“So coming to padang today?” my tuition mate, who was also one of my football mates asked me as class wrapped up.
“Yeah, for sure” I replied, eager to take a nice hard-earned break (my maths tuition class was a nightmare and anything of pleasure seeking activities was always considered a ‘hard-earned’ reward for me) after tuition.
Padang, which means field in Malay was the term used to describe where we would play just about any kind of sport, but mostly it was always football. My days of playing football started way back in 1993-94 where I became old enough to go to the fields to play on my own. Games usually started at 5.30 but the actual game would start at 6.00 pm (or even 6.15 pm depending on how many people came and whether we had enough people to start 2 teams and get the ball literally ‘rolling’). Sometimes we would all need to wait for the ball-keeper to come and that could be a very demoralizing where everyone will be rilled up and the only words you can hear in the field would “eh cepat la ni!” meaning “lets get on with it!!”. I used to play at the padang at the back of my house till I was about 14-15.
After that it just got too difficult to play over there as municipal started to build “playground facilities” which would in effect stop us from claiming dominion over the entire padang. Games would often last until around 7.00 pm (about 45 minutes to an hour) and after that we would all head home. Because I lived in a predominantly Malay area, most of my team mates were young Malay boys – some were mild mannered and some were just brash and hot tempered.
As I mentioned earlier, the construction of the “playground facilities” effectively curbed our football activities behind my house. It was also this time that the boys I use to play with were also growing up, most of them reaching 14-15 years old and beginning to hang out with a different kind of crowd – 15 is the coming of age for most Malaysian boys. You learn about sex, about girls, you start mixing with the older 16-17 year old kids, and you just start losing your first degree of innocence (you lose your second degree of innocence after college and your last degree when you have worked for about 5 years).
Anyway coming back to the playground facilities issue – as I mentioned most of us started to look for different avenues – I was about 16 years old at this time and I began mixing with a different group of individuals – I was a science streamed student and my tuition classes allowed me to mix with kids from Penang Free School (PFS – Incidentally PFS is SXI’s biggest rival in Penang) and it was with these kids who invited me over to join them for football in the evenings at Minden Heights, another taman just adjacent to my taman. This means I would need to travel a little further to have my football sessions…which I did.
My experiences of playing with those guys – guys who were closer to my age and who came from different kinds of sizes and backgrounds would be one of my most memorable memories of my adolescent years. For starters, these kids aged from 14 up to 18 and most of these kids had their siblings (although or younger) joining in football. Also, all of them spoke English and there was a mixed group of Malays and Indians – we didn’t have any Chinese boys join us and we didn’t really care). Some of these friends as I mentioned were my tuition mates, and there were a few from my Church as well. But most of them (about 70%) I knew from tuition and I guess that familiarity allowed me to get in to their group. Heck I even knew some of them during my primary days so there was definitely some sort of established connection I shared with these guys).
Playing with these guys was always fun because I guess we had more space to play compared to the padang at the back of my house and secondly these guys knew how to play good football, and I did improve of my own game playing with them. And I think the 3rd reason would be that everyone spoke English, and as such I shared more things in common with them – from music, movies, to the girls that these guys would talk about – mostly from Convent Green Lane but again, thanks to tuition we all knew the popular girls through direct or secondary connections. For me, because I had my church connections and most of these popular girls were Catholics (ironically eh?) and were of the same age group, I had a more “established” connections compared to my friends, which made me a good ally to these guys.
Like any other group, we began to disintegrate soon after SPM was over. It’s a pretty big thing once you get your SPM results (it’s not so much of a big thing when you are done with SPM) because the next thing of every 18 year old would be – which college should I attend? And I guess this was the beginning of the end for my football mates and even for me. That was the start of when we began to move in our directions and path; some of my friends went to different colleges in Penang, and as a result we didn’t get much time to hang out. Some even went down to KL to study (KL at that time was a big major city for me which I knew very little off except for the Twin Towers and the refillable drinks that Burger King offered – I loved telling people of my experience in Burger King KLCC which I first had in 2000).
I hardly kept in touch with these guys after I started college. In college, as expected I formed new friendships with different people – more on this when I write about my college years. A few did join my college but were in different programmes and in the end; all of them either dropped out or transferred to another college.
As I walked past both padangs earlier today evening – these memories came back to me – of how we used to look forward to these games, more so especially in the bigger padang at Minden Heights. It feels like an era has gone by. It’s quite an observation to see how we all just moved on with our lives. I have no idea where these football mates of mine are at, although I know I could make the effort to find out but given how I myself am so busy with my career and work, I guess I just need to find that time to check out on these guys some day in the future.
