Soccer is unexplicable love for fans

What happens when a soccer fan wants to watch his favorite team but all the games play overseas or aired earlier than any Sunday Mass? For Travis Stanley, a Liverpool soccer fan this is not a problem, but his passion.

“It’s not like you’re getting up early to go to work, this is love,” Travis says while cleaning the living room table at 6:50 am to make room for his coffee cup, a basket of bread, a jar of marmalade, and a pat of butter.

The game hasn’t started yet but Travis stares quietly at the empty field on  the screen as he imagines himself in the stadium stands rooting for his team. The referee gives the first whistle and Travis is caught not wearing his Liverpool jersey as is his ritual for every game, perhaps the  bad results from his team lately has discouraged his old time ritual.

He sits quiet and practically motionless for the first 10 minutes until the opposite team scores a goal. Now, he slaps the table, grabs his cup and walks away to the kitchen for more coffee to avoid seeing the painful replay.

The second half of the game starts and Travis is already wearing his jersey, as he is the 12th player ready and anxious to get on the field and reverse the score. The most emotive moment of the game comes when Liverpool evens the scores; he jumps out of his seat, lifts his arms with closed fists and screams euphoric for a few seconds as if nothing could give him more pleasure than  seeing the ball penetrating  the goal  and hitting the net.

Travis’ passion for his team keeps the long-distance love alive.

Glen Martin pops your bubble

 It’s hard to ignore what Glen Martin said in the first 20 minutes of his speech. He was our first guest speaker in Florangela’s writing for mass communication class and we were ready to get some tips on how to be better writers, but instead we learned how an old school journalist struggles to support himself in the new social media era.

 “I’m poised with my own petard,” he said as he confessed he doesn’t read daily newspapers anymore. Glen said the newspaper industry has gone down since the launch of craigslist and with it many journalists like himself struggle to find a full time job in the new social media. Although he manages to get enough freelance jobs, he sharply admitted, “I will not necessarily recommend [this] as a career path for you.”

 A good writer needs to have more abilities than just “to blog other bloggers,” he said. He is convinced the essential writing skills in up and coming journalists are eroding. He compared the new social media as the partisan newspapers of the late 1700, in which they were highly opinionated. “They spewed venom at each other and now we’ve gone back to that tradition,” he said. Students are being trained to write for the social media and not focused on producing content, conducting an interview or double-checking their own reporting.

Glen’s advice to become a good writer was simple: write everyday and read good writers, but won’t guarantee you are going to make a living as a writer.