Enthralling ride comes to an end

This will regrettably be our farewell column in the Inquirer. For some 14 months we have enjoyed the privilege of reaching the widest audience possible because of the unmatched readership of the Inquirer.
However, to us at least, there are other things more important than the mere opportunity to reach a wider readership base. One has to be happy with the environment within.
And for us who have spent some 50 memorable years chronicling the saga of our athletes in the search for human excellence in various athletic disciplines, when one has serious differences of opinion with a colleague in the Sports section, one is placed in an untenable position.
Let us hasten to clarify that to us, integrity is the quality of wholeness. On this score we’ve had some fundamental differences with our editor which resulted in what publisher Isagani Yambot felt undermined the editor’s rights and privileges and resulted in that phrase that managements resort to, “loss of confidence.”
That to us, may well be a two-way street, and rather than exacerbate a testy situation, we have accepted our fate but refuse to compromise our principles.
We believe with all the fervor we can muster that we need to not merely support our athletes but we need to strengthen the culture of standing by our national teams as a vehicle of expressing our sense of nationhood.
We must, at all times, place the interests of our athletes above the pettiness of our so-called sports leaders. Here again we appear to be on the wrong side.
We need to recognize the rights of even the most irritating National Sports Association official to due process and the inherent right to be heard.
The power of the entrenched should never be allowed to deny an individual’s basic rights as clearly evident in the case of athletics chief Go Teng Kok who had to turn, reluctantly we might add, to the courts for justice.
The dispensation of justice must surely be the hallmark of sports leaders without which the fabric of sports and youth development would be torn.
Within the same framework, the sports pages need to do justice to our athletes and evaluate, purely on merit and significance, the stories that reach this widest of audiences and not pander to friendships and other importuning.
It has been a learning experience, although a sometimes distressing one, in fairness probably to the Inquirer as well. But that’s life.
We sincerely wish to thank the Inquirer for the opportunity to reach a wide audience with our views and our stories. The ride has come to an end but it was an enthralling one, thanks mainly to the readers whose opinions—good, bad or indifferent—we always respected and are grateful for.
We may soon return to where we came from, happy in the thought that we will continue to enjoy the privilege of keeping our unbridled passion for sports alive within a quality of wholeness even though the audience may be much smaller.