Which Manchester United footballer leads the most extraordinary life? Cristiano Ronaldo? Wayne Rooney? Rio Ferdinand? Wrong on all counts. Try Park Ji Sung.
Park’s is a parallel life, the kind of which is usually to be found only in fiction, and researching an article on him merely confirms this.
While his every move is pored over in his native South Korea — think David Beckham or the Queen — barely a word outside of the obligatory mentions in match reports has been written about the energetic midfield player in this country.
Even his team-mates, save for his closest friends, Carlos Tévez and Patrice Evra, from whom he bought his house in Wilmslow, Cheshire, might profess to know little about Park’s life outside of his love for football. A king in South Korea, then, but a relative mystery in Manchester.
Indeed, it must be strange for someone who is mobbed on the streets of Seoul to be able to walk through Salford without people offering more than a passing glance, but given his almost excruciating shyness — a trait that his parents and early coaches feared would severely impede his development — it is not hard to understand why Manchester is manna from heaven for the poster boy of South Korean football.
In October last year the Korean edition of FourFourTwo magazine dedicated 40 of its 178 pages to him, the front cover adorned with his picture and bearing the words “Legend of JS Park”.
It was, in effect, a condensed version of his 2006 autobiography, Infinite Challenge, which topped Asia’s bestsellers’ list, a comprehensive account of his life “From The Cradle To The Pitch” as one heading read.
There were even three pages dedicated to discussing the minutiae of the Nike boots he wears. No detail is considered too minor where Park’s followers — more than 87,000 of whom are members of his official fan club — are concerned.
The same magazine rated him this month as the second most powerful person in Korean football, after Chung Mong Joon, a Fifa vice-president, although Park will probably occupy top spot next year if he becomes the first Asian to play in a Champions League final tomorrow when United take on Barcelona in Rome.
It will be just reward for a player who was left out of United’s squad for last season’s Champions League final victory against Chelsea, despite the influential role that he had played in helping to get his team to Moscow, but then Park’s story is, in itself, a triumph against adversity.
He was born in Seoul in February 1981 and brought up in nearby Suwon, where he now has a street named after him. His mother, Myung Ja, was convinced that her son would grow up to be as strong as the mythological Korean dragons she had dreamt about during pregnancy, but initially the opposite — at least in body — was true. Imagine his parents’ surprise then when Park, while still in third grade at elementary school, professed a wish to become a professional footballer.
Small and weak, it must have seemed a fanciful dream at the time, but Park would not be deterred. Impressed with his son’s iron will, Sung Jong, Park’s father, gave up his job working in a metals factory to run a butcher’s so that his only child would have a choice of meat with which to strengthen that fragile frame.
Largely overlooked at high school because of his stature, hope appeared to be fading until, aged 17, Park grew six inches in the space of 12 months to his present height of 5ft 9in (1.75m). It would not prevent him from being rejected by every professional club or university he applied to in South Korea, but his steely determination impressed Lee Hak Jong, his high-school football manager, whose recommendation was enough to secure Park a place at the Myung Ji University in Seoul.
It would prove to be just the break he needed, and over the next three years, a star was born. Park followed up his fine form at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and for Kyoto Purple Sanga, of Japan, by helping South Korea to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2002 before Guus Hiddink, the mastermind behind that success, took the player with him to PSV Eindhoven.
After a difficult start, when, for a time, he conceded that he “didn’t like the ball coming to me because the fans were booing so much”, Park won over the detractors.
A £4 million move to United was sealed after a man-of-the-match performance for PSV in first leg of the Champions League semi-final against AC Milan in 2005, but while he did not encounter quite the resistance from United supporters as he had from PSV’s, many were left wondering if his arrival constituted little more than a commercial exercise. Almost four years on, no one is questioning United’s motives any more. Commercially, though, Park’s arrival has more than compensated for the loss of Beckham.
Since their launch in February 2006, United have sold 1.2 million credit and debit cards in South Korea. By contrast, only 380,000 have been sold in the past ten years in the United Kingdom. In effect, it means that one in five of United’s “core” Korean fans have one.
The Korean edition of United’s official website receives more than two million page impressions every month and United also agreed a lucrative sponsorship deal with the Seoul Metropolitan Government that runs to 2011. United, it seems, now have the best of both worlds. Only don’t expect Park to shout about it.
Cha the trailblazer for Asians in Europe
Park Ji Sung hopes to become the first South Korean — and the first Asian, for that matter — to play in a European Cup final, but one of his compatriots left his mark on Uefa Cup finals. Cha Bum Kun, below, widely considered to be South Korea’s greatest player, was a big hit in Germany after moving there in the late 1970s.
Cha helped Eintracht Frankfurt to win the 1980 Uefa Cup, playing in both legs of the final as Borussia Mönchengladbach were beaten on away goals. He also won the competition with Bayer Leverkusen when they beat Espanyol in the 1988 final. Having left the field injured before Espanyol scored all their goals in a 3-0 first-leg win in Spain, Cha played throughout the return, scoring the late third goal to take the tie to a penalty shoot-out.
source : timesonline.co.uk
Park’s is a parallel life, the kind of which is usually to be found only in fiction, and researching an article on him merely confirms this.
While his every move is pored over in his native South Korea — think David Beckham or the Queen — barely a word outside of the obligatory mentions in match reports has been written about the energetic midfield player in this country.
Even his team-mates, save for his closest friends, Carlos Tévez and Patrice Evra, from whom he bought his house in Wilmslow, Cheshire, might profess to know little about Park’s life outside of his love for football. A king in South Korea, then, but a relative mystery in Manchester.
Indeed, it must be strange for someone who is mobbed on the streets of Seoul to be able to walk through Salford without people offering more than a passing glance, but given his almost excruciating shyness — a trait that his parents and early coaches feared would severely impede his development — it is not hard to understand why Manchester is manna from heaven for the poster boy of South Korean football.
In October last year the Korean edition of FourFourTwo magazine dedicated 40 of its 178 pages to him, the front cover adorned with his picture and bearing the words “Legend of JS Park”.
It was, in effect, a condensed version of his 2006 autobiography, Infinite Challenge, which topped Asia’s bestsellers’ list, a comprehensive account of his life “From The Cradle To The Pitch” as one heading read.
There were even three pages dedicated to discussing the minutiae of the Nike boots he wears. No detail is considered too minor where Park’s followers — more than 87,000 of whom are members of his official fan club — are concerned.
The same magazine rated him this month as the second most powerful person in Korean football, after Chung Mong Joon, a Fifa vice-president, although Park will probably occupy top spot next year if he becomes the first Asian to play in a Champions League final tomorrow when United take on Barcelona in Rome.
It will be just reward for a player who was left out of United’s squad for last season’s Champions League final victory against Chelsea, despite the influential role that he had played in helping to get his team to Moscow, but then Park’s story is, in itself, a triumph against adversity.
He was born in Seoul in February 1981 and brought up in nearby Suwon, where he now has a street named after him. His mother, Myung Ja, was convinced that her son would grow up to be as strong as the mythological Korean dragons she had dreamt about during pregnancy, but initially the opposite — at least in body — was true. Imagine his parents’ surprise then when Park, while still in third grade at elementary school, professed a wish to become a professional footballer.
Small and weak, it must have seemed a fanciful dream at the time, but Park would not be deterred. Impressed with his son’s iron will, Sung Jong, Park’s father, gave up his job working in a metals factory to run a butcher’s so that his only child would have a choice of meat with which to strengthen that fragile frame.
Largely overlooked at high school because of his stature, hope appeared to be fading until, aged 17, Park grew six inches in the space of 12 months to his present height of 5ft 9in (1.75m). It would not prevent him from being rejected by every professional club or university he applied to in South Korea, but his steely determination impressed Lee Hak Jong, his high-school football manager, whose recommendation was enough to secure Park a place at the Myung Ji University in Seoul.
It would prove to be just the break he needed, and over the next three years, a star was born. Park followed up his fine form at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and for Kyoto Purple Sanga, of Japan, by helping South Korea to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2002 before Guus Hiddink, the mastermind behind that success, took the player with him to PSV Eindhoven.
After a difficult start, when, for a time, he conceded that he “didn’t like the ball coming to me because the fans were booing so much”, Park won over the detractors.
A £4 million move to United was sealed after a man-of-the-match performance for PSV in first leg of the Champions League semi-final against AC Milan in 2005, but while he did not encounter quite the resistance from United supporters as he had from PSV’s, many were left wondering if his arrival constituted little more than a commercial exercise. Almost four years on, no one is questioning United’s motives any more. Commercially, though, Park’s arrival has more than compensated for the loss of Beckham.
Since their launch in February 2006, United have sold 1.2 million credit and debit cards in South Korea. By contrast, only 380,000 have been sold in the past ten years in the United Kingdom. In effect, it means that one in five of United’s “core” Korean fans have one.
The Korean edition of United’s official website receives more than two million page impressions every month and United also agreed a lucrative sponsorship deal with the Seoul Metropolitan Government that runs to 2011. United, it seems, now have the best of both worlds. Only don’t expect Park to shout about it.
Cha the trailblazer for Asians in Europe
Park Ji Sung hopes to become the first South Korean — and the first Asian, for that matter — to play in a European Cup final, but one of his compatriots left his mark on Uefa Cup finals. Cha Bum Kun, below, widely considered to be South Korea’s greatest player, was a big hit in Germany after moving there in the late 1970s.
Cha helped Eintracht Frankfurt to win the 1980 Uefa Cup, playing in both legs of the final as Borussia Mönchengladbach were beaten on away goals. He also won the competition with Bayer Leverkusen when they beat Espanyol in the 1988 final. Having left the field injured before Espanyol scored all their goals in a 3-0 first-leg win in Spain, Cha played throughout the return, scoring the late third goal to take the tie to a penalty shoot-out.
source : timesonline.co.uk
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