Published in the papers!

I'm famous!

For a few milliseconds on Wednesday at least.

My letter got published by Today in her feature on the National Stadium where readers wrote in of their memories. So I did. And my passionate letter must have moved their hearts and souls to get selected, but not before the editors tore apart the innards and churned it around, save for the start and end which thankfully remained more or less intact, else I wouldn't have recognized it at all.

Between me and the lady called Jun-lei, who edited my piece, it started out embarassingly though.

My entry started with the mention of a little tin box which holds all the ticket stubs of the football matches that I had attended at Kallang. When she called me, The masquerading Intern, I was asked to bring down that little tin box with the particular ticket stub of the match that I wrote of. Sure I thought, I'd be delighted to.

When I rushed home after work, my precious tin box was nowhere to be found. It wasn't standing at where it should be, nor was it anywhere else. After moments of digging around, I finally realised that I had somehow arrived at an unsentimental decision to dump it, tin and contents, just a couple months ago.

That was a really depressing moment.

I had carefully kept all the tickets for years, starting from the 90's. So for almost a decade, they sat in darkness as docile memories do. Then came that fateful day when I decided that I'm never ever gonna do anything with these tickets since hey, they are all in my head and heart, so I threw them away. And now when that moment arrives for me to show off that piece of paper saying Singapore vs Bahrain, dated 2001, I have nothing.

Sad.

And embarassing when I call back Today to inform the lady that I no longer possess the tin box which I wrote of with pride.

Anyway, from the result of the editing, I experienced at first hand how conforming and politically correct the paper must behave especially when it is part of the national broadsheet. The words of the eventual published piece couldn't muster a fraction of the emotions burning through Kallang that night. Mild by comparison, that's right.

Here what's I originally wrote, within the restricted 200 words:
A little Mauna Loa Honey Roasted Macadamia Nuts tin box holds all the ticket stubs of the Lions’ games that I had attended. Of them, the most memorable match was the World Cup Qualifier against Bahrain in 2001, held at Kallang.

Singapore needed a win to qualify. Our opponents were leading and we struggled to get past them, tried as we did. Despite their superiority on the pitch, the middle-eastern charlatans started time wasting with more than 20 minutes of the game to go.

The crowd was incensed, outraged.

The trickeries of time wasting that they employed made a mockery of the beautiful game, even out-doing the comical Rivaldo in World Cup '02.

Singapore fans reacted in a way I had never seen before, cheering, shouting and cursing as one. That was Team Singapore, if I may borrow the present day term, at its united best. Coins were thrown and bottles flung in a mad cacophony. Rubbish strewed the pitch, and I don’t mean the Bahrain players.

Police had to intervene, so did Nazri Nasri, the Lions captain then. The Bahrain team bus was waylaid by lions and had to be escorted out. Kallang certainly roared that eventful night.

The edited version: