BLEACHERS BREW EST. MAY 2006

Someone asked me how my blog and newspaper column came to be titled "Bleachers Brew". It's like this, it's an amalgam of sorts of two things: The bleachers area in the stadium/arena where I used to sit when I would watch baseball, football, and basketball games and Miles Davis' great jazz album Bitches Brew. That's how it got culled together. I originally planned on calling it "The View from the Big Chair" that is a nod to Tears For Fear's second album, Songs from the Big Chair. So there.

Monday, October 13, 2008

A thousand words in my lifetime

There was this print ad by Nikon (that I previously credited to Kodak) that grafted itself onto my consciousness the moment I saw it.

It was an ad without any visuals. But the copy was plenty powerful.

A three year-old boy saluting at his father's funeral.
A woman crying over the body of a student shot by the National Guard.
An American President lifting his pet beagle up by its ears.

A lone student standing in front of four tanks.


If you can picture it in your head, it was probably taken with a Nikon.


The ad was written by Richard Kelly and art directed by Ron Rosen of Scali McCabe Sloves (New York) and won a couple of advertising awards.

In case you don't know what the pictures are -- Yeah, I hear you. It's a generational gap thing. -- JFK Jr. during his famous father's funeral, then it was the Kent State demos during the Vietnam War, then it was Lyndon B. Johnson pulling his pet beagle's ears, and lastly in was that Tianamen Square picture. Save for the last shot, I saw all those shots in old Time, Newsweek, and Life magazines that my grandfolks saved for me (the JFK and RFK assassinations, the Apollo 11 landings, and the Vietnam War). Yes, I still have everyone of them. The last shot, well has to be one of the most published of all time.

When you talk about images. In those dreary years of Blue Eagle basketball, there is only one thing that comes to mind, a shot taken of the team with their arms raised during the alma mater. And we were the only one singing then. Let no one tell you otherwise.

The reason why I say that image says a lot of the team was those were really trying years when it was coming off the NCAA withdrawal, going 0-12, and the eventual rise of Ateneo basketball.

As La Salle became the toast of UAAP Men's Basketball, there are three images now that come to mind: the shot taken by Ernie Sarmiento of Larry Fonacier blocking Mark Cardona and of the subsequent shot of Wesley Gonzalez standing over the fallen Cardona. And there's this year's shot by Vic Icasas of Nonoy Baclao reprising Gonzalez with his towering over Rico Maierhofer. Am glad that Nonoy apologized to Rico about it -- and on TV no less.






















My point is, they represent what Ateneo basketball is all about now -- climbing back to the top and in the process, trying to reclaim what the Green Archers have worn over their collective heads over the years.

One thing is for sure. Those dreary days of Blue Eagle basketball are now over. Can't wait for those new images.



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