe it or not, never in my wildest dreams did I think I would go into professional writing some day. But fate intervened and, by God’s grace, I have succeeded long enough to leave behind a legacy when I shall have crossed the Great Beyond.

It’s worth recalling a few events in my younger days at Xavier School that perhaps played a role in what became of me when I joined the “real life” after college.

It was batchmate Samuel Dy Tang who introduced me to the “NBA world” when he brought various NBA magazines to school for me to read and peruse during breaktime. Interest grew quickly.

How often I borrowed the magazines from Sam and brought them home for scrutiny and longer reading. It was back in our grade school days or early teenaged years and since then, I have been hooked up to NBA chronicling and eventually in local and international sports in general.

Another batchmate, Jeffrey Yao, also lent me some NBA materials for which I am truly grateful. That really got me rocking and rolling. During my spare time off classes, I would often go to Rizal Avenue or traverse the Binondo area (Jim’s Counter was one favorite hangout) to get my fill of other sports magazines that carried NBA stories for several pieces of silver.

At the start of the eighties, vintage PBA play-by-play man Dick Ildefonso sought me out for help on the credentials of prospective imports for the league and subsequently introduced me to the editor-in-chief of a sports weekly magazine, Sports World.

From there, I graduated to the major leagues like the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where I wrote a twice-a-week column on NBA developments for 16 years (1986-2002); concurrently became the EIC of Tower Sports magazine for more than a decade while moonlighting as a TV analyst for Tiong Lian games from the mid-2000s onwards.

YouTube.com has some of my TV interviews and gameface.ph carries all the write-ups. The websites chingyuenhomegrown.webs.com and masaathletics.webs.com have been set up under my initiative.

For seven years (2006-13), I also was a disc jockey (no joke!) for a Sunday program (Buhay Pinoy Noon at Ngayon) in a government-owned radio station under the monicker Hyper Henry.

I played good, old music from the fifties, sixties and seventies and shared stories about life as only a Baby Boomer like me had experienced. In effect, I have become a tri-media man. Again, never in my wildest dreams I would become one.

God is good, God is great! On the personal side, I have five children – Matthew Lester (who teaches English to Korean students in the Philippines) and Marianne Kimberly (who works for an IT company) from my late wife, Violy; and 12-year-old Justin Miguel (an incoming Grade 7 student who has been recruited to play for the Philadelphia High School team this year), Hillary and Anika from my current lifetime partner, Winnie.

They are all my jewels and never to be taken away from me forever. Yet I also fully understand that life is so fleeting. And at 60, I have started to make some preparations just in case death comes knocking at my door.