59

Bear with me. This will be an intensely reflective piece, as this writer turns 59 tomorrow. It has been an amazing, rocky ride, with sport being the one constant I have been able to lean on, build a life around, and share with many people. We all hope that we leave the world a little better than we found it. Some of us strive to do that as a matter of course. Without sport, I don’t know where I would be. My grandfather Jose Unson (Daddy Peping to family members) died at the age of 79, so I subconsciously pegged 80 as the age at which I would clock out. So when I turned 40, mortality and legacy became an increasingly important part of my life and career.

My saintly, grandmother, Teofila Bravo Unson, turns 99 the day after tomorrow. Though already bedridden and suffering from dementia, she remains an anchor to our past, the prosperous, wonderful times when she and our Daddy Peping kept us all together with Sundays at their home. We could just walk in, and forget all of our problems. There was always an abundance of food, television, air-conditioning, joke-telling, and the grown-ups’ sport of choice: mahjong. As the eldest grandchild, I had my fill of sports on TV, TIME and Newswek, Daddy Peping’s books, Mama Upe’s baking, and… babysitting my younger cousins, which itself should be an Olympic sport. When my grandfather passed away in 1996, Mama Upe moved back to Pangasinan, and nobody stepped into the heroic void he left behind. That was almost 30 years ago.

One of the reasons I love sport so much is because, as Howard Cosell once said, “Sports is the toy department of human life.” More than that, it is our God-given great laboratory, where we can learn about ourselves and other people in an environment where it may hurt less, and we can evolve before leaping out into the great unknown of the world. If people cheat in sports, then you know they’re going to be shady in real life. If people practice, play hard, give it their all, and don’t go out of their way to hurt anyone else, then you know you can trust them. That’s more or less how it goes.

My first fascination was with basketball at age five. My uncle Romy, my mother’s youngest brother, is nine years older, so