I LOVE the smell of newly pressed books. Like a new-born baby, I slide my fingers on the cover like caressing a baby. There’s something about books.
Aside from the printed words that come to life and the insights you gain from reading; the techniques of these wordsmiths, there’s a magic to them.
How much more when it is your own?
My eighth book… Homegrown: A Celebration of Xavier Sports just rolled off the presses. This was a three-year odyssey. Oh, the writing was the easy part. Half the book lists every single person who represented Xavier during their time in the school. That in itself as well as collating all those championships was an arduous task.
It isn’t the definitive history of Xavier School sports. If that were the case, it would take more than that to put everything together given also the lack of material.
It is a tapestry of stories woven into a narrative of what it was like to don the colors of this small school that was based in San Juan and to go into athletic battle. It’s an oral re-telling of triumph and well, challenges. It celebrates pioneers and giants among men.
As a youngster, I wanted to write for Marvel Comics and pen the adventures of Daredevil, Captain America, Spider-Man, the X-Men and Quasar. Yes, those five.
Well, I think I am far from achieving that although I have penned my own independent Filipino komiks that have done well despite hardly any marketing push. Who knows?
As for books?
Wow. I’m still in disbelief after all these years.
Every time I have a new book published, I think back to two books—John Feinstein’s A Season On the Brink (about the Indiana Hoosier’s 1985-86 college basketball season) and Jack McCallum’s Unfinished Business: On and Off the Court with the 1990-91 Boston Celtics.
These two books (along with the magazines Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Creem and Jingle) had a huge effect on me during my formative years.
An excerpt of A Season on the Brink was reprinted in an issue of Sports Illustrated, and I was blown away at the detail and the storytelling. I wondered during this era before the advent of the specialty shops if National Bookstore or Alemar’s would carry Feinstein’s book. But no.
My favorite curio shop.… The Rastro… in Shoppesville, Greenhills—where I bought my issues of Sports Illustrated and other indie comics—carried it although it was a secondhand copy. I couldn’t care less.
I bought it, devoured it, and re-read A Season on the Brink about three times that year.
Then the great SI writer Jack McCallum wrote Unfinished Business which was about the 1990-91 season of the Boston Celtics when they last challenged for a National Basketball Association title with three guys named LarryKevinRobert.
Years later, when I got to interview Brian Shaw (who was on that 1990-91 Celtics team), I asked him about this book and he chuckled. Shaw said he was amazed that someone from this part of the world brought up that book as he had good memories of that year.
Like A Season On the Brink, I was amazed at the level of detail and storytelling on Unfinished Business (I pestered National Bookstore into ordering this). The fly on the wall point of view that was riveting and tantalizing. One that McCallum repeated in his most excellent and enjoyable book about the Phoenix Suns: Seven Seconds or Less.
In most of my stories, I strove to be that fly on the wall. To tell stories of deep insight and compelling conflict. I applied the same to my weekly column, Bleachers Brew, in the pages of the BusinessMirror of which I have been doing for 15 years this year.
I parlayed this into writing for magazines and the television reporting or analysis for several networks and even at one point, a radio show I had over the late NU107.
When I look back at what I have written, I always think back to A Season On the Brink and Unfinished Business. I think of John Feinstein and Jack McCallum and how they inspired me to do this.
And I am forever grateful.
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