Kristopher Irizarry

During the final year the Chicago Bulls reigned as basketball champs, Homer Sayson was headed for a remote airport in a rural area of the Philippines. He met a farmer who instantly recognized him and proudly showed off his brand-new Bulls cap, a purchase scraped together from his meager earnings. "To top it off, he had no TV but knew the whole team roster," remembers the Filipino sportswriter.

The explosion in basketball's popularity in an impoverished nation like the Philippines gives weight to Noam Chomsky's theory that sports becomes the dominant public discourse when a population has lost hope in participatory politics. "Former U.S. justice Thurgood Marshall said, 'I only read the sports pages because they report man's accomplishments. The front page is man's failure.' In a country like mine where the strife of the front pages serves as a barometer telling people whether they can conduct life as usual in the morning, sports is a place where they can transcend the strife," Sayson says. Some of the voracious demand for American sports coverage is satisfied by his much-read column for The Philippine Star in Cebu, the island's second largest city. Sayson has become a celebrity in his homeland by becoming the bilingual Tagalog and English voice for basketball and other major sports in the States.

Hoping to turn his column covering the NBA and other U.S. sporting events over the past nine years into a book, Sayson has set up camp in Chicago, a city he knows well after covering several Bulls championships. Despite enjoying a lofty status in his home country, a considerable following in the American Filipino community, and a loyal readership among sports junkies, the life Sayson lives now is that of a double agent as he struggles to survive on pauper's wages--about $250 a month plus freelance editing and other odd jobs.

However, while traveling on assignment, his paper pays for Sayson to live temporarily in the lap of luxury, staying in four-star hotels and enjoying meals with friends like former NBA star Isiah Thomas. "I realize how absurd this existence is. I mean, with my wages, it's like a homeless guy getting a free night at the Wyndham Suites," he says of his life on the road, a life he didn't enjoy even growing up in a middle-class family back home. One day, he's hanging out with Justin Timberlake at the NBA finals, and the next he's back in Chicago staying at a youth hostel on the South Side.

Sayson's editors didn't need much convincing that their star scribe needed to be kept stateside between coverage of major sporting events. When he isn't on the road, following the NBA, Sayson is weighing in on major boxing events. In U.S. sport circles, Sayson is actually better known for his writings on the sweet science than basketball, and websites for boxing devotees regularly feature links to his columns.

Being in America allows the sportswriter to expand his coverage while searching for an agent to publish his book. Every day he sets up a makeshift office in a downtown Kinko's. From there, he connects to the Internet to file his column and answer more than a hundred daily e-mails from devoted readers and sports insiders who feed him tips.

What his editors didn't understand was that transitioning to full-time life in the United States on such a tiny salary has been, at times, as full of as many growing pains as rebuilding the Bulls. "It's almost impossible to communicate the cost of living to them here," he says. For the first few months in Chicago, Sayson was staying in a $17-a-night hostel run by a retired Chicago police offer on 79th Street, waking up wondering if his paper had wired his paycheck from overseas on time. Although he now shares an apartment on Lake Shore Drive with a roommate, he still experiences culture shock coming home after living it up on the road.

Most compelling of Sayson's columns are his diary entries chronicling his life as a stranger in a strange land, the bulk of the material for his book. One memorable narrative involves an altercation with a flight attendant that took place after 9/11. The Star had recently allowed him to expense two suits from the Banana Republic. "Being 5 foot 1 inch, I couldn't find my size anywhere else, but they [his bosses back home] didn't believe that these were actually inexpensive suits." The cost of the new clothes represented two months wages for a middle-class Filipino and the thought of cramming them wrinkled into the overhead compartment upset Sayson enough to cause a stir even when it meant possible arrest. Ultimately, his journalist credentials saved him.

A background in political science supplies an interwoven cultural critique to his tales, the outsider perspective of a social critic coolly cruising into an American horizon that looks increasingly like his homeland, examining Filipinos' love affair with all things American--from Starbucks to sports jerseys. Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson shirts now outsell soccer jerseys in the developing world, which Sayson credits to the NBA's global presence. Although their headquarters are in New York, the organization has eighteen major offices outside of the Big Apple, including Hong Kong, to reach Asian markets. The 2002 NBA finals were broadcast in twenty-nine languages.

Sayson parallels the specific phenomenon of basketball in the Philippines, as a participatory as well as a spectator sport, to the rise of the game in America's inner cities. "It's because it's so cheap and the Philippines is a very poor country," he says. "You need a field for soccer or baseball; for basketball, you can make a hole in a bushel basket and set up court in an alley."

Sayson began his career as a sports announcer for a radio station in his home city of Cebu, watching the games over a television satellite and giving at-home listeners a play-by-play. "Having to think on my toes and paint a vivid picture in a split second helped my writing," he says. His rise to fame came in the face of calamity, when a prolonged brownout during the 1993 NBA finals between the Bulls and the Phoenix Suns caused an audience to turn to radio--the voice they heard was Homer Sayson.

"The following day, both the largest papers in Cebu and Manila ran articles on 'The Rewards of Radio,' focussing on my broadcast, and I became a household name," Sayson remembers. This fame has followed him to America, sometimes keeping him awake at night, like after the Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson fight when well-wishers from the American Filipino community crowded into his hotel room until four in the morning.

A story underscores this roundball reporter's celebrity. On a meandering trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I stopped to see a friend at her father's bar in downtown Racine. The sign outside reads Captain's Cove, but not long ago it simply read "Filipino Club." Its clientele is still almost exclusively Philippine. Mention of the name Homer Sayson and the fact that I was from Chicago set off a frenzy of questions; one man even wondered if the columnist was living with Michael Jordan because of his new Chicago byline.

The question has to arise why Sayson has chosen to begin his extended stay in America under the same strain so many immigrants with far less stature endure. "I could have easily depended on people from my country but it wouldn't be professional; I have to maintain a certain distance from my readership," he says. "You have to understand, the Philippines is a small country and it wouldn't take long for stories about how much I ate or how many towels I used to get back to the island, all the way from Chicago to Cebu."

Sayson takes his role of sports authority seriously. "Writing a sports column, you just can't be Hemingway, you have to be a scientist, too. People are devoted to you for statistics," he says. "Minus the facts, you are no different than a street juggler." But besides his in-depth analysis, his columns also indulge in colorful portraits of characters in the sports world, written in his trademark conversational yet jazzy tone. From a recent feature on John Stockton:

In this funk age where players don shorts that hang all the way to their shins, John Stockton is a relic, who wears his shorts so tight, as if the tailor had run out of cloth.

While the young point guards make their passes with so much fanfare--the no-look, the behind-the-back and between-the-legs--John does his in the simplest of ways--the pinpoint bounce pass, the basic chest pass and the occasional lob. 'It's two points, just the same,' he'd say.

You'll be struck by lightning first before you'll see John Stockton dunk. But love him or hate him, he is more durable than the Energizer bunny. And if that isn't worth anything to you, then you need to see your neurologist.

This self-described "Liz Smith of the sports pages" has at times been able to scoop the mainstream media, like when he published news of the 76ers' trade of center Dikembe Mutombo four days ahead of the U.S. press. "To be a good sportswriter you have to have mojo. My mojo is the grapevine aspect of my column," he says. Readers rely on him for the insider gossip, like his behind-the-scenes in the players' wives locker room during the NBA finals, or the juicy morsel that the LA Lakers can only celebrate with California sparkling wine.

To Sayson, the trials and tribulations of athletes play out as the great human epic, and his readership devours stories about the fantastic free falls of the famous. "Sports is littered with the carcasses of former kings," he intones. He tells the story of interviewing former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks, who won three million dollars knocking out Muhammad Ali in 1978. The next year, he won five million for the rematch. But when Sayson met him, he was working as a janitor for minimum wage.

The boxer's change of fate is one that Sayson can obviously appreciate during his simultaneous struggle and rise to fame. But Sayson does not plan to make Chicago his permanent home turf, even though he could earn more as a writer here, for a myriad of factors. Because Al Qaeda cells were found in the Philippines, getting permission from U.S. immigration services for an extended stay has proved difficult even for him. At the same time, although Sayson doesn't utilize his recognition for free meals, his connections can get him an immigration lawyer that represents champion bantam weight boxer Manny Pacquiao.

To explain his loyalty to his readers and his devotion to his homeland, Sayson launches into Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog, a metaphor befitting Muhammad Ali. It starts out that the scorpion and the frog become allies and vow to help each other across the river. "But then the scorpion stings the frog midway across, and the dying frog asks the scorpion why. He says, 'I don't know, I was just born to sting.'" Sayson pauses.

"I just couldn't live here permanently, no matter what the financial rewards would be in the long run. I couldn't distance myself from the people who read me and gave me this opportunity."

(2002-12-04)

Also by Kristopher Irizarry

BROTHERLY LOVE
Can you compare Chicago and Philadelphia? From my experience working in the Kensington section of the city, I'd say no. David Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam's Latino outreach described North Philly to me as, "some seriously Third World shit."
(2002-08-01)

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