Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer Read Free Page A

watch the football match".
    It was the first
football game that I ever watched; an FA Cup final. I cannot remember
distinctly but I think that Manchester United lost the match 1-0.
They attacked and attacked for 80 full minutes; one counter-attack
and they lost. I became a United fan from that day onward; my whole
family supported them. But my all-time favorite football player was
Diego Armando Maradona, who then played for SSC Napoli. To me he will
always be special; the greatest footballer living. I tried not to
miss any of his matches. Save for the World Cup, there was no live
football on TV in Singapore, so I would skip all of my other
activities to watch Maradona's delayed games. He was my idol; a true
football genius. I also admired other prominent footballers like
Gheorghe Hagi, Johan Cruyff, Enzo Francescoli and Eder. I was really
into sports when I was young; apart from footballers, my heroes were
Sebastian Coe, Muhammad Ali and John McEnroe.
    My English was very
bad back then. I mean, although English was our first language in
school - mathematics, history, science... all were taught in English
- there was really no good command of the language around when we
were young. We all spoke broken English and the Chinese were the
worst at it. They were so unrefined that we called the boys 'Ah Beng'
and the girls 'Ah Lian': The equivalent of 'rogue' and 'bimbo' in the
local street dialect Hokkien. When we met outside school, we would
blurt out: "Hey Ah Beng. Where you go, la?"
    "Ho, hey".
    "How are you,
la?"
    We also mixed other
languages with English: Tamil, Chinese, Malay; sometimes within the
span of a single sentence.
    "Na bei
chee-bye. What the fuck is this fellow doing? Lu ki ma".
    Vulgarity was very
common, especially among the Chinese. First thing in the morning,
they would burst out "Na bei chee-bye", which literally
means "your mother's pussy" in Hokkien. That was their way
of wishing you a good morning.
    In school, we all
studied our mother tongues as second languages. It wasn't compulsory;
an Indian guy could choose to study Mandarin and a Chinese could
learn Tamil. Well, I've never actually met a Chinese guy in Singapore
who studied Tamil but many Indians chose to study Mandarin. I studied
Tamil as my second language but I can also speak Malaysian, a bit of
Chinese and Sinhalese. I didn't bother to learn Filipino or Thai;
most Singaporeans who know Filipino or Thai are either pimps -
prostitution is legal in Singapore - or have a penchant for women
from those countries.
    I placed my first
bet at around the age of 13. I picked Manchester United to win in an
FA Cup final against my neighbor, who was much older than me. He lost
and refused to pay but I was too young to stand up to him and claim
my money. At that time I also played cards with my friends and
occasionally did some petty betting. Our favorite pastime was 'si ki
phuay', a Chinese card game that resembles poker. Gambling was
illegal in Singapore and our parents didn't let us play cards for
money so we had to find secluded places around town to play our
games. When I was 16, as we were playing cards behind our school, the
police suddenly ambushed us. A friend and I took off in the same
direction with a policeman giving chase after us. When we were out in
the open, the officer aimed his gun in our direction and shouted:
"The two of you. Stop or I'll shoot".
    My friend slowed
down and looked back, thinking of turning himself in, but I had a
different plan.
    "You asshole",
I yelled at him, "he's not going to shoot you for playing cards.
Just keep running".
    We managed to get
away and return home.
    On a different
occasion, two friends and I were arrested for playing cards on the
staircases of a shopping center and were taken to the police station.
Since there were no policemen of Indian origin in sight, I started
speaking to my friends in Tamil.
    "Look", I
suggested, "when we record our statements, let's say that only
two of us were gambling while the third