lit a candle 4h agoGrew up reading Bare Eye and never understood how he made a boxing match feel like poetry. Just found out he was a poet too. That explains everything.
Their story
Ricardo "Recah" Trinidad was a Filipino sportswriter, editor and poet whose byline shaped how generations of readers understood boxing, basketball and the people who played them. For decades he moved between the press box and the page with the same insistence: say something new, take the reader somewhere television could…
Ricardo "Recah" Trinidad was a Filipino sportswriter, editor and poet whose byline shaped how generations of readers understood boxing, basketball and the people who played them. For decades he moved between the press box and the page with the same insistence: say something new, take the reader somewhere television could not, and never mistake reporting for decoration. He wrote the long-running Bare Eye column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, founded the tabloid Tempo, edited the anti-dictatorship paper We Forum in the last years of the Marcos regime, and published books that ranged from Pacquiao ringside dispatches to a novel of the Pasig River. He died in his sleep on 13 September 2026, aged 83, after months of recovery from a heart attack earlier that year. His family said he had found rest free from pain, and that he was reunited with his eldest son, the sports journalist Chino Trinidad, who had died in 2024.
Trinidad was born on 9 May 1943 in Mandaluyong and grew up along the Pasig, a landscape he would later reclaim in fiction as Tales from My Lost River. His father was a writer, and literature pulled harder than numbers; after a gap year that included radio work and market stalls and billiard-hall nights to pay for school, he studied journalism at the University of Santo Tomas. He entered the newsroom young, first as a sports reporter at the Philippines Herald, then at the Sunday Times Magazine of The Manila Times under Nick Joaquin, who marked him as a literary talent as well as a reporter. Martial law closed that magazine. In the 1980s he edited We Forum, worked with Malaya, and in 1982 became the founding editor of Tempo, building a staff that helped make the tabloid the country's top seller. After the fall of Marcos he joined the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where for years Bare Eye was among the paper's most-read sports columns.
Boxing was the beat that made him famous. He covered Olympics from Munich to Sydney, sat on broadcast panels, and worked as an international boxing judge. He followed Manny Pacquiao fight after fight, sleeping on floors when hotel rooms ran out, filing under impossible deadlines, and later gathering the work in Pacific Storm: Dispatches on Pacquiao of the Philippines. Colleagues remembered that athletes sometimes became celebrities after a Trinidad piece, and that Trinidad himself sometimes seemed better known than the people he profiled. He also wrote poetry that won a Palanca Award, and Nick Joaquin once placed him in the succession of literary lights after Gregorio Brillantes and Ding Nolledo. In later years he appeared with his son Chino on television and in the Father Knows Best conversations that revisited Olympic wounds such as Onyok Velasco's disputed 1996 light-flyweight final.
Off the page he was a husband to Fe, a father to Chino, Paolo and Baste, and a grandfather to six. Friends from Tempo and the stadiums remembered long nights that ended only when the last bottle and the last argument about a fight were done. He told student interviewers that writing was like cooking: know the dish, choose the ingredients, aim for clarity rather than display. He retired from the Inquirer columnist's life but never fully left the game. When he died on a Sunday morning in September 2026, tributes from newsrooms across Manila treated the loss as the closing of a register: the sportswriter who could sound like a poet without forgetting the score.
He liked to say that a reporter's first job after television arrived was not to compete with the camera on the final score, but to recover the ticket the viewer never bought: the smell of the gym, the politics around a renovation budget, the quiet after a disputed decision. That standard made Bare Eye feel less like a results column and more like a weekly argument with the country's sporting conscience. Younger writers who passed through Tempo or sat near him at ringside copied the cadence even when they did not share the references.
In death as in life he was paired with the Inquirer era that raised him after 1986. The same Sunday that carried news of his passing also carried tributes naming him beside other vanishing elders of Philippine print. For readers who grew up with Pacquiao underdogs and UAAP Saturdays, the byline Recah Trinidad was itself a place: part press row, part riverside memory, part insistence that sports copy could still be literature without ceasing to be news.
Biography adapted from SPIN.ph, GMA News, PEP.ph, Philippine Journalism Oral History interview (2005), Inquirer Sports byline archive, family statements.
In their own words
“Writing is like cooking. Know what dish you want, get the proper ingredients, and aim for clarity.”
Paraphrased from his 2005 Philippine Journalism Oral History interview on craft.
“A good sportswriter must first of all be committed. If you're there just to write, then don't. Your heart must be able to deliver the goods.”
2005 Philippine Journalism Oral History interview.
“Always say something new.”
Advice he gave younger writers on what separates print sports copy from television score-telling.
“He was a warrior who fought his biggest battle and won.”
On Manny Pacquiao in Pacific Storm: Dispatches on Pacquiao of the Philippines.
“Naghanda ako, nagbihis ako ng husto... dahil alam namin na ito na ang golden moment.”
Recalling the 1996 Onyok Velasco Olympic final, to SPIN.ph / Father Knows Best.
“Naiyak si Onyok, ako pinigil ko luha ko.”
On the aftermath of the 1996 Olympic light-flyweight decision.
Beautiful way to put it. He saw everything.