“Even though I’m not an athlete, the thought of playing in a regular season game would give me a lot of pride.”
바카라사이트Last August, in the middle of dinner, a senior reporter asked me, “Why haven’t we all imagined it?” I said, “Why haven’t we all imagined it? Scoring the game-winning goal in a sports tournament and being the center of attention from my female classmates. Or being the center of attention in a packed gymnasium.
Just thinking about it makes me smile from ear to ear. It’s like being the hero of a popular movie or novel, and the whole world revolves around you.
Here are 10 athletes who have endured long hours of hard work to achieve that moment.
Monday, September 4, 10:30 am. Despite the fact that Goyang Sono has no practice game scheduled, the auxiliary stadium of the Goyang Sports Complex is lit up and numerous officials are bustling around in the early hours. Not just for professional and college players.
Technically, it’s for the ‘invincibility’ test, the 150 minutes for the general public to knock on the door of their dreams. From community colleges to Army cadets to Cerritos College in Illinois. Just as everyone’s life has been different, so have the stories and schools of the 10 competitors.
There were an unusual number of professional officials in the stands, even an SBS aerial camera on KBS. The reason was clear. They wanted to see Jo Jun-hee, the first IMG Academy player from Korea, play.
I spent over a day Googling Jo Junhee, JUNHEE CHO, trying to find detailed stats and game footage, but came up empty-handed. All I could find was the occasional pickup game and a short highlight reel, but no full game footage. Of course, it could be my lack of skill.
He was such a mysterious man that his public persona drew the attention of power analysts, coaches, and even the head coach of Seoul Samsung, Eun Hee-seok himself.
“I wanted to see it with my own eyes. We need guards, forwards, everything.”
Eun’s words were sincere.
As the team with the highest first-round pick probability at 16%, along with Wonju DB, Suwon KT, and Daegu KOGAS, one well-picked rookie can shake up the KBL game, even if only slightly. Moreover, Samsung had no obvious reinforcements in the Air Conditioning League, so they had no choice but to focus on selecting rookies.
Jo Joon-hee put on a military-style performance from the start. His elasticity and athleticism were everything we’d heard about, and he was the only one to mix up his hedging move with a dunk in a fastbreak situation during the fundamentals test.
Other than Cho Jun-hee, the other nine players were scrambling to get their names stamped by the officials. It was a different kind of tryout scene, as it was the last time they could imprint their names on professional officials, and it was understandable that they sometimes put greed ahead of teamwork.
Still, getting to the podium on draft day as a member of the public is somehow harder than getting a camel through the eye of a needle. It’s a moment when even players who fly and crawl in the college league are rejected and taste frustration.
Still, giving up is not in their vocabulary. There were many dizzying scenes that could have led to injuries, but they got up and sprinted again.
Jung Ju-young, Kim Geun-hyun, Ahn Se-joon, Lee Sang-beom, Park Se-young, Seo Moon-se-chan, Cho Jun-hee, Choi Jin-seok, Kwak Si-hwan, and Choi Min-chul. These are the 10 regular people who played 40 minutes on the court, breathing hard, with no substitutions. For 40 minutes, they were good-natured competitors, but as soon as the buzzer sounded, they encouraged each other and patted each other on the back.
And then they neatly removed their red and blue jerseys and dropped them on the court, hoping that they would be transformed into colorful professional uniforms on the 21st.
After the match, some of the participants took pictures with happy smiles on their faces. Others couldn’t leave the court with their hearts full of regret and continued to shoot from the free throw line and three-point line. Jung Ju-young, who suffered a bitter defeat as a member of Sangmyung University, was the first to utter the word regret.
The literal translation of best in Korean is best, good, and favorite. In modern society, it is used in the same way as the word for putting all your strength into something. The 10 ordinary people on the court were doing their best to play the game they love more than anyone else.
They gave it their all, just as much as the pros, and hopefully the clichéd story of hard work never betrays itself.