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Greetings, from the member of the Star-Advertiser sports team you are least likely to have heard of. If you think this is merely a disingenuous attempt to be self-effacing, consider my resume:
>> I was deemed too anonymous to keep trotting out as a member of our “celebrity” trivia team on KKEA each year (if that’s still a thing).
>> I turned up at Waialae Country Club for a Sony Open credential once and was practically asked for a birth certificate, a bill with a local mailing address, a DNA sample and a notarized affidavit from sports editor Paul Arnett.
>> A local sportscasting legend once mocked me on his TV show after calling into the department and looking for Paul and getting me — someone he’d never even heard of. Fortunately for me, he couldn’t mock me by name because … well, he’d already forgotten my name.
I’d be perfectly content to stay anonymous — the cliche is that copy editors are like offensive linemen when it comes to the limelight, though I’d argue that Jesse Sapolu has a larger piece of Joe Montana’s fame than I have of Stephen Tsai’s — but new sports editor Curtis Murayama has other ideas. So once a month (or so), you will get my thoughts on the month past, the month ahead and … well, whatever you want to read about.
My email address is at the end of each column. I don’t know UH volleyball as well as Jason Kaneshiro, the NFL Draft as well as Curtis, high school sports as well as Paul Honda or … well, everything Hawaii sports as well as Dave Reardon, but I can give you some insight into how we put together our section each day and why we make some of the decisions we make.
Letting you in on the thought process might help kill some of the myths out there about our motivations. That we get accused of so many kinds of biases that run counter to each other is, I suppose, some evidence that we do a pretty good job of keeping our coverage impartial, but few seem to see it that way.
When I’ve spoken or corresponded with readers in the past — well, other than ones asking why we (the newspaper) aren’t “showing the game,” you know, on TV — I’ve had some good conversations about the choices we make in our coverage, so hit me up via email. But for now …
The month past has been unusually newsy, and the uptick is even starker after a year-plus of far less sports than usual. Most Mays are stuffed with high school state tournaments, some of the most exciting events of the year, and when we do some of our most important work. We didn’t get any of that this year, though the schools and leagues worked hard to give kids as much of a normal experience as was possible given the conditions.
What we did get was the highest high this state has seen in maybe 13 years with the Hawaii men’s volleyball team winning a national title, and one of the lowest lows we’ve seen in my 20-plus years in the sports department with the death of UH football legend Colt Brennan, who was the main reason the above-mentioned “13 years” isn’t “29 years.”
We also had the Rainbow Wahine water polo team’s trip to the national quarterfinals, Dustin Demeter’s huge weekend against Cal State Fullerton for Rainbow baseball and Caleb Lomavita’s Ohtani-esque performance as Saint Louis marched toward the ILH baseball championship.
Colt’s death aside, May reminded us what sports can be at its best, something we haven’t seen in more than 14 months. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a precursor to a livelier than usual summer.
June to August is usually a fallow period for sports, but the pandemic — perhaps you’ve heard of it? — has actually made this summer more active than usual. The NBA playoffs are just getting going and will last a month deeper into summer than usual, followed, as usual, by the NBA Draft.
Major League Baseball has also pushed its draft back about a month, to mid-July, and there’s been a bit of a boom in Hawaii-linked players making a splash in the pros.
The Star-Advertiser’s Hawaii Baseball Report has become one of my favorite features as I’ve worked on it more and more the past few years. It’s exciting watching players from our state — whether they went to high school or college here — rise through the ranks and close in on their dreams of reaching the bigs. These are kids who walked the same halls as many of us or who are the son of a friend (or in my case, the son of my dentist).
After a season without minor league baseball, the report returned this weekend and a comparison to the same chart from this month 20 years ago offers some evidence of how strong the talent coming out of Hawaii is right now.
In May 2001, there were two major leaguers with Hawaii ties — Mike Fetters and Benny Agbayani (most recently seen coaching his daughter Ailana on the ‘Iolani softball team the past couple of months). This year? Seven — former Rainbow Josh Rojas and Hawaii high school products Kolten Wong (also a UH alum), Kurt Suzuki, Ka‘ai Tom, Isaiah Kiner-Falefa, Jordan Yamamoto and Kirby Yates (those last two out right now with injuries).
Since then Kean Wong has been called back up by the Angels. And working their way back in the minors after stints of varying length in the bigs are Steven Wright, Rico Garcia and Kyle Dowdy. Pitchers Jackson Rees, Quintin Torres-Costa and Kodi Medeiros are also a step away in Triple-A.
Maybe the only thing more exciting than tracking these kids this summer will be seeing if UH can make the temporary on-campus stadium the biggest public works project to come in on time in who knows how long.
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