PHOENIX — I am incredibly excited to participate in this incredible course discussing sports culture and commentary. To be instructed by one of the greatest columnists of our time, William C. Rhoden, is a privilege and opportunity that I will take 100% seriously. I hope to be both informative and entertaining in every column I write and that it fully showcases my unique perspective on sports while also growing in my ability to tell stories surrounding the sports world. To that end, there are many reasons why my perspective is quite intriguing, and here’s how that came to be.
The moment I fell in love with sports changed my life forever, positively and slightly negatively. In 2012, when I was about nine years old, one of my mother, Alicia’s, lifelong friends, Chris Anderson, who had become part of our family, gave me a gift that I had not asked for but he thought would be pretty valuable: an Almanac from 2010. Chris explained to me that Almanacs were written calendars that were put into a book of everything that happened in the U.S. or the world in a single year; it was a yearly encyclopedia of sorts.
When I started to read it, I happened to reach the very back of the book accidentally, and when I did, I found a list of every single Super Bowl ever to be played, all the way up to Super Bowl XLV (45) at the time. I immediately became fascinated with the people and the places and the history of the event, and within two weeks, I went up to my mother and started listing each Super Bowl off one by one; low and behold, I had memorized the winner, loser, score, location, and MVP of every single Super Bowl ever. It was at this moment that my love for sports was realized, and this “party trick” of sorts started it all, one that I’m thankful to say I still have to this day.
However, subsequently, after my love and true obsession with sports was realized, my mom started to put the pieces together that something socially for me wasn’t right, as sports became the only thing I wanted to talk about and that I would become irate if I had to hear anyone talk about anything else. This led to a series of meetings with a psychiatrist and occupational therapist with both myself and my mom, and it became clear to them and other medical professionals that we had seen that this was not normal; it was a sign of high-functioning cases of autism.
I was officially diagnosed just before I had turned ten, and that changed my and my mom’s life forever, as she would homeschool me from fifth grade until I had graduated from high school, giving me a chance to learn and grow in a more comfortable environment while also aptly develop social skills. It was a sacrifice that made my mom serve me and my younger sister, Ana, full-time and forced her to support us full-time even without a monthly paying job, as she had stepped down from her incredibly coveted position as an advertising and marketing supervisor at Anheuser-Busch a couple of years prior. It is a decision that I am deeply grateful for, as her daily presence and guidance provided me with the life lessons and values that I live by to this day.
Growing up in Houston, football was always the most talked about sport in the city, as Houston has some of the most passionate football fans at any level (high school, college, or pro) anywhere in the country. But as I was becoming a teenager, baseball quickly grew to be my favorite. It became the center of the sports universe in the city as the Houston Astros grew from a basement-dwelling anchor of Major League Baseball to the sport’s dashing new dynasty centered on youth and analytics. While the success on the field was tarnished in many ways due to the sign-stealing scandal that led the team to a World Series title in 2017, both myself and the city still rallied behind our team, as that championship year was a significant refuge for those in Houston due to the tragic events of Hurricane Harvey, which had impacted the city two months before their championship run.
Now, at the Cronkite School, my love for sports has evolved into a passion for journalism and storytelling. I had the incredible privilege of covering Arizona State Football at many outlets: as
a broadcast reporter for the Walter Cronkite Sports Network, a play-by-play broadcaster for KASC Blaze Radio, and even as a Sports Intern at KPHO Arizona’s Family CBS 5. Throughout it all, I truly lived the week-in and week-out grind of being a sports journalist, even while being a student and attending classes regularly, an experience that taught me so much about the business and grew me as a reporter and professional.
Outside of sports, I have discovered a new passion that has added a unique dimension to my life. I have developed a deep love for podcasting and pop culture. This passion led me to host my own variety talk show on Blaze Radio, The World According to Zippy. In this show, I bring on guests to discuss their perspectives on life and the world around them, a journey that has been both enlightening and exhilarating.
