Football Memories of Jingde (II)
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on June 2, 2008.
When I moved into town for school, I was in the second year of junior high. It was a time when landline telephones and cable TV still felt fashionable. I did not truly fall in love with football then, but I did become inseparable from arcade games, which is how I later came to know good friends like Zhang Qipei. That is another story. My only football memory from that period was secretly watching Guizhou TV's broadcast of the 1995 FA Cup final at home, where Cantona scored the famous volley against Liverpool, and the man who took the corner was none other than Beckham.
By my third year of junior high, China's Jia-A league was flourishing, but our school still had no proper sports equipment, no PE pressure from entrance exams, and free-activity periods in which anything could happen. Some people dated, some played arcade games, some ran off to steal sweet potatoes on the hill, but football was still absent. Once in a while we would kick around a mineral-water bottle as if it were a football, and have a great time.
Those days passed lightly. We were young, simple, and happy, and each of us had our own dreams of the future: to charge through the world with a sword, or to wander with wine and quick justice, or to lose ourselves in romance and poetry. Yet football remained a martial world we had not stepped into.
In high school, we faced far less academic pressure than students do now. There were no pop-idol talent shows either, so we had no choice but to pour all the hormones of adolescence onto the sports field. Our class took up football late, and our basics were terrible. School resources were scarce, with only one football field for countless people. Worse still, there were also four basketball courts on the same ground, so on Saturday afternoons the whole place was chaos. If you were not paying attention while playing, another ball might fly in from nowhere, or some stranger might grab the football and start shooting hoops with it.
The photo below shows the old sports ground of Jingde Middle School, taken by me on May 6, 2001.
The funniest part was always the goalkeepers. Several teams shared the same goal on one side, so for a while one team's keeper would be in goal, then another team's keeper would come over and take over. It was hilarious. Back then we played like lunatics, often staying until the sun went down. The field would go from packed with people to only the few of us stubborn brothers left lying on the ground in giant spread-eagle shapes.
The juniors one year below us had started playing earlier, and they combined better too, with something of a golden-generation aura about them. I once joined one of their matches, and because my technique was still poor I had no choice but to play goalkeeper. Anyone who has played casual football knows that nobody wants to keep goal. It is basically the same as being a ball boy.
Naturally I was not willing to accept that, so I practiced hard every day. In football, the way you strike the ball often tells people what kind of player you are. As for me, I never liked dribbling much; I cared more about passing technique, movement, and placement. So when I was alone I loved practicing my kicking. There had once been a row of flat classroom buildings beside the field, and one of them had a sheet-metal door that was exactly the target size I liked. Even though I was otherwise a pretty obedient student, in the name of football improvement I had to become a violent man. At the beginning my kicking was awful, and the windows nearby suffered badly. On several occasions the ball curved over the roof and smashed the second-floor glass of the building behind it. Even Beckham would not have matched that trajectory. My improvement owed a great deal to that iron door and those broken windows. Sadly, both the field and the classrooms that held our sweat and friendship have been demolished. Nearly ten years later, whenever I pass the old place, I still think of shooting at that iron door in the dusk, and its echoes still ring in my ears.
Because my skills improved so quickly, by the second half of senior two I had already become one of the better football players in my class.