Heung Son-Min: 1st Essay: What I Thought While I Was Playing Football

Son is a published author, and whilst this one might be very much one for purists, but this translation does make for interesting reading.

Sonny’s father, Son Woong-jung has been described as having been moulded his boy and these memoirs only serve to confirm the suspicion.

Another good background read on the 27-year-old I’d recommend to you is this interview with David Hytner in The Guardian, from March 2019.

Dad’s advice to me until 2nd grade was “go out and play.” Even now, dad talks about this. “You must burn the coal that is known as freedom in order for creativity to be embedded in a person.” Letting kids do what they want is the fastest way to see where their interest lies.

During 3rd grade, I wanted to play soccer professionally. Dad (he is ex-national pro player) was against it and asked me “why?” and i said “because it’s fun.” and he told me “Heung-Min, to play soccer and to be actually good, it’s hard. The world of soccer is cruel and cold. It’ll make the society look like warm place. Do you still want to do it?” Dad had a big flaw. He was not good at making speech at the eye level of a 3rd grader. Why is soccer cold? What does ‘harsh’ mean? These were what I wanted to ask. Only later I realized how deep those words were…

I would go to school in the morning and afternoon we trained for soccer for 2 hours. The menu was simple. It was ball lifting. With inside, outside, middle of the foot, every part of the body. Once mastered, it took 15-20 minutes, but when I started it took 40 minutes. Next was 8 ball dribble (this is where you set 4 cones in diamond on two sides, and make “infinite” signs). This helped me understand the importance of sense of touch. We did this for 7 years.

Dad always said “you focus on training, nothing else. I’ll take care of everything else.” Practising soccer takes a lot of prep. Taking care of pebbles (lot of Koreans back then played on dirt field, grass field was…super luxury). Setting up cones, getting the balls. I’ve even seen dad take big refrigerator size box to carry a soccer ball. But I only practised. I never touched anything else.

Dad was super, scary. Even the academy he ran, kids would quit because he was so, so scary. And forcing kids only to practice ball lifting, many hated it. Even the academy team could not play against others because we never had enough members. I’ve also never remember being praised. All I remember was being criticized.

We have lot of stories. One time we were fighting about something and dad got angry and forced us to ‘ball lift’ for 4 hours. The 1 ball started to look like 4, and the ground started to shake. One time neighbhorhood grandma would yell that she’s calling the police because how angry dad treated us. Dad tried to explain that this was for their own good and she said “no way a parent can do that to a child.”

I’m like mom and my brother is more like dad. I would do everything dad asked me, but my brother was combative. Arguing against dad and fighting with him. There is a drill that we did where we would lift the ball and circle around small soccer field. 1. Left foot, 2. Right foot, then with 3. Both foot. If we dropped it, we had to start over at 1. When I dropped it, I went back to start, but my brother would drop it and when he saw that dad didn’t notice, he would keep going acting like nothing happened. I’m sure dad knew, but he never said anything.

For 7 years, this is all we did. Variations of Ball lift and 8 dribble. Same thing every day. I was able to do this for 3 reasons. 1. Soccer was fun. 2. Dad was scary and I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that this was boring. 3. I’m sure we’re doing this b/c its necessary dad thought it was necessary.

Dad’s philosophy was simple. You must master the ball before anything else. Once you master, then work on pass, then shooting, then tactics, then game play. Unless we can do 1+1 there is no reason to work on anything else.

Many wonder what our training was like because players have stories about their youth program and such. I don’t really remember what my childhood training was like because we did the same thing every single day.