“Never heard of them. Go see Christine at Queenstown.”
And that is how I got involved with Tanjong Pagar United Football Club, which was then one of the best S-League sides in the country. I met the overworked and underpaid Christine (a familiar tale for Singaporeans working in sports administration) and she asked if I would help out with the fan club and write the odd piece for the club’s newsletter. It was enormous fun, even if Christine had a habit of talking up her new ang moh assistant. I remember at one of Tanjong Pagar’s matches, she took me to a half-time reception and introduced me to the S-League CEO by saying, “This is Neil Humphreys. He’s joined us from West Ham United.”
The closest I ever got to becoming part of the administration at West Ham came at the age of 12 when I joined the fan club and was taken on a stadium tour. We went onto the pitch, visited the dressing rooms and had a look at their trophy collection. The last did not take long.
Coincidentally, and I cannot take any of the credit for this, the year 1998 proved to be the most successful in Tanjong Pagar’s history. They won a cup double, lifting the Singapore and FA cups, finished second in the S-League on goal difference and picked up the S-League Fan Club of the Year title at the end of the season. And there were some genuinely memorable matches that season watched by up to 5,000 fans. English clubs in the lower leagues cannot guarantee such attendances on a regular basis. Tanjong Pagar played to packed stadiums almost every week and was clearly destined for bigger things.
Today, the club no longer exists. At least in a footballing sense. After several years of walking a financial tightrope, the club’s management eventually threw in the towel after the 2004 season. They dropped out of the S-League, citing debts reported to be around $600,000. They vowed to return but they played no part in the 2006 league season and the silence coming from the club’s management remains deafening. A club that once had strong roots in Singaporean football, beginning life as Tiong Bahru United in the 1970s and producing several national players along the way, has gone.
I saw the banner sign above Queenstown Stadium’s entrance. “Home of the Jaguars” it proudly boasted. Tanjong Pagar’s nickname was the Jaguars. Like a Jaguar’s coat, the sign was once striking with its red, black and white stripes. Now, it was faded and pathetic. After two years, no one had even thought to take down the “next fixture” window box that provided details of the upcoming match and it remained stuck to the wall beside the turnstile. A ghost town would be the obvious analogy, but for the fact that there were three guys sitting on the kerb outside the stadium. Red-eyed and surrounded by empty Tiger Beer cans, they were gently swaying from side to side in that harmless, intoxicated state, while trying to hold and read a newspaper. What the hell were they doing here?
But, of course. Inside the stadium stood the S-League’s greatest legacy—a Singapore Pools betting outlet full of punters boning up on the evening’s Premiership fixtures. The football club may have gone, but the gambling will always endure. Legalised football betting on the S-League and the Premiership was introduced to provide additional revenue for the likes of Tanjong Pagar. But the S-League was nothing more than national service. The English Premiership was the real cash cow and still is.
I drifted along the running track and up the concrete terrace to see the old Tanjong Pagar fan club and admin office. It was still there, but only just. The Portakabin (the management could not accommodate a permanent office inside the clubhouse; the space was reserved for the jackpot machines) was covered in rust and moss stains, suggesting its days were numbered. If anyone can actually be bothered to knock it down, that is.
With nostalgia getting the better of me, I sat in what was once my favourite spot in the empty stand. It was Saturday evening and there used to be over 3,000 people crammed in this stadium. Now there were just two joggers; one an elderly chap, the other a disturbingly tanned fitness freak, pounding the track around the pitch. HDB flats still look down on the stadium. On match nights, neighbours watched from their windows. I loved that. It reminded me of the tower blocks that overlooked West Ham’s Upton Park. When we were young, my friends and I each promised to buy one of the East London flats so we could watch Tony Cottee and Frank McAvennie for free every week.
Then I sat in the press box, the name of which always was a bit of a stretch. It was nothing more than a row of plastic seats with a wooden work top laid across the top and a crackling phone line that had probably been installed by Alexander Graham Bell himself in 1876. From that seat, I once composed scintillating prose for those Straits Times readers dying to know what had happened between Tanjong Pagar and Balestier Khalsa. There were only about 3,000 of them, I suspect, and they were already sitting with me in the stadium. I am sure sports readers would have been preoccupied with far more important news that day, such as David Beckham getting his head shaved.
But in some respects, the perilous state of Tanjong Pagar United sums up the state of professional football in Singapore today. It is a dead S-League football club with a packed betting outlet. And no one really seems to care.
After visiting the ghostly Queenstown Stadium, I needed cheering up a bit. So I strode purposefully over to a Commonwealth Avenue coffee shop to find arse man. In keeping with time-honoured traditions nurtured at West Ham United, Tanjong Pagar matches were often complemented with supper at this particular coffee shop, which was popular with both fans and players. I always found that aspect of the S-League fascinating. You would have to go back to the days of the maximum wage in English football to see West Ham fans and players sharing a table at a pie and mash shop in Green Street. But I was not here to spot Jaguars, I had come to ogle another man’s buttocks.
Arse man worked, I seem to recall, at a Western food stall, although I could be wrong. He had two visible distractions that rendered all other memories hazy. In a certain light, the stall assistant could have been Singapore’s answer to Cliff Richard. He wore large aviator glasses and had the same big hairstyle once popular with the Bay City Rollers, the one that middle-aged Chinese men inexplicably favour. But it was his shorts that made him a minor celebrity and earned him a photograph on the front page of The New Paper. They were once jeans, I assume, that had been cut down to shorts. But these things had been massacred. They made the famous Daisy Duke hot pants in the Dukes of Hazzard look like flared trousers. When this guy turned the other cheek, everyone in the coffee shop saw it. The shorts were cut at least one inch above the groove between bum and thigh, showing off the pale white fleshy parts. When he bent over, the little hairy brain was almost visible. No one ever ordered his chicken frankfurter.
His bizarre ensemble was rounded off with a pair of wellington boots, which, in my mind’s eye, are yellow but that could be attributed to Phua Chu Kang. He was certainly a sight to behold. With the aviator glasses, the wellies and the exposed crack, I had always hoped he would suddenly throw down the plates and give us a quick verse of “YMCA”.
I checked every stall, but he obviously was not there. He is not a man who is difficult to pick out in a crowd. The Western stall where I thought he worked was closed, so I asked the neighbouring stall holder about him. Now, this was a difficult conversation.
“I’m looking for a guy who worked at this coffee shop. I think he worked at the stall next door to you.”
“Sure thing, man. What he look like?”
Now, how was I supposed to answer this question? He was a Chinese man in his 30s who looked like Cliff Richard and mooned all his customers.
“Er, well, he’s Chinese, wears big spectacles and likes to wear, er, shorts, you know? Short shorts.”
I demonstrated their cropped length and the old uncle smiled. He knew who I meant.
“He’s not working today. Doesn’t work weekends,” he laughed. “But don’t worry, he still works here.”
That was good to know. Singapore’s oldest housing estate needs a little continuity. Its S-League football club may have gone, but there are compensations. Arse man is still around. Ma
y he bare his chiselled buttocks to all and sundry for many years to come. Feeling strangely uplifted by that thought, I ambled back to Queenstown Station humming “Forever young! I wanna be forever young!”
CHAPTER 11
At this point of my farewell tour, I decided to take a detour. I planned to visit Singapore’s sprawling empire. Like neighbouring Indonesia, Singapore has a number of islands under its flag. Indonesia has over 13,500; Singapore has Kusu Island and St John’s Island. Yes, all right, I am being flippant. Singapore has tens of islands it can proudly call its own but they are not serviced by a ferry on Sundays. Kusu Island and St John’s Island are. These two islands form part of the Southern Islands, which are located about 6 kilometres off the coast of Singapore. Until the Sentosa Leisure Group started providing regular ferries to both islands, visitors had to rely on old sampans and bumboats. But we are spoilt now; all I had to do was be at Sentosa Ferry Terminal by 11am.
Inevitably, I was 2 minutes late. Still stuck in the stubborn mindset that I can reach anywhere within half an hour, I left Toa Payoh at 10.20am and fully expected to be 10 minutes early. I took the train from Braddell Station, changed at Dhoby Ghaut, alighted at HarbourFront, ran like a madman who never exercises to the bus interchange to catch the Sentosa feeder bus, then grabbed a poor teenage member of staff wearing the bright orange Sentosa shirt and ordered him to send a message to the ferry terminal. But I was so out of breath I could barely speak.
“Tell ... them ... wait. Don’t shoot off ... I coming ... over ... John ... right now.” The boy looked scared.
The bus got caught at some traffic lights as the clock on board read 10.59am. At the Sentosa arrival counter, I made the same plea before dragging my shaking legs and nauseous stomach off to the ferry terminal. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 11.02am. There was no ferry. At the counter, the sign read “Next ferry: 1pm”. I suddenly felt faint.
“Next please,” said a far too chirpy girl working behind the counter. She got a shock when she saw a sweaty, blotchy-faced ang moh desperately trying not to vomit over her counter.
“Has the 11am ferry gone already?”
“Yes, sir, it left right on time.” I looked up and down Keppel Harbour but could not see it.
“Excuse me, is it a ferry or a rocket-propelled speedboat? It’s completely disappeared?”
“Ooh, it’s very fast. Always leaves on time.”
No, it does not. After spending the next two hours in an oxygen tent, I returned to the ferry terminal promptly at 12.50pm and was the first person on the bright orange ferry, which boasted agreeable air conditioning and comfy plush seats. We did not move for what seemed like an eternity.
“What’s the time, mate?” I asked a Malay chap next to me.
It was 1.05pm. I was not pleased. And I really should start wearing a watch. The ferry’s captain sounded the horn for departure then stopped to allow three extremely handsome and giggling young German couples to board. It was 1.07pm. Cheeky bastards. I have nothing against Germans, you understand, I am just deeply suspicious of any nation that sends David Hasselhoff to the top of its music charts.
Finally, after I had visualised several ways to drown six young Germans at Kusu Island without being caught, the ferry zoomed away. The counter girl was right. It was a fast vessel.
Like many Singaporeans, I first visited Kusu Island during the ninth lunar month (which falls between September and November, according to the Lunar Calendar). Cheap ferries take across thousands of devotees for their annual Kusu Pilgrimage to pray for health, peace, happiness and the winning 4D numbers. I go to stock up on cheap Buddha statues for my mother. You cannot move in her house for laughing Buddhas with fat bellies. They giggle at you from the living room, the dining room and even the back garden. It is certainly an interesting blend of cultures. My mother lives in a semi-detached house in Kent. She loves to tell the story that her son braved the elements in an old sampan to visit a remote, cloud-topped island in the South China Sea. There, the indigenous people spend many months mining for precious stones before handcrafting beautiful delicate Buddha statues, a tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation. In reality, of course, I boarded a packed ferry during the ninth lunar month and bought three statues for $10 on Kusu Island.
I do like Kusu Island (Kusu means “tortoise” in Chinese). Tortoises loom large in the island’s legends because there is a similarity in shape, hence the island’s name. According to one legend, a magical tortoise transformed into an island to save two shipwrecked sailors, a Malay and a Chinese, which sounds plausible enough. Just 5.6 kilometres from Singapore, Kusu is only 8.5 hectares in size, giving it a cosy, intimate feel. At its centre are the turtle lagoon and a Chinese temple called Da Bo Gong (God of Prosperity). The temple was built by a wealthy businessman in 1923 and is where the Chinese come in droves during the ninth lunar month. I had a polite look around. Unless you have a penchant for looking at pythons locked up in a cage with a donation box stuck on one of the bars, there really is not much to see. But I was desperate to escape from the insufferable midday heat.
The tortoise sanctuary outside the temple has always intrigued me because it is usually full of turtles. On this particular day, there were dozens of turtles splashing around in the concrete bay and just a couple of tortoises thrown in to ensure that Sentosa Leisure Group does not fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. I spent several minutes watching an elderly tortoise do nothing. Is there a more boring animal on the planet than the tortoise? A gathering of tortoises is not an exhibit; it is a tableau. A couple of Chinese teenagers took several photographs with the tortoise sanctuary behind them. Why? The backdrop is not going to change. You will never hear a tourist say, “Quick, Alfie, stand still. I want to get you and the tortoise in the same shot ... Damn it, the tortoise just ran off.”
The tortoise sanctuary was certainly a more pleasant experience out of season. The coming of the ninth lunar month is the death knell for most of the defenceless animals. I visited one evening a couple of years ago and watched a cleaner sweep up half a dozen dead turtles. He said it was a daily feature of his work, but not a surprising one. Idiots grabbed the turtles to pose with them for photographs, turned them over and poked them to satisfy their morbid curiosity or, worse yet, handed them to their small children to play with. Of course, pick up any creature and it will react. Admittedly, a turtle hardly has the reflexes of a cheetah, but the reptile’s head suddenly withdraws and its stumpy feet stretch out. This reaction invariably leads to some ditzy teenager screaming and throwing it across the sanctuary. When this happens, the food chain’s hierarchy has to be seriously questioned.
I ambled round the back of Kusu to my favourite part of the island. It is nothing more than a beach really. But it is an undisturbed, pristine one. The sand is soft and always clean, the blue lagoon is generally pellucid and a decent spot for some rare snorkelling and the splendid scenery includes Singapore’s Lazarus Island on the right and Indonesia’s Batam Island way off on the left. And I usually get it all to myself.
I sat down under one of the many beach shelters to remove my sweaty socks and allow the red ants to eat my toes when I spotted my German friends again. With the entire lagoon to themselves, they were picnicking, sunbathing and snorkelling. Behind them was a rugged hillock with a Malay shrine of three keramats (holy shrines of Malay saints) at the top, which added a touch of Asian exotica to the setting. There was even a lifeguard on duty to ensure the German tourists did not drown. The beach setting was so tranquil, so perfect, I am surprised Alex Garland has not written a novel about it. Rock stars are always bitching about travelling to the far ends of the Earth to find an exclusive beach in the Caribbean to escape the paparazzi. Nonsense. Come to Kusu Island. Privacy is always guaranteed. No one will ever find you.
And what about Singaporeans? In contrast to the golden sands at Kusu, East Coast Park and the Sentosa beaches are crowded at the weekend, even though they offer dirtier beaches and certainly fewer s
norkelling opportunities. And cleanliness is a given here. I noticed three cleaners sweeping the paths and beaches and there could not have been more than 50 people on the entire island. Kusu’s beaches may be few, but they are immaculate compared to those at both Bali and Phuket and you will not be bothered every five minutes by locals asking to braid your hair or massage your back.
The cost of an $11-ferry ticket provides Singaporeans with a secluded location for a few beers with poly mates, safe beach shelters and a lagoon where you can ogle your girlfriend’s white bits and perhaps even squeeze one or two of them. Suggest a weekend trip to Kusu Island to most Singaporeans, however, and they will laugh. But they will never have the last laugh. That is reserved for the German tourists who had a stunning blue lagoon to themselves on a glorious Sunday afternoon.
I had high expectations for St John’s Island as I had never been there before. The island is 6.5 kilometres south of Singapore, making it the southernmost point of my valedictory tour. And I was fascinated by its modern history. It is generally agreed that in his search for a post to protect British trade in the region, old Raffles came to Singapore in 1819 and anchored his fleet of eight ships off St John’s Island. You would think there would be a plaque to commemorate this event on the island, but if there is one, it is well hidden.
The island’s history then gets juicy. In 1874, the island became a quarantine area for cholera-stricken Chinese immigrants. By the 1930s, St John’s had achieved the proud status of being the world’s largest quarantine centre, screening both Asian immigrants and pilgrims returning from Mecca. Now, why isn’t that little-known fact included in the Singapore Tourism Board’s guidebooks? The country is always looking for opportunities to be the world’s biggest or best. Best airline, best airport, best container port and best cholera quarantine centre. Why not? The day after I visited Cholera Cove, I mean St John’s Island, there was a coordinated attempt at all the golf clubs in the country to set a new world record for the biggest simultaneous golf tee off. And the story made the prime pages of all the national newspapers. That is, unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of living in a comparatively crime-free, corruption-free country. You have to endure unbelievably humdrum news stories from time to time.
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 9
