Football Memories of Jingde (IV)
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on December 10, 2008.
Back in those years, the close friends I knew had usually either played football with me or drunk with me, and the even closer ones, like Zhang Qipei or Wang Min, were almost the kind you could say wore the same trousers. Wang Zhengqiang was a little different. First, although I had met him as early as junior high, we always moved in different circles and did not play together. Second, the man had an astonishingly low alcohol tolerance. After just two drinks his face would turn so red it made you want to dial emergency services.
But the boy could really play.
When football commentator Zhang Lu used to describe a certain kind of player in Serie A, he liked to say the player was "sly" in the positive sense. Wang Zhengqiang absolutely qualified as one of those. He struck quickly. In martial-arts novels, the masters kill in a flash of steel. With him, by the time you turned to look, all you could see was his back. If he had devoted himself to training some kind of invisible-kick technique, he would probably have become the leader of the martial world. He also had a strong sense of the game and a good overall view. Of course, our own technical level was so poor back then that when he played with us, he did not really need to display much of that broader vision. Huang Song of the golden generation had a similar style, just with less speed. Wang had a maturity on the pitch that did not match his age at all, so much so that you almost suspected he had already gone away to university and come back just to humour the rest of us.
His only weakness was physicality. He always wore glasses while playing too, so against the truly reckless types things could get dangerous. In that sense, God was still fair in making people. In our era, family food conditions were generally not great. Aside from Min, who seemed to live on turtle soup, very few of us were power players. So in the Jingde football circle, technical footballers formed the mainstream, while the strong ones acted like gang bosses. Football's harmonious society had already appeared there long before the term was fashionable. Within that technical mainstream, this "sly man" moved like a fish in water.
That 2:0 win by Class 1 over us, mentioned in the previous essay, was, in my opinion, almost entirely his doing. Even now, many years later, I still believe that.
Another thing that must be said is that he was also excellent at Winning Eleven. I did not play him many times, but I never beat him. To be precise, I was always soundly thrashed.
After we started working, contact became less frequent. He seemed to move through several different cities. In 2005 he came to Nanjing once with Min and watched that year's Asian Cup.
The last time I saw him was at Zhu Yan's wedding, when several friends gathered at Zhu Yan's home before he caught a night train to Hangzhou. It was already late autumn, and by the next day everyone would again go their separate ways, so nobody drank much. "After this meal, I'm off," he said as he stood up. His alcohol tolerance was poor, but there was still a certain heroic air to him.
I never really got the chance to play beside him properly, or to eat heartily and drink deeply with him. That remains a real regret.