Chino Trinidad’s leap of faith

(Part 1)

Sports broadcaster Chino Trinidad has never been satisfied with the status quo. He seems to have been born with an innate thirst to find a better way to do things, to do what is best for his craft, his industry, his country. In the last two years, he has faced the biggest challenge of his career: creating a new platform for which tales of Filipino greatness would be shared with the rest of the world, to help his countrymen rediscover what has made our country great, and how we never back down from a challenge.

In 2010, the veteran sports broadcaster walked away from a lucrative contract renewal as commissioner of the Philippine Basketball League, feeling his time there had run its course. All he had left to support his family was his contract with GMA. It was a big risk to take. But he was happy telling real, down-to-earth sports stories, not just reading box scores or spewing the entertainment-laced, tabloid journalism that fills prime time news.

Trinidad also got tired of the time-sensitive nature of network news, which he felt didn’t allow for the full measure of great stories to be told. The reason he rarely did stand-uppers or went on-camera was to save those precious extra 20 seconds or so for the meat of the story. But time and time again, he produced what he knew were stories worth telling, stories to inspire the public, only to have them bumped off, or often, drowned in the bad news of robberies, rapes and other unsavory tales fed to the masses on a daily basis. That was when he realized he needed his own platform, his own soapbox, to share his stories from.

Chino was so happy when he finally had his own show, Sports Pilipinas, and the latitude to craft his own stories at the standards the  broadcaster dreams of a network show, and he finally had his. To be given his own weekly show was a dream come true. He even exceeded the required ratings. But in early 2014, the show was cancelled, and along with it his contract. Chino felt betrayed, having poured all of himself into the show.

“It’s a spoiled life,” the former PBA courtside reporter reminisced. “Then suddenly, I was told that Sports Pilipinas would be discontinued. I was sad. What did I do? It didn’t take long; I got back up, did my research.”

Trinidad discovered that 2013 was the centennial of the first Philippine team to the Far Eastern Games, technically the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Philippine sports. But try as he might, nobody seemed to listen, nobody picked up the story. Chino took it upon himself to craft a once-in-a-lifetime event called “Pagpupugay”, wherein he would gather the greatest living Filipino sports legends in one event, and honor them, whether they were still alive or not. The weeklong exhibit at Resorts World Manila climaxed with a sentimental journey through the country’s glorious past in sports, and left very few in the house with a dry eye himself was brought to tears by the suffering of Filipino greats like Olympic silver medalist Anthony Villanueva and basketball pioneer Tony Genato, and prayed their slide into despair and financial incapacity would not happen to any of our sports heroes again.

“I don’t really know where it started,” Chino admits. “I could say it started two years ago, or I could say it started the moment I stepped into the limelight of being a broadcaster, because these kinds of things don’t come to you overnight. It’s a culmination of so many things that prepare you. Maybe I got tired of watching news and watching everything that was negative. I was getting frustrated, I was getting depressed. This is what we feed our people every day.”

Chino clearly remembers when the grind of the news mill finally got to him.

“I was waiting for my item to come out. It was about a one-handed player who was struggling but a very good football player, a striker even. I asked our executive producer, ‘Don’t you get tired of doing this every day?’ You know what he told me? ‘Well, it rates.’ That was the justification. Then they bumped off my story. That was the last straw. No matter what effort you put into finding a story that – I felt – was going to inspire a certain percentage of our population. That was the trigger point.”

Looking at alternatives, Trinidad considered Internet TV, but found the engagement with audiences too shallow. So he went back to his roots, his years covering the PBA with Vintage Enterprises and the discipline he developed crafting stories there. Besides, what did networks know about storytelling that he didn’t? He knew that all it would take was unparalleled boldness on his part. He knew he could put up his own channel. Serendipitously, he received an offer to run a cockfighting channel, of all things. Though squeamish about the sport in particular, Trinidad saw it as an opportunity to learn the internal workings of the cable industry. His mentor in this endeavor, Jun Zafra, is considered one of the pioneers of Philippine cable television.  The potential market seemed fathomless. Trinidad immersed himself in both cockfighting and cable TV, learning from all the big businessmen who were behind both. Consulting a former boss at Solar Peter Chanliong, his idea soon formed for a channel that would trumpet the greatness of the Filipinos of the past and the present.

“I was advised that all I had to do was to take care of content, because it was expensive,” he recalls. “Expensive? I could be a one-man show. How can content be expensive. There’s money to be had. The pitfall is that everybody is enamored of ratings, but it’s not necessary that ratings sell. That’s what happened with Sports Pilipinas; we were rating but we were not being sold. But for as long as you have content, you are going to survive.”