DISCLAIMER: Some of this story is true, some are fake, most are exaggerated.



“Hockey! What on earth is that! I don’t want this strange sport, why didn’t I get basketball instead!” Bewildered, I stared at the CCA allocation notice stuck to the notice board, which seemed to morph into a shifting, shimmering image of the basketball coach flashing a beaming smile at me. The longer and harder I stared, the more convinced I was that smile was a distorted malicious sneer. My blood boiled as I thought about how the coach had praised me so effusively during the trials last week. So that pretentious, double-crossing jerk must have been putting up a show all along!
Beside me, Gifford was practically bursting with excitement, with a goofy, clown-like grin stretching across his face. “Come on Wai Choong, hockey’s just like soccer! Imagine yourself dribbling like Ronaldo!”
Oh sure, the last thing I needed was an image of another grinning, pretentious jerk. With a sigh, I tore my eyes from that notice board and trudged off to the training pitch to meet my new teammates.
The first thing that greeted us, as we stepped onto the hockey pitch, was an Indian man. His face was fixed in a contemplative frown, which we soon found out was the closest he could get to a smile. Framed by thick eyebrows which slanted down sharply towards his nose, his eyes seemed to bore into you. Those two hard tiny points, aflame with ferocity, would melt every inch of your defensiveness, and his flinty bark would make even the most rebellious player flinch.
That hot Monday afternoon, his first words to us were not the usual “Hello” or any of the normal introductory ice-breaking questions. Instead, he snarled, “Get those sticks, and start tapping the ball, no fooling around, or you do fifty push-ups for me. Now get moving!” Then he moved away to train the seniors.
Those brusque words only served deepened my misery, pushing me over my tipping point. A burning sensation slowly suffused my face, a wave that rippled from the centre of my brain, and then just like a tsunami picking up momentum, an inexorable rush of boiling blood shot to the very extremities of my body, straining, pounding, raging against the rigid confines of my body until it eventually burst out of me in the form of a snide retort, “This coach is a monster! What a black-faced grouch, his face muscles must be so rigid he can’t even smile! Why on earth are we stuck with him?”
And just as if he had heard me, Coach’s voice rumbled across the full length of the pitch. “Hey you jokers, stop chatting like a bunch of girls. If you sissies want to talk, just put on skirts and get out of here!”
There was one thing I really respected about Coach, and that was his ability to command us about. His uncompromising tone jolted us into work, and we soon set about trying to move the ball around with our new sticks. All around me, my seniors were languorously knocking the ball around, thoroughly enjoying themselves. Feeling mocked by their ease around a hockey ball, I snatched a hefty looking beginner stick and started tapping the ball around. Who could stop me from learning hockey? After all I had already mastered basketball, soccer, cycling, roller blading, ice skating, and countless other sports!
And yet, after a mere few minutes, my burst of enthusiasm had evaporated, sucked dry by the heat waves that shimmered all across the pitch. Standing at 1.75m tall, my commanding physical presence was often advantageous when I picked up new sports. But now, my glamorously proud spine was forced into painful contortions as I clumsily bent down, trying to keep the end of that impossibly short stick on the ground. And yes the stick, sticky with sweat and grime, slipped so often in my hands, as if it were an eel obstinately trying to defy my will. While I had so often outshone people, this time, I was shining with a hot glow of humiliation and embarrassment at my failure. Every inch of my twisted spine hurt and screamed at me to take a break, but my coach was like a vulture circling on its helpless pray, keen eyes fixed upon us. I didn’t dare to show any outward sign of our exhaustion, for fear of incurring his fearsome wrath.
Soon I was panting with exhaustion and as the heavy weight of heated air threatened to saturate my lungs, an overwhelming clot of despairing desperation started to clog up the arteries in my heart. A strangled scream choked in my throat: How can I survive another four years in this stupid CCA, I hate the coach, I hate the physical torment, I hate the stupid sport itself!
Thankfully, unlike the sport and Coach, the people weren’t repellant. There was Ish, the highly entertaining Sikh who was often so high in spirits that he seemed crazy to all of us. He was constantly uttering a stream of adjectives meant to sound sophisticated but ending up as meaningless strings of words so hilarious ridiculous. When we met, the first thing he said to me was “Your body is an approximation of gargantuan scale that it is in juxtaposition to your puny miniature concoction of a brain.”
And his most comical moments were when he would bug out his eyes, go around forcefully bear-hugging people and growling, “I am the best, I own you!” in his trademark confident voice. Or he might say, “Look at my thunderous thigh muscles, they bulge out till my tights are bursting!”
We would all roll our eyes and go sarcastically, “Yeah yeah, Ish, your fats are shapely…”
Ish was in a class of his own. It was highly amusing to prick his flamboyant show of ego and overrated self-flattery with reality checks. It was amusing how someone could boast so confidently about abilities he obviously knew he didn’t have and we often found his verbose self-aggrandisation lifting our spirits. Such a lively, buoyant personality helped alleviate some of the dark misery that often rose up in me whenever I thought of hockey. And my dread of going for training sessions grew as Coach seemed to start picking on me.
By some malicious twist of fate, my coach started calling me “Wu Choong” instead of “Wu Wai Choong” and stubbornly stuck to that ridiculous sounding name even though I kept correcting him. I was also having a lot of trouble getting used to crouching down to playing hockey. Eventually, I started squatting down, a posture so abhorrent to Coach that he derided me with derogatory comments every time he saw me squatting.
At first, it was simply, “Wu Chong, you joker, don’t squat down and play.”
Then it became, “Are you deaf? You are one hell of a blur king, how many times have I asked you not to squat!”
And then, “I’m SICK and TIRED of you, why can’t you change? Do you have brains?”
And finally, “Wu Chong, you remind me of my toilet bowl, squat down and shit all the time!”
Have you ever felt like melting into the shadows, hiding in the safe haven offered in the folds of the cloak of anonymity? Have you ever felt your throat constrict with hurt and bitterness when a person throws stinging criticisms at you? I never felt like I could achieve any mark of excellence in hockey. During every training session, I volunteered to play as a defender, because defenders were never as glamorous and attention-seeking as strikers. We could hide from the glare of attention, we could shelter ourselves from the giddying glamour of popularity, and most importantly, our job was to do only what was necessary and nothing more. While an attacker’s life is all about flashes of brilliance which achieve immortality, a defender’s life is about constant reliability—a rather forgettable quality. And that was precisely what I wanted. I was trying to be forgotten.
A month later, there was a selection test for our first competition. Twenty people passed. Two people failed. I was one of the lucky two.
In the trials, I had somehow managed to pass the ball straight to the “monkey” 8 times in a row. The third, fourth and fifth times I made this fatal mistake, I heard my coach yelling “Wu Chong, you blind or what? You wear specs also cannot see the ball is it?” My heart, originally a ship with sails swelling with hope and optimism, was punctured over and over again by his sharply hurled insults, and sank a little deeper into the sea of despair with every misplaced passed I made. The last few times, I passed to the opponent, I was rewarded with nothing but silence from my coach, a silence that seemed so bleak and cold, its presence made more ostensible by its lack of intrusiveness. While I was usually deemed worthy enough to deserve a scolding, this time I realized my coach didn’t think me worthy of his attention.
The day those 20 successful friends went off to the competition, I felt lonely, rejected and marginalised. Yes, my friends had all comforted me after Coach had unceremoniously left me out of the team, and Ish had cheered me up greatly. But now, deep in my heart, I knew I did not belong with them. I cursed my coach. Why must he be so biased towards me? Why couldn’t he give me a chance? And my friends, why must they be so lucky? Why couldn’t more of them fail to make the team so that they could accompany me in my misery? I raged against unfortunate luck I had for being tall, I blamed my coach for dooming me to this humiliation, I even blamed my parents for giving me such unsuitable genes for hockey. And then as I slumped on the hockey pitch, sloped shoulders shuddering with the sobs that wrecked me, I heard the familiar tapping sounds of the Indian dribble slowly getting louder and louder. Looking up, I saw my other half—the “headless chicken”.
Well actually, his real name was Vincent. Short, plump and slow, he was physically everything that I wasn’t. But he had the same unfortunate fate of being disliked by Coach. My mind flashed back to those scenes where Coach would berate Vincent for running around aimlessly and drifting out of position, often calling him a “headless chicken”. Hah, great, at least someone else has been dropped from the team, I thought maliciously. Determined that he would not catch me bawling my heart out, I furtively wiped my eyes and tried to gather my wits around me.
“Hey Vincent, what’s up?” I smiled the pretentious smile which I hated so much.
“I’m training. Hey, what happened to you? Don’t be emo lah, if you can’t make the team now, then just work harder, try to improve and get into the team next time.” Vincent smiled his concerned face-crinkling smile.
“Yeah, but I swear even if I improve, coach will still call me a toilet bowl. He likes to shit a whole load of crap on me!”
“Hey, chill man, have you ever thought he was doing it for our own sake? Maybe he’s merely trying to make us tougher? Maybe he’s trying to goad you into improving? ”
“But, Vincent, he calls you a “headless chicken” too! Don’t you feel humiliated in front of everyone? I HATE HIM!”
Vincent sighed, a flash of darkness clouding his twinkling eyes for a split second. Then he smiled and continued, “I think I deserve that tag, I think there’s some truth in what he’s saying. Really! I should try to improve my positioning. And you shouldn’t be so self-defeating. You keep refusing to change just because you hate what Coach is saying about you. But don’t you feel what he says makes sense? Every man make his own luck, Wai Choong… ”
“But Coach is just so—”
“It’s not just about him, Wai Choong. It’s also about you!”
Yes, perhaps he’s right, an inner voice whispered to me. I was so scared to express myself and experiment with my skills during training sessions. But my problem was more than just my apathetic, passive attitude towards training, in fact, I was trying very hard to remain anonymous in hockey trainings.
“Every man makes his own luck, every man makes his own luck, every man makes his own luck, every…” As Vincent’s timely words of wisdom reverberated over and over again in my head, I felt a powerful compulsion imbue my limbs and muscles. It was a resolve to free myself from my miserable status as a lousy player, a commitment to improving myself, and a pledge that whatever Coach said would not affect the strength of my new-found determination.
So there we were, the two of us, striking solitary figures in the vast expanse of the turf. We toiled industriously in the scorching sun, fending off the heat, fighting against our humiliation, and struggling to overcome our inferiority complexes.
Every day, during the holidays, both the headless chicken and the toilet bowl stayed back to train long after the others had left. We practiced so hard that it seemed as if the headless chicken had lost another head and the toilet bowl had flushed its sanity down the pipe. I lost most of my fear of expressing myself. My former meek self was replaced by a reckless, whirling force of nature. I improved greatly and soon became addicted to the pursuit of perfection. I was obsessed with everything about hockey. I loved the sweet sensation of striking a ball dead center, feeling the satisfying vibration travelling from the stick, through the very core of my bones and resonating within my heart and mind. I reveled in the feeling of becoming a swiftly flowing fluid, as I weaved the past throngs of wrong-footed defenders. I was consumed by the adrenaline rush of skinning defenders with speed and the savagery of bowling over opponents in my path. And I had turned my weakness into my advantage. I learnt to use my height to hit balls with more power and to shield the ball more effectively. However, even though I had improved, one fatal flaw still afflicted me: I continued to squat, and my coach, never stopped calling me a toilet bowl.
And toilet bowl I was, all the way through the season and into the finals. Yes we got into the finals. The roar of the crowds, the shrill beeps of the referee whistles, the crescendo of drum beats, screamed loudly at me, filling my heart with their exhilarating, fast-paced rythms. And equally intense was my feeling of frustration I looked at Ish, Gifford and Vincent, all playing on the pitch while I rotted uselessly on the bench. I silently nursed this bitter resentment, turning my attention from the pitch and visualizing myself terrorizing the opponents. Lost to the world, I imagined that I was the hero on the pitch calmly picking my opponents apart. “Merciless Decimation”, “Siege and destroy”, “Project Annihilation”, “Revenge of the Titans”, Ish’s oft-uttered words of grandeur no longer seemed like flatulence to me, I caressed, savored and tasted them, feeling their power rousing my heart in a battle cry.
Just at that moment, a cheer rose amongst the crowd, ripping through my reverie. Ish had made a terrible defensive mistake and the opponents had scored. I looked at the board. Only 5 minutes of the second half were left. Then I turned to look at the face of Coach, which was coloured an ominous, botched purple.
“Ish, get off the pitch! NOW!” Coach yelled, and then swiveling around, he screamed at us, “Who has the balls to fight his heart out for the team!”
That pent-up battle cry burst out of me and I cried, “Let me play!”
Before I knew it, I was on the pitch, right in the middle of 21 other tussling bodies. All charged up with adrenaline, fighting for that one goal needed to save us from descending into the ignominy reserved only for runners-up.
It wasn’t long before I received the ball. Just as I had visualized countless times, I dribbled swiftly past defenders, each desperately trying his best to get in a tackle, but each failing miserably in even getting a whiff of me. As I dribbled past a fourth defender, and neared the goal, I felt the hard thud of metal against bone, followed by a blinding burst of pain that tore through my shin bone. That dirty player had swung his stick against my shin instead of trying to get the ball! I howled in pain, stumbled, vision shimmering as I struggled to fight back the shooting pain that shot up my shin. Then as I fell to the ground, the goalkeeper suddenly morphed into a shifting, shimmering image of the basketball coach flashing a beaming smile at me. That pretentious grinning jerk! I cursed inwardly, convinced that I was doomed to failure, just as I had failed to get into the basketball CCA. Despair seeped into my mind and weighed me down. And then, all of a sudden, a mental image of my coach cut through the blanket of despair and planted itself firmly in my consciousness. “STOP behaving like a sissy. Are you a girl? Why don’t you change into a skirt and play for my girls’ team?”
Those familiar taunting words enraged me and lent a rush of energy to my limbs. I struggled against the pain, regained my balance and took a hesitant stumbling step forward. Then, as if to egg me on even further, yet another flinty Coach bark filled my ears. “Wu Chong, you remind me of my toilet bowl, squat down and shit all the time!” I flinched involuntarily, then swearing in bewilderment and fury, lurched forward with a curse. Whatever physical pain I had felt was now gone. There was one thing I really respected about Coach, and that was his ability to command us about, to bend us to suit his will. Aiming the ball at the face of the basketball coach, I smiled to myself, before letting fly an unstoppable shot. Time seemed to move like viscous syrup, as I watched the face of the basketball coach slowly smash into bits, I rejoiced inwardly. I knew I would never fail again, I knew I had finally embraced hockey into my heart.
A last minute goal isn’t a very rare occurrence, it often happens as players succumb to lethargy. But two last minute goals are certainly worth mentioning. That day, the toilet bowl could not stop flushing. It flushed the pride of its opponents to rot with other wastes, it flushed the yellow shame of its soiled history down to the sewers, it flushed away the sticky clinging reputation of ignominy.
Wu Chong—WC—was no longer simply a Water Closet. He was a World Class one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is always a day where your teacher must leave you for greener pastures. And my Coach was no exception. At his farewell party, I gave him a fake hockey ball with the phrase “A ball is round, anyone can win” penned on it. That man had taught me so much, he had drilled into me the importance of mental toughness and not giving up, he had criticized me so that I could be motivated to drive myself to greater heights and most importantly, he had taught me to take knocks face on, recover, and rise up to challenge the impudent assailant.
I hated him, and yet I loved him too.