Football Memories of Jingde (I)
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on August 27, 2007.
Recently I have been planning to write a small series to commemorate those vanished, happy football days.
This first piece can count as an opening chapter.
In truth, my love of football was influenced in no small part by my mother. When CCTV had just begun broadcasting recorded Serie A matches, she used to watch them often. That was still the era of the Dutch trio and the three great German warhorses. At first I only wondered why so many people were chasing one ball around, but after watching a few times I could already explain the offside rule to her. Perhaps that was when my mother first decided that I was actually a clever child.
The first time I kicked a ball was in third grade.
Because both of my parents were teachers, I often had the good fortune of "borrowing" school sports equipment. I remember that my father took me there, and I immediately picked out a yellow basketball. In all the years afterward, he probably regretted that decision countless times: why let his son get involved with a ball and waste so much study time?
It was called a basketball, but in fact it was smaller than a normal one, the kind suitable for primary school children. Rural primary schools were poor back then, and there were no proper basketball hoops, so at first I really did just bounce the ball around with my friends. But perhaps bouncing it was not satisfying enough. I kicked it once, with all the creative imagination I had, and that first kick was impossible to take back. Soon all my playmates were chasing the ball around like mad dogs, catching it in their arms and booting it out again. Truly, those were passionate years. The fate of that ball was easy to imagine. A few days later it had been kicked flat. Looking back, I really did show some talent. If I had been trained properly, maybe China would by now be world champion in the art of kicking basketballs flat.
Still, damaged socialist basketballs were damaged basketballs, and my mother gave me a stern scolding when she found out. From that point on, nobody in our little world dared kick a ball again, and until I moved into town for school, I never touched a real football.