Fang Kaisheng|My table tennis relationship with Zhuang Zedong

My ping-pong relationship with Zhuang Zedong

Written by Fang Kaisheng

(a)

At 7:30 p.m. on April 9, 1961, the men's and women's team finals of the 26th World Table Tennis Championships kicked off at the Beijing Workers' Gymnasium. The men's and women's teams of China and Japan are all playing. The women's team took the lead. When the two sides fought 1-1, the final of the Chinese and Japanese men's teams began. The first to represent both China and Japan were Zhuang Zedong and Hoshino Zhanya.

I was 8 years old at the time, and in a packed stadium of 10,000 people, I witnessed Zhuang Zedong's debut on behalf of the Chinese national table tennis team in the team final of the world's top table tennis event.

I don't know anything about table tennis, but my first impression of Zhuang Zedong at this moment is - so handsome! Thick eyebrows, big eyes, beautiful head shape, wearing a red sweatshirt with the national emblem, smiling, full of confidence. When he opened up his stance to face off against Shinya Hoshino, Japan's new champion at the time, I was immediately overwhelmed by Zhuang Zedong's skills. Zhuang Zedong used a brand-new two-sided attack technique in the middle and near Taiwan, and hit Hoshino Zhanya running left and right, panting. After the first set, Zhuang Zedong easily settled 2-0, and the Chinese men's team got off to a good start!

At this time, the final of the women's team has ended, and Sun Meiying and Qiu Zhonghui, who represented the Chinese women's team, lost 2-3 to Japan's Matsuzaki and Iteng and were runners-up. In addition to regrets, the audience pinned China's hopes of winning the championship on the men's team.

In the fifth set, Zhuang Zedong played again, and the opponent was the Japanese star and two-time world men's singles champion, nicknamed "Zhiduoxing" Ichiro Ogimura. Previously, China and Japan fought 2-2, and the atmosphere on the field was already white-hot, and people's hearts were raised to their throats, and the silence in the stadium of 10,000 people was terrible. Because the Chinese team struggled to draw with a total score of 1-2, whether Zhuang Zedong can win this set is important to who will die in the end, and the audience sweated for Zhuang Zedong.

is a good Zhuang Zedong, and it is a storm to get started: attacking left and right, long pumping and short hanging, playing Ogimura at a loss, and the so-called "secret weapon" arc ball he is good at almost failed to pull out a board. In the matchup in the third set just now, Ogimura narrowly defeated Xu Yinsheng of the Chinese team 2-1 and has already scored one point. So when he came on the court in the fifth set, he had a look of arrogance. At this time, Ogimura was difficult to parry in the face of Zhuang Zedong's fierce offensive and was defeated. Two 21 to 15, Zhuang Zedong won easily. With a score of 3-2, the Chinese team re-established its strategic lead.

With the cheers of more than 10,000 spectators, the Chinese team finally defeated the Japanese team 5-3. When Zhuang Zedong and his teammates stood on the championship podium, the audience and I cheered for the difficult victory of the Chinese men's team. In this battle, although Zhuang Zedong played as the third main force, he won both battles and easily swept the No. 1 and No. 2 main forces of the Japanese team. A few days later, he won the first world men's singles title of his table tennis career. Since then, China's table tennis has entered a new era of enduring prosperity.

In this way, I became a "fan" of Zhuang Zedong and became obsessed with table tennis.

In the second year, I was admitted to the table tennis training class of the Youth Amateur Sports School in Xicheng District, Beijing, and I played for 4 years. During this period, in addition to studying and training, I often watched Zhuang Zedong's games in Beijing in my spare time, and paid attention to all the credit related to Zhuang Zedong.

I remember that in April 1963, the 27th World Table Tennis Championships was held in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. At that time, China did not yet have international television broadcasting technology. For more than ten days, I sat on the radio at 12 o'clock at night and listened to the latest news of the game. Early the next morning, I went to school to release information about the battle situation to my classmates as soon as possible. Every time he talks about Zhuang Zedong's game, he also adds a description of the scene he imagined. Watching my classmates listen to my true and fake "Shenkan" with relish, I felt a little proud.

(b)

One day in March 1965, the sports school organized us to go to the training hall of the National Sports Commission to observe the national table tennis team to participate in the pre-competition training of the 28th World Table Tennis Championships. After being a "fan" for 4 years, I was finally able to approach Zhuang Zedong.

The training conditions of the national team at that time were really different from today. It is a Soviet-style building with a large dome and a large indoor space of more than 5,000 square meters. In the middle is a training ground for volleyball and badminton, and there are about 20 tables in the outer passage of the corridor on the east and west sides of the hall.

Walking into the training hall, it is like entering a big supermarket. The first to introduce the vision is that several famous badminton players such as Tang Xianhu, Fang Kaixiang, and Liang Xiaomu of the national badminton team are fighting against each other; On the adjacent volleyball court, popular volleyball stars such as Malik are shouting and smashing the ball, and the environment is a little chaotic. Later, I saw that the members of the table tennis team were training intensely on both sides of the hall.

I walked straight to the training table of the Chinese men's team on the west side of the hall. Li Furong and Zhang Xielin, who have been selected and announced in the media to enter the team lineup, are training against arc ball with China's arc ball stars Yu Changchun and Liao Wenting respectively. Obviously, this is a targeted training aimed at the decisive battle against the Japanese team. The other two team members Xu Yinsheng and Zhou Lansun practiced forehand and backhand swing speed training on the table next to them.

What about Zhuang Zedong? I searched eagerly. Walking along the table to the northernmost corner, I suddenly heard a stern reprimand: "Move faster!" Be a little more decisive with your forehand! Looking in the direction of the sound, it turned out that Fu Qifang, the head coach of the national men's team, was conducting multi-ball training for Zhuang Zedong.

I saw Coach Fu Qifang holding a basin of table tennis balls, a backhand near the net, and a forehand in a sharp straight line to "feed the ball" to Zhuang Zedong. Zhuang Zedong first made a backhand pick, and then slid sideways to the forehand position with an afterburner to turn back. Such a set of actions, one move and one style, meticulous, played 4 pots of table tennis! I stood on the edge of the table and silently counted about 160 balls in a pot. In other words, in nearly half an hour, such a seemingly simple action, Zhuang Zedong practiced it at least 400 times! I was in awe of this situation. From the conversation between Fu Qifang and Zhuang Zedong during the training process, I also roughly understood why Zhuang Zedong was trained in this technical action.

It turned out that since 1963, a table tennis rookie Hiroshi Takahashi has emerged in Japan. This Hiroshi Takahashi holds the racket directly in his right hand, and the two-sided attack style of the middle platform has solid basic skills and great strength. In the past two years in the Sino-Japanese table tennis exchange competition, he defeated Zhuang Zedong twice. Zhuang Zedong's backhand skills can be called the world's first, and his forehand is relatively weak. Takahashi Hao just grabbed Zhuang Zedong's technical shortcomings, which are difficult for ordinary people to find, first sent the ball to Zhuang Zedong's backhand near the net, and then changed the line, "dead" Zhuang Zedong's forehand, and the result was 2-0 both times. The "small stove" that head coach Fu Qifang gave Zhuang Zedong was actually a very targeted response taken by the Chinese team to strategically predict the possible situation of the 28th World Championships.

More than 20 days later, at the 28th World Championships in Ljubljana, the capital of the former Yugoslavia, Zhuang Zedong and Takahashi Hiroshi met twice. In the final of the China-Japan men's team, Hiroshi Takahashi defeated Zhuang Zedong and Zhang Xielin 2-0 in two games. For a while, Hiroshi Takahashi was very vocal about winning the championship in a single competition. Just four days later, Zhuang Zedong played Hiroshi Takahashi for the fourth time in the men's singles semifinals. 21-18, 21-15, 21-8, Zhuang Zedong used a clean and beautiful 3-0 to knock Takahashi off the horse, and teammate Li Furong met in the finals, and finally won the championship. Later, he won the honor of "three consecutive championships".

At that time, most of the domestic media thought that the victory of the four dozen Takahashi Hiroshi was the result of Zhuang Zedong's emancipation of his mind and letting go of his burden, and I dare not agree. Because Zhuang Zedong, as a super-first-class master in the world table tennis world, has excellent psychological quality. Lost to Hiroshi Takahashi three times, mainly because the opponent caught his own technical shortcomings. Coach Fu Qifang's precise strategic prediction and training measures, coupled with Zhuang Zedong's superhuman talent and hard work, are the fundamental reasons for his victory in four beats against Takahashi Hao. Kung Fu is outside the poem, the Chinese table tennis team's strategic overall view, advanced training concepts and advanced training system, the Japanese table tennis team is incomparable. More than 30 years later, as a member of Zhuang Zedong's International Table Tennis Club, I talked about this classic battle with Zhuang Zedong, who has become my coach, and he agreed with me.

(c)

The vicissitudes of death, the stars change. It was 2003 when I met Zhuang Zedong again. In the past 30 years, Zhuang Zedong and I have performed different versions of the "Destiny Drama" on our respective life tracks.

In 1966, the "Cultural Revolution" ended my childhood dream of table tennis, and three years later I joined the 63rd Army of the Beijing Military Region as a soldier. In the early 70s, at the sports meeting held in the army, I won the runner-up of the 63rd Army Table Tennis Men's Singles by virtue of the "boy skills" I practiced during the junior sports school, and I was transferred to the military sports team to play table tennis for several years. During this period, on behalf of the 63rd Army, he participated in many competitions between the unit station and the Beijing Military Region, and he was also considered a "ball addiction" for several years. In 1974, after bringing a group of younger table tennis players from Beijing Shichahai Sports School, I left the military sports team and returned to the grassroots company. He started as a platoon commander and later became a company commander. Soon after, he was transferred to the training department of the organ as a staff officer. In the following decades of military career, from the field army to the Beijing Military Region, and then to the headquarters of the General Headquarters, the work unit has changed several times, but he has never left the training department. Six of these years were spent in military academies. In the unwitting passage of time, I, a table tennis boy who once dreamed of becoming a professional athlete, was made a professional soldier by fate.

One day in 2003, I learned in the media that Zhuang Zedong and Qiu Zhonghui had set up an international table tennis club. On the day of the listing, I rushed over, and I was 50 years old this year. It has been 38 years since I watched Zhuang Zedong's training at the age of 12 in 1965, and I am eager to see each other in a snap of my fingers.

Zhuang Zedong was 63 years old at this time and was still a well-known public figure at home and abroad. As everyone knows, in the past few decades, Zhuang Zedong has experienced a rollercoaster of political ups and downs. At the 31st World Table Tennis Championships in 1971, he used "a small ball to turn the earth", breaking the long-standing ice of China and the United States, and writing the immortal legend of "table tennis diplomacy". Chairman Mao Zedong praised and said: "This Zhuang Zedong, not only does he play the ball well, but he will also do some diplomacy." Zhuang Zedong has since entered the official career, was elected as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China at the age of 33, and led the director of the National Sports Commission at the age of 34, becoming the youngest ministerial-level official.

In response to the old saying: Fortune and misfortune depend on each other. In the special era of the "Cultural Revolution", Zhuang Zedong made serious mistakes. After the collapse of the "Gang of Four", Zhuang Zedong fell into a low point in his life. first quarantined and censored, then delegated to Shanxi, and divorced. After several "purgatory", in the mid-80s, Zhuang Zedong returned to Beijing and was assigned to the Beijing Children's Palace as an ordinary table tennis coach. Zhuang Zedong walked out of the table tennis training class of the Children's Palace in the 50s of the 20th century, and he returned to the origin of his life.

How is Zhuang Zedong doing now? With questions, I walked into Zhuang Zedong Qiu Zhonghui International Table Tennis Club. In the hall where the table tennis table is placed, the guests are full of friends. Zhuang Zedong, Xu Yinsheng, Li Furong, and Zhang Xielin are taking a group photo, which is the main lineup of the men's team at the 28th World Championships. "There is still one Zhou Lansun missing." I blurted out his whereabouts. Zhuang Zedong glanced at me and replied: "Lan Sun has passed away from illness, it has been a few years, if he can stand here today, then everyone will see the most glorious lineup in the history of Chinese table tennis." Zhuang Zedong's eyes were bright, and he was still confident in his conversation. In fact, from the lineup of guests attending the club's listing ceremony, people can feel the aura released by Zhuang Zedong. I went through the membership procedures and became a full member of the club.

Training began, three times a week. With the deepening of the training course, my observation and understanding of Zhuang Zedong has gradually deepened.

One day in class, several students thought that they were old and had a low technical starting point, and they felt embarrassed to train according to Zhuang Zedong's formal training requirements. Zhuang Zedong saw everyone's thoughts, so he said: "To learn to play table tennis, you must remember three sentences: first, hobbies are your best teachers; Second, as long as you learn, it's not too late; Third, there is as much output as there is input. Everyone is a successful person, and I believe that you are all good at learning to play table tennis. A philosophical remark was convincing to everyone, and the ball skills quickly improved. I later learned that during the few years of Zhuang Zedong's work in the Children's Palace, he applied psychological education to training and practice, and successfully launched a large number of young table tennis talents. During his teaching period, he set a record for the Children's Palace to send talents to professional teams, and was awarded the title of Outstanding Teacher by Beijing Municipality many times, and was awarded the honorary title of Special Teacher by the Beijing Municipal Government in 1994.

Once, Zhuang Zedong stood by the table and watched my training. He suddenly spoke: "Kaisheng, I've seen it, your basic skills are good, and you can also train the Fa. Let me ask you a question, why do you never ask me to play? Zhuang Zedong's words came to my heart. I told Zhuang Zedong that on the first day of class, I heard him say something like this when he was teaching the theory of "acceleration braking" in table tennis that he founded: When playing table tennis, primary school students use big arm strength, middle school students use small arm strength, and college students use wrist strength. Although I have learned to play table tennis, in front of Mr. Zhuang, I am still a primary school student, and the kung fu of the "three-legged cat" is still in the stage of exerting strength with the big arm, as if a primary school student has just mastered the four operations, how can I ask a graduate tutor to teach calculus and number theory. Therefore, I really don't dare to trouble Mr. Zhuang. Zhuang Zedong laughed and said that I must play with you once today. As he spoke, he started the fight and fought me for 40 minutes. Teacher Zhuang talked while playing, and corrected my movements from time to time. The onlookers were not without envy and said that I was "an exclusive privilege". This is the only time I have played on the same stage with Mr. Zhuang Zedong in the past few years in Zhuang Zedong's club. Under the guidance of Mr. Zhuang, I have really made significant progress. In the second year of the "Zhuang Zedong Cup" competition, I defeated several former professional players, won the third place, and won the team championship of the Beijing Table Tennis Association Cup with my teammates, and won the first-class amateur athlete certificate issued by the Chinese Table Tennis Association.

(iv)

has been with Zhuang Zedong for a long time, and there are more topics. I talked to Zhuang Zedong about his two matches in the 26th World Championship finals. He said, "In those two games, I did play at a super level. More than 20 years later, I realized what really won the game. It was at a memorial service to commemorate Chairman Mao's birthday, and Wu Xujin, a staff member of his old man's home at the time, recalled that Chairman Mao watched the game while sitting in front of an 18-inch black-and-white television. When the game was hot, the old man got up and shouted, "Grandpa Zhuang, my little ancestor, you have to take it down for me!" "I only now understand that my victory over Hoshino and Ogimura was with the divine help of Chairman Mao and his old man! After telling this wonderful ping-pong allusion, Zhuang Zedong was already in tears.

Zhuang Zedong told me that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were the two great men he admired the most in his life. He said you know, during the 31st World Championships, I took the initiative to contact Cohen of the United States, which caused a sensation in the international media. But within the table tennis delegation, I felt like I had made a mistake. The leaders were also kind and repeatedly warned me that the matter would end here and that I should not do anything out of the ordinary. Chairman Mao and his old man had great foresight and keenly grasped my inadvertent move to direct the historical drama of "ping-pong diplomacy" that had an epoch-making impact on the world's strategic pattern. What is its historical significance? Zhuang Zedong took out a set of data. He said that there are now about 190 countries that have diplomatic relations with us, compared to only 28 countries before 1971; In the five years between ping-pong diplomacy and Chairman Mao's death, China established formal diplomatic relations with 100 countries! That is to say, the cornerstone of our country's later reform and opening up, opening the country, and going to the world, this cornerstone of the international strategic environment, was laid for us by Chairman Mao and his old man after ping-pong diplomacy, and we have enjoyed the precious historical legacy left by the old man. The comments of those who have witnessed ping-pong diplomacy are deafening.

One day, Zhuang Zedong handed me a copy of the book he wrote, "Deng Xiaoping Approves Our Marriage", and said you should read it first. After reading it, I asked him, Mr. Zhuang, can you tell me the details of Comrade Xiaoping's approval of your marriage to Mr. Dunzi? He said: Because of my special status and the mistakes I made during the "Cultural Revolution," five ministries and commissions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Education, the State Sports Commission, and the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and Government, jointly wrote a report to the central authorities on the issue of my transnational marriage with Sasaki Dunzi, recommending that it not be approved, and that the matter drag on for several years. Later, Nie Weiping mentioned this matter to Comrade Deng Xiaoping, and Comrade Xiaoping said that Zhuang Zedong had made contributions, and he still had to live, so he should be allowed to get married. As I write this, it coincides with the 110th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's birth, and CCTV is airing the hit TV series "Deng Xiaoping at a Turning Point in History". In one of the debates, Comrade Xiaoping was alone on the issue of whether or not to return to the city for young intellectuals who had gone to the countryside, saying: "In my opinion, it is better to let the children go home." This final word is really similar to his approval of Zhuang Zedong and Sasaki Dunzi's marriage, how similar it is. What we see from the great man's vast mind is his heart for the people. Zhuang Zedong said: When Comrade Xiaoping passed away, I and Dunzi entrusted people to send flower baskets, set up a mourning hall at home, and hung a banner that read: Worship the benefactor Deng Xiaoping.

Zhuang Zedong writes well, and he is quite influential in the circle, he said that he studied under Fan Zeng. He inscribed a picture on me: "The god of the sword country, the courage is the soul of the ball." "I said Mr. Zhuang, if you specialize in calligraphy, you must also be a world champion. One day in 2010, he called me to his home. In a strange atmosphere, Zhuang Zedong told me that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which was in an advanced stage. He said that the most reassuring thing behind me was Mrs. Sasaki Dunzi. She gave up a lot and lost a lot in order to marry me. For so many years, I lived entirely on my pension. I have an idea, I plan to write Braille and sell it in my last bit of time, so as to save a living expenses for Dunzi, and I hope you can do me a favor. A few days later, I contacted two friends who like to play table tennis and bought two inscriptions by Mr. Zhuang: "If you don't fight for a ball, how can you conquer the world". After doing this, I was very sad and calmed down a little.

Spring Festival 2013. At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, I received a text message from Mr. Dunzi Sasaki: Zhuang Zedong passed away. Twenty days later, I left a pen in the sign-in book of Mr. Zhuang Zedong's farewell ceremony:

A ball becomes a big weapon, and you can be a hero. Teacher Zhuang, let's go.

Your student: Kaisheng Fang

(Early morning of September 7, 2014)

About author:Fang Kaisheng, male, retired cadre of the former General Logistics Headquarters, Cuiwei Road Military Rest House, Haidian District.