Black Warriors

We pursued an intense interest in sports as much as we pursued our fractious crimes. Our estate got a new community centre with a number of sports facilities, one of them, a brand new basketball court. Back then, one could just ask to join a game. Playing basketball on the brand new court was an in thing and the court usually ended up crowded. To alleviate and at the same time ‘reserve’ the turf, we would form different teams and played a game or two to prevent people from coming in.

We called our basketball team “Hei Xing Kang” or the Black Warriors a whim, although there was nothing valiant about us. In fact, we were quite clumsy and lousy at basketball, but we did have great fun nonetheless. One of which was designing and sewing our own black jerseys.

David, the youngest of the pack, was assigned or rather bullied in the honour of being the water boy, he fetched us water and refreshment if we wanted him to. This honour was bestowed on jersey number 13.

Unlike the better teams, we were not serious about the game except to have fun. Training was disorganised and everyone wanted to be a forward. Without a coach, most of our trainings were spent on arguing about play positions.

For competition, scores were best kept to ourselves. Nothing to shout about, but certainly our game debrief was riotously infectious with laughter as we recalled our mischievous silly acts. Before the game, we knew that we would not win and would devise unfair techniques to ensure that we did not lose by a wide margin.

It was wicked like pulling jersey, stripping someone’s shorts or elbowing an opponent.