But George Das, R Velu, Lazarus Rokk and Fauzi Omar admit that without the support of athletes, coaches and officials, their rise in reporting would have been slow.

Through the bonding power of sport and trust, these trailblazers became friends, having each other’s best interests at heart.

Together, they helped build a national sentiment that made people feel linked to a common sense of purpose and pride.

It was this camaraderie that created something so connective, humane and glorious as sport through an event called Sports Flame.

The event is about giving back for the years of joy the former journalists had writing about the role models from the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.

“They were like bows from which our careers were launched, and without them, we would not have had a job to do,” said Das.

He said Sports Flame was also about the pride of achieving dreams at the highest level, surviving the challenges that came with it, and bringing glory to Malaysia.

Sports Flame first hit the nostalgic sweet spot in 2011. The latest edition, supported by FMT, will be pure theatre on Dec 9 at the Concorde Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

A delightful club of some 120 marquee names, most of whom we no longer hear of, see or read much about anymore, will attend the exceptional catch-up, bound by their love of sports and each other.

Lighting the flame

Sports Flame was an idea that Velu proposed to Das after the passing of hockey legend and top sports administrator, Ho Koh Chye, whose 15th death anniversary is on Dec 3.

What was to be a dinner reunion of 10 different sports personalities every month morphed into seven casual, warm and cosy yearly editions.

It involved about 100 icons, including some well-known names among local fans from Singapore, Indonesia and India.

The fun part of it was when teammates and rivals met after a long time, with some wearing their blazers from the Olympics, Asian Games and the 1975 hockey world cup in Kuala Lumpur.

The first edition saw Malaysia’s 1975 hockey world cuppers meeting India’s Aslam Sher Khan – the full-back who virtually put the host nation out of the final – for the first time after 36 years.

The men from Sports Flame want the event to have aesthetic value, not commercial merit, and they dig into their own pockets to host the reunions.

Das, 77, said: “We started Sports Flame to salute the personalities especially from the 70s, and included some from the 60s and early 80s.

“They made our reporting enjoyable, and this is our way of saying thanks to them and showing them that sportswriters from their era have not forgotten them.”

“Sports bonded us,” said Velu, 73. “They were not people whom you interviewed and forgot about later.”

“Sports Flame has provided a platform to renew friendships, and some of them have been so eager to do this that they even volunteered to chip in for expenses,” he said.

Das and Velu quit journalism in the 1980s and sprung to the forefront of the golden triangle of sport, sponsorship and media.

Rokk, 68, said: “We learned so much from them because as sportswriters we did not have the luxury of just covering one sport.

“We were not experts in some of the sports, and they taught us well, supplying the news that made great copy.”

Fauzi, 68, said the history of the legends was “a rich tapestry of sporting life that to them was a vehicle of expression, loyalty to sport and duty to the nation.”

“We built friendships on the bonds of shared experiences in personal and professional lives,” he said. “We would have been nobody in sports journalism without them.”

To immortalise the heroes of Malaysia’s glorious sporting past for their sacrifices and magnificence, Das and his gang run mysportsflame.com.

In 2018, they produced a book, “Sports Flame – Stories Never Told Before”, written by several legends and renowned sportswriters, all of whom wrote about their own experiences.

An absorbing part of the book was wives writing about their husbands who had passed on.

The four amigos

If Sports Flame can be described as a gang, then they found the perfect leader in Das, an informal, straightforward man who has lived his entire life by the twin pillars of friendship and loyalty.

Das and his amigos brought thoughtfulness and humanity to sportswriting as reporters, columnists and editors with the New Straits Times, Malay Mail and Sports Mirror.

They were influential, imaginative, focused, driven, and fought for what was right and necessary.

At times, their searing opinions got them into battles with sports figures and associations.

In 1992, Rokk broke a story that to a certain extent fuelled a constitutional crisis.

It involved Sultan Abu Bakar College hockey coach Douglas Gomez who was allegedly assaulted by the then sultan of Johor.

Gomez had protested against an order by the ruler to his team to withdraw from the national schools hockey tournament.

The order came after the sultan’s son, Tunku Majid, was banned for five years by the Malaysian Hockey Federation for assaulting Perak goalkeeper, Mohamed Selvaraja, at the Malaysia Games.

Then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had to step in to resolve the matter, and laws on the relationship between the monarchy and the people were reviewed.

Rokk, Fauzi and another prominent journalist, Johnson Fernandez, were at the centre of the semi-pro football match-fixing expose of the 1993-94 season.

The scandal led to the arrests of 230 players and officials and destroyed Malaysian football, but not before the reporters received death threats.

Fauzi received a bullet in the mail, Rokk got a razor blade with a drawing of a tombstone with his name on it, while Fernandez was terrorised with menacing phone calls.

They were not intimidated and provided crucial information to the National Sports Council for a white paper.

Fauzi, a former Malay Mail editor, quit writing sports in 2000. In his final column, he wrote: “After 25 years of presenting the many wonderful and not so wonderful facets of Malaysian sports, I have decided to bow out because I choose not to be part of the total politicisation of sports – its total corruption.

“From football to cricket, the game has been compromised. Sold out, lock, stock and barrel, and I fear, I too will become tainted if I stay.

“The final straw which broke the proverbial camel’s back is the creeping malevolence of racism.”

Like Fauzi’s frankness, the sharp words of Rokk still ring loud in the context of forgotten sportspeople.

Rokk was furious that the badminton stars of Malaysia’s Thomas Cup victory in 1967 had to apply for a pass to watch the 1992 final in Kuala Lumpur, only to find there were no seats for them.

The former New Straits Times sports editor wrote a scathing column about how “amnesia set in faster than rigor mortis”.