Football Memories of Jingde (III)
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on June 22, 2008.
By senior year, there were only two kinds of ball I wanted to play: football, and Winning Eleven.
Let me start with Winning Eleven, because that too is part of my football memory. One evening, the school lost power during self-study and a few classmates dragged me off to a place where you could "play game discs." I still remember the scene now. The game room was small, right next to the cinema, crowded with arcade cabinets for Street Fighter, KOF, mahjong, and a battered TV hooked up to a PlayStation that made you want to kick it to death. Single-player cost three yuan an hour, doubles cost six. For poor boys like us that was expensive, but we still enjoyed it enormously and saved money every week just to go a few times.
At first we were probably playing Winning Eleven 3. Honestly, I should thank those people selling pirated discs. Without your lawbreaking, my life story might have been incomplete. There was no Chinese version then, not even an English version. Player names were all in Japanese. You had to identify players from the blurry pronunciation of the commentator, except for the ones whose faces looked especially strange, like Carlos, Zidane, and Ronaldo.
I still miss that wild era when Carlos and Ronaldo played up front. Though I never bothered using Brazil myself, because I felt that taught you nothing. Speed-9 Carlos plus Ronaldo, along with the unstoppable Batistuta, taught you what true invincibility looked like.
At the time we were Class 3-2, and gradually the ball-playing crowd in class split into two factions: football and basketball. But since there was no CBA craze, no Yao Ming, and because football had more players to begin with, almost nobody defected from football to basketball. As I remember it, only Zhou Wenyu and Zhang Shengfeng remained absolutely loyal to basketball. The school had no football competition then, and as our class team kept growing stronger, our desire to play a real match became even stronger than the desire to find girlfriends.
For our first opponents, of course, we wanted someone weak enough that we could practice teamwork and build confidence. We fixed our eyes on Class 1, a class where only two people really knew how to play and everyone else just played basketball. To their credit, they accepted right away.
The match was arranged for an afternoon after school. The field was still muddy after rain, and the sky was dark and heavy, with exactly the kind of mood that makes you think, before the army leaves, the general already dies. I no longer remember the details of the game, only that we lost 0:2. One goal came from He Jinwei, and the other from a basketball-playing classmate surnamed Yu who later went off to Tibet. Even now, I still do not quite understand how we lost. But that match was a real blow to me. In today's language, we had no clear understanding of our own level. A frog at the bottom of a well finally tried to climb out, only to be blown back in by the wind, with the lid slammed shut on top.
As for those two players from Class 1, they both came with plenty of stories. Let me start with He Jinwei.
That guy was excellent at two things: Winning Eleven and pinching people. In Winning Eleven he and I were evenly matched, but I always lost the penalty shootouts, which left a small psychological scar on my young mind. As for pinching, he had practically founded his own school of martial arts. Zhang Qipei's chest muscles, according to legend, were pinched into existence by him. Back then, he knew Wang Zhengqiang, Zhu Min from Class 4, Ma Lihui, one of the banner figures of the so-called golden generation, and Wu Wenjin, known in the jianghu as Little Left. Through them he often played with that golden generation. Once they all bought a set of white Italy jerseys, and he chose No. 12, the number of Pagliuca, which immediately earned him the nickname "Pagliuca." Unfortunately that meant he ended up playing goalkeeper more and more often.
As a footballer, he did not have especially obvious traits, but he was lucky. Once he went by chartered car with the golden generation to Jixi and played a match against Jixi No. 1 High School. They actually won. It rained heavily on the journey, and the ball skated on the water like a floating leaf, so one sliding tackle meant a whole pair of trousers soaked through. These days, hiring a car to play an away match seems ordinary. Back then it felt incredibly stylish. He also scored two goals in matches that left deep impressions on me: one was in the 0:2 defeat I mentioned above, and the other came in the famous 5:5 match against the golden generation, where the opening goal was also his, more or less by accident.
After graduation, he went to study in Shanghai and somehow gained an even more vivid nickname: Doraemon.
For people who are that accomplished, it is hard for their nicknames not to have character.
And the other player from Class 1 was Wang Zhengqiang.