Sports Competitions

Beginning in Junior High, I played basketball whenever I had some free time. Yes, I competed whenever the opportunity arose. My class won some and lost some. I hated to lose, that was my strong point and my weak point too. Taking a sport too seriously was always a bad thing at that time in Taiwan, since no one considered sports important and certainly there were no professional sports of any kind. But for me, I never cared about what people thought. Sport, and basketball in particular, was just pure enjoyment personally.

In the second year of our Cheng-Kong High School, we had a school wide Track and Field competition. We had quite a number of items on the competition list. In running, we had 100m to 1500m with everything in-between, plus some relays and a hindrance race. In field competition, we had all the jumps, except the pole jump (I did not know there was such a jump then) and all the throwing events, such as disk, spear, and lead ball. My class, believe it or not, received the over-all first place trophy, beating many classes older than us. (There were, of course, several classes in each year of the School.) I was the class leader and it was a proud moment when I represented the class to receive the top trophy. The High School even paid a professional photographer to come and take a picture of the whole class with our Physical Education class teacher and our coach.

It was one of the two big events (another one will be posted soon) in my High School experience!