The Tribune

IT was a nail-biting, hold-your-breath moment that lasted for weeks on end. Would Team Bahamas – kids who had worked so hard to qualify and had their hopes pinned on faith -- get the funding to go to Marseilles to participate in the 2022 FIA Motorsport Games?

For racing enthusiasts, the Motorsport Games were the event of the year, the Olympic of motor sport. At stake was the opportunity for a group of teens who had worked on patched up karts and trained in the broiling summer sun on an old drag racing strip to participate in the equivalent of the Olympics for racing enthusiasts? While teams from more than 70 other countries had far more advantages, Team Bahamas had heart. Their headquarters had been a makeshift tent, the closest thing to luxury in their practice run-ups were restrooms in an otherwise abandoned concrete structure. If a parent came to watch, they brought a folding chair.

Small donations trickled in. The Rotary Club of East Nassau, a long-standing partner of the edu-karting programme, supported a participant, covering airfare for her and her mother, one of the group’s dedicated parents. The Bahamas Motor Sports Association and David McLaughlin, founder of the edu-karting programme, and Susan Schauff, who started as a parent supporter and stuck with it even after her own son went off to college and she became its face in The Bahamas, maxed out their credit cards.

And the team was on its way, flying to London, then on to France, and when the opening ceremony began in what is dubbed the Olympics of Motor Sport, Team Bahamas waved the largest flag in the stadium. The only thing brighter and bigger was the smiles on team faces and the pride flag-bearer Ramando Hudson wore.

Team Bahamas did not win the karting competition, but the kids and their enthusiasm won the hearts of just about every single individual present. They formed a bond with Team Ukraine, both teams having fought so hard to get to Marseilles experiencing moments, memories and friendships they will always cherish.

It does not much matter that Team Bahamas did not come first in the karting races. They won something that, in time, will be more important.

With 72 countries competing for a series of prizes, Team Bahamas made it to the top three in the category for the President’s Award for Diversity and Inclusion.

At a ceremony tonight, December 9, in Bologna, Italy, winners will be announced and awards will be given out and though members will not be present, Team Bahamas whether moving into the winning spot or just knowing they made it to the finals will be remembered as the little team that could – and did.

In front of 462 drivers, all their supporters, the crowds that gathered to watch Team Bahamas showed the world you don’t have to be rich so long as there is wealth in spirit and hope in your heart.

On behalf of journalists everywhere

The death of Tribune Managing Editor Eugene Duffy earlier this week cast a shadow of sadness over the media. Duffy had been ill for about six months, but expected to return to his job following treatment at home in the UK. He did not make it back but he left a legacy, indoctrinating in his reporting staff the need to dig and dig deep and never stop until they got to the bottom. The surface, he said, was for the novice who wanted a job, not the journalist who wanted a career.

Not everyone in the news room took his hard driving way easily, but everyone learned from him.

Several left for easier jobs, especially with various government ministries where the hours may be longer and the need to produce on a regular basis an ongoing taskmaster, but the urgency to get to the bottom of the story is not part of the job. Duffy would have scoffed at such demands because they are demands on time, not on talent.

He hated to see good talent go untapped or underused. He would have said demand on presence is a world apart from demand on pursuit of the truth.

Duffy was hard, but he also had a wry sense of humour and he saw irony in just about everything that happened and in major events, a back story that needed to be told.

The world needs more journalists like Eugene Duffy. Says a colleague, “He was at his core an idealist who never lost faith in his conviction that newspapers in particular could still make a real difference in the lives of their readers, even in -- and maybe especially in -- the age of the internet and smart phones. He could have become a hardened cynic. But he didn’t. Though he could look fierce and speak bluntly, he retained an enduring sentimentality.

A loyal man with a tender side, he deployed his tough exterior when it served a higher purpose. But that isn’t who he was at his core.”

We did not always agree on the issues, but we only bumped heads seriously twice, including once when he refused to run a column I wrote. Out of more than 250, it was the only one he ever rejected.

Oddly enough, it was a remembrance of the passing of another tough media guy, Ivan Johnson, on the one-year anniversary of his passing.

The PLP came to power on September 17, 2021 and the Punch closed its doors a few weeks later after Johnson’s sudden death October 4.

I noted that while the PM’s approval ratings were high and I fully understood why – Philip Davis is as likable and warm a leader as you could ever ask for – he also enjoyed a year without the Punch breathing down his neck, a freedom his predecessors had not enjoyed.

Duffy had no use for the Punch and he killed the column. There, the gist of the column got printed, Duffy, though I take no pleasure in it but want to remind all who read papers or get their news one way or another that journalists deserve to be recognized, thanked and appreciated far more than they are.

At every event my firm handles, and there are many, the media gets the loudest and longest thanks.

No one works harder than a journalist striving to reach the truth and tell the story.

Telling the story. That is what we do – or what I did that helped prepare me for what I do now in public relations. As a reporter and as de facto bureau chief, I was on duty whenever news broke. If I got a call in the middle of the night that there was a drug bust and I was the reporter the police department trusted to get it right, I would grab up my sleeping little daughter, lay her down on a blanket on the floor of the old El Camino truck I drove and head for the story.

Time was irrelevant – 2 am was no different from 2 pm if there was a story. At the end of a long and heated City Commission meeting, I dropped my change into a payphone and dictated the story from the top of my head and the green lined steno notepad in my hand where I had jotted down important quotes word for word.

I had to get it right, the legislation that had been passed, the controversy explained, the count accurate and there was no time to write it, I spoke it into the phone and when the quarter ran out, I dropped in a dime.

Punctuation was full stop for period. New graf for next paragraph. No one read the story back to me to check grammar. It was headed for cursory editing, a headline and slapped on to the pages for print.

There are still those out there dedicated to one of the most valuable professions in the world. God bless them and let us all have a little more respect for those who truly care about finding the truth and telling a story. Like the late Eugene Duffy.