Athlete's Identity

843 Words4 Pages
An Athlete’s Identity – Yoon Lee (Former Soccer Player) Yoon Lee was born on April 23rd, 1955, in the Korean town of Pusan. He was the first child to Yang-Sook and Chul-Yong. Yang-Sook, his father, played soccer in college and physical trainer after he retired, and started Yoon in the sport. Yoon started playing soccer with his friends in the street, using a sock filled with rags as a soccer ball. They would use the sidewalks as sidelines, and buckets or barrels as goalposts. “I became pretty good at being able to dribble the sock around and even learned how to hit it with my head,” Yoon says. He would sometimes cut school with his friends just to play soccer in open fields. In fact, he was discovered by a soccer scout while playing with some fellow workers. Yoon’s first job was a cobbler’s apprentice, which paid just over $2 a month. A cobbler is one who repairs shoes, a skill which Yoon continued to use throughout his soccer career. He would repair his and his teammate’s shoes because very few soccer teams had people to do it for them. About the time he took that job, he was given the nickname of Chao. The word, which has no literal translation in Korean, was given to him by the boys he used to play soccer with. Yoon didn’t like it at the time, because he thought they were making fun of him. He sometimes got into fights with his friends over it, and asked them to call him Yoon, his real name. They continued to call him Chao though. There was a time, earlier in his life, when Yoon, smaller than most people he played against, would get into fights often during soccer games. Often times when he’d outclass the older boys he was playing against, they’d become cynical, and start fights with him. He and his friends would share their dreams of playing on a well-known team. “Often when I got home from my job and from the games we played I was very

More about Athlete's Identity

Open Document