Blank Assessment: When a Sports Journalist Must Say No

The evaluation sheet before me carried a single conclusion: N/A – insufficient information. No tournament, no player, no time, no place. A young sports editor asked what we should write. I did not reply immediately. I rewound an old tape. SEA Games 29, Kuala Lumpur, runner Nguyễn Thị Oanh at the start of the 3,000m steeplechase. The stands were loud, but in my ears the clearest sound was her spikes scraping the track. I paused on a frame nobody noticed, then closed the file and said: “With nothing in hand, we do not write.” That answer is not a failure. In three decades of sports journalism, I have learned that a blank assessment is a complete piece of data: it tells us that everything we do not know is still outside the start line. I trust footage more than memory because footage does not lie. When a director once dismissed my work because I was a woman, I did not argue. I asked to see all the recording tapes from SEA Games 29. I counted Oanh's stride rate in the final lap: 47 steps per minute. That verified detail changed the final cut of the documentary. The same discipline applies to writing match reports. Saying “I do not know yet” is more credible than inventing tactics to sound clever. The most valuable lesson I can offer is this: respect data enough to stay silent until it speaks. A journalist may be called slow, but never a liar. An empty stadium still has a rhythm. We only need the patience to listen.