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

person was simply watching".
    "Who shall we
say was watching?" they inquired.
    "Me of course,
you dumb fuckers", I replied. "I'm the one who came up with
the idea".
    I was not made for
academic studies, I was an average student: n either
too smart nor too dumb. The only time when I would really sit down
and study were the final three weeks before exams, that was it. No one had ever taken the time to drill the
importance of an education into me.
    My real talent was
in sports and, although I had a passion for football, I was persuaded
to take up athletics by my school teachers. I had come in second at a
cross-country race and one of the coaches of the school's athletics
team recruited me. My school had a reputation for forging excellent
runners dating back to the early 70's so athletics had precedence
over any other discipline. I was not born a talented athlete, it took
hard work; I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning and run 10
to 15 kilometers before heading to school. After school was finished , I would rest a bit and then head for the athletics'
track for further training. I dreamed of winning the inter-school
championship. I ran middle-distance, the 800 meters, in about 1
minute and 58 seconds and the 1500 meters in 4 minutes and 7 seconds;
not too shabby for a school boy. I didn't have a proper trainer and
lacked guidance in my diet but I trained among professional athletes
who competed on longer distances. My coach at the time was a very
nice man who sacrificed a good portion of his time and money on his
pupils without getting anything in return. His name was Mr.
Sivalingam and he allowed me to train with a group of national
athletes belonging to a top club called Swift Athletes Association.
Training was tough and exhausting; when our sessions were over, we
would all go to a hawker center - an open-air food court - nearby to
buy some food and drinks. My teenage life was focused on sports;
nobody bothered to tell me that there was no future in what I was
doing. Had I broken the world record, there would have been no
special treatment to be expected; only much later did I realize that
most of the friends with whom I used to train and compete either
abandoned athletics after the end of school or went on to become
Physical Education teachers.
    While in school, my
other extra-curricular activity was the boy-scouts. I can still
recite our promise to God, to the Republic of Singapore and to Scout
Law. As boy-scouts, we had access to the keys of certain locked
premises on school campus, including the Audio-Visual Aid (AVA) room,
that we tidied periodically to impress the headmaster. One day a
friend and fellow boy-scout managed to copy the AVA room's keys so
that we could spend the weekends there watching movies until late at
night. During one of those evenings my friends and I decided to steal
a VHS video recorder from the room then went downtown to sell it for
five hundred Singapore dollars. We divided the booty equally among
us. The year was 1984 and I was 18 years old; at that time, going
downtown was a big thrill for us. With the five hundred dollars in
our pockets, we went to watch a movie in the city; I can't remember
what film it was. When the theft was discovered, the school filed a
police report but no arrests were made. The Principal marveled as to
how a VHS recorder had gone missing without a proper break-in.
    After this incident,
some of my friends continued to spend their nights inside the school;
they brought outsiders with them and planned a massive break-in. By
then, I had completed my secondary school and begun my
Pre-University. I was attending Arts and Social Sciences; had I gone
on to University and obtained my degree, I would probably be a
teacher today, but fate had another path in mind for me.
    During a weekend, my
former schoolmates entered the school premises and stole every single
electronic device in the AVA room. They then focused
their attention to the school's canteen and took food and