The Boxing Rebellion——美国《纽约客》对邹市明的专访
The Sporting Scene
The Boxing Rebellion
In the sport that Mao banned, China’s hopes rest on one man.
by Evan Osnos
February 4, 2008
本文中文版见：http://www.suiyang.cn/html/02/n-402.html
Twenty-six-year-old Zou Shiming in the locker room in his hometown of Zunyi, China, with one of the Olympic team coaches (far left) and his teammates in the background. Chinese boxing officials have a name for their objective in this summer’s Olympics: the “zero-gold-medal breakthrough.”Photograph by Ian Teh.
On a cold night in November, Zou Shiming, the captain of China’s national boxing team, arrived early for a banquet in his honor at a Chinese restaurant in a mall in Chicago, where the amateur world championships were being held. Zou is twenty-six, stands just under five feet five inches tall, and looks boyish enough to be a teen-ager, but wrinkles form beside his eyes when he smiles. The speck of a scar by his left eye is not from boxing but from a girl who once bullied him in school. He has sharp cheekbones, a thick brush of black hair, and a long, aquiline nose. Like most boxers, he alternates between two sizes: regular weight—in his case, a hundred and ten pounds—and fighting weight (a hundred and six pounds). Before each competition, he spends most of a month famished. He gets grumpy and irritable, and then apologizes. For distraction, he gnaws on watermelon slices and spits out the pulp. Or he pulls up pictures of lamb noodles and posts them on his blog.
His teammates were still outside the restaurant, window-shopping, but Zou took a seat at an empty table. He laid out a Chinese newspaper and scanned the headlines, with little interest. The bridge of his nose was puffy and blue from his last bout, a few hours earlier. He was still in his red-and-white team warmup suit with “China” embroidered in gold thread across the back. On his left breast he wore a small brass pin of Mao Zedong’s head—a gift from his coach, Zhang Chuanliang, whom he calls Teacher Zhang. After eight days of competition, Zou’s cheeks had hollowed, and his smile was tired. “I’m hungry,” he said in Chinese.
Zou could feast now. He had won that day, gaining his second world championship and confirming his place as the first boxer in Chinese history to be considered a contender for an Olympic gold medal. A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that a Chinese boxer could win anything. The sport was banned for decades, because Mao’s government considered it too violent and too Western. It wasn’t allowed until 1986, after sports authorities made a calculation: boxing has eleven weight classes, thereby providing dozens of medal opportunities. That means a lot to a government that has elevated the hunt for Olympic medals to a state religion, a faith never more fervent than today, as China prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, in Beijing. Chinese boxing officials have a name for their objective: the “zero-gold-medal breakthrough.”
“Our target for the 2008 Olympics is explicit: one gold medal,” Chang Jianping, the president of the Chinese Boxing Association, told me. When the Beijing News asked Teacher Zhang, who is the team’s head boxing coach, what he thought of that prospect, he replied, “The entire national team has only one person really capable of capturing the gold: Zou Shiming.”
Zou has won the amateur World Boxing Championships twice, in 2005 and 2007, and is the first Chinese boxer to win that championship. He also won a bronze medal in Athens in 2004, making him China’s first Olympic boxing medalist.
Zou’s first fight in Chicago fell during lunchtime, and the crowd was sparse. Only muffled thuds and the polyglot shouts of opposing cornermen broke the stillness of the arena, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the city’s Near West Side. Two rings had been erected side by side, so that simultaneous fights could speed the opening rounds.
The world outside had intruded already. The Cuban team, from which two fighters have defected in recent years, was boycotting the competition, saying that it suspected a conspiracy by the “most vile interests of the United States and some of its allies: the theft of athletes.” Separately, two Ugandan fighters, including the team captain, had vanished from their hotel with their suitcases. One later called the coach to say, with apologies, that he was in Canada, but made no mention of returning home.
From the warmup area, Zou walked silently to the ring. The announcer stumbled over his name (“Sheeming Joe!”), to a polite flutter of applause. Zou slipped through the ropes. In his corner, in a hooded sweatshirt, stood Teacher Zhang, who looked so unprepossessing that he might have been a spectator who had stepped up for a closer look. Zhang coached martial arts until 1986, when he switched to boxing, and rose to the sport’s upper ranks. At fifty-four, he is trim and good-looking, with a brush cut that, like many Chinese men his age, he dyes an inky black. He has little appetite for conversation, but if he’s asked about fighting his eyes sparkle and he embarks on long, precise paragraphs. He has done more than anybody else to define China’s boxing style, yet he is so averse to attention that he can sometimes be found napping in the locker room during medal ceremonies while his fighters are on the podium. Zhang’s indifference to formality is unusual, to say the least, in China’s sports bureaucracy. “The leaders don’t like him,” a coach who has known him for many years says. “He has never kissed the leaders’ asses.”
A trio of Chinese sports officials had filed in and taken ringside seats. Zou turned toward Zhang and embraced him for a long moment over the top rope, his glove curled around the older man’s head. After more than a decade with Teacher Zhang, Zou mentions him more often than he does his parents. “We’re like father and son,” Zou says. The hug is a pre-fight ritual. “It calms me down.”
Zou turned back to his opponent, a Romanian named Constantin Paraschiv. At the sound of the bell, Paraschiv came out in a hurry, his fists clamped beside his face in the upright style of the Europeans. He was energetic and aggressive, firing jabs and prompting Zou to backpedal around the ring or list from the waist. Zou looked uninspired. He threw few punches. He drifted clockwise around the ring, pursued by the Romanian. By the end of Round 1, Paraschiv led, three points to two, and Zou went back to his corner.
Teacher Zhang stood close to Zou’s face, spoke softly, and tipped a trickle of bottled water into his mouth. When the bell signalled the start of Round 2, Zou sprang forward and buried a left-right combination to even the score. He set his stance farther apart than before and bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. He scissored his legs, an homage to his idol, Muhammad Ali. His first round, it seemed, had been a warmup. He glided around Paraschiv, pausing only to flick a combination into the Romanian’s padded brow. Every time Paraschiv slung his fist, Zou eased out of the way and counterpunched. Paraschiv, pivoting and swinging in vain, did not score another point in the round. Or, for that matter, in either of the two rounds that followed.
Zou rarely knocks his opponents out. He batters them and darts out of reach, like an angry sparrow. Sometimes he holds his fists so low that they drop below his waist, a caricature of Ali. Zou is a light flyweight, the lightest weight class in the Olympics. But, even among boxers his size, Zou is known for exceptional speed. After he beat the Irish fighter Paddy Barnes, I asked Barnes what had happened. Zou’s left hand, he replied. “It’s that fast. I could hardly see it coming.” When the American Rau’shee Warren was on his way to losing to Zou in the 2004 Olympics, in Athens, Warren told his corner that he couldn’t keep up: “I’m telling the coach, ‘Dang, he can move, and I can’t catch him!’ ”
By the final bell, Zou had scored thirteen punches on Paraschiv in a row, to win, 15–3. The Romanian was flushed and slumped. He had spent three rounds slugging air. After the referee held Zou’s arm aloft, Zou bowed to the judges and ducked through the ropes. He climbed down from the ring and headed for the front row, where the Chinese officials were seated. China’s boxing boss, Chang, a jolly, broad-faced man in a maroon blazer, sat with provincial sports officials. Zou greeted each with a two-handed shake, nodded at their comments, and thanked them. I came to recognize the ritual after every one of his fights in Chicago: the beeline to the officials at ringside, the two-handed shakes. Sweat pouring down his face, Zou listened closely to the men in suit jackets. Sports officials in China are among those who have a hand in shaping a top athlete’s future: where he lives, the terms by which he goes pro. On the evening news, they march in hard hats around new stadiums or huddle over blueprints. I wondered what they could possibly tell Zou about his fight that he didn’t know already.
Zou’s emergence startled American boxing purists who have been slow to warm up to his style. After Zou’s fight, I asked the United States’ head coach, Dan Campbell, what he thought. “I didn’t think anything of him,” Campbell said. “He did the thing that he did in the Olympics, hitting with this part of his hand, and this part,” Campbell went on, gesturing dismissively to the sides of his fist.
That criticism doesn’t bother Teacher Zhang. Zou’s medals are the evidence he needs. “If he can win points,” Zhang said, “even if he can fight with you he won’t waste his energy.”
Zou eating lunch with his parents and uncle in Zunyi. “Like most boxers, he alternates between two sizes: regular weight—in his case, a hundred and ten pounds—and fighting weight (a hundred and six pounds),” Osnos writes. “Before each competition, he spends most of a month famished.”
After the team arrived in Chicago, I met Zou one morning in his hotel. He was groggy. “I woke up at three-thirty this morning,” he said.
Until dawn, he had watched television shows that he couldn’t understand. It was his first trip to the United States, and so far he’d seen it only through the window of a bus. He has experienced much of the world that way: the best shuttle buses, hotel cafeterias, and gyms of Iran, the Czech Republic, Russia, Cuba, Qatar. He and the other Chinese boxers had skipped the opening ceremony, a couple of days earlier, because it would have meant standing around in the cold—only to learn later that they could have met Muhammad Ali, a surprise guest.
Zou sat forward in an oversized yellow leather armchair. Nearby, a large man in a golf shirt and a blazer laughed into his cell phone. Zou was carrying two cell phones, one of which was an iPhone; he and a coach had hacked into it, with instructions they found online, to make it display Chinese characters. After he won a bronze medal at the Olympics in 2004, Unicom, a telecommunications company, gave him a free phone and allowed him to choose a number, and he chose one that ended with the digits 2008. Around the same time, Shanghai G.M., a joint venture with General Motors, gave him a silver Buick Excelle sedan. He made sure that the license plate also ended in 2008.
Zou is unfailingly soft-spoken and polite, which, in a sport of swaggerers, can be mistaken for lack of confidence. It shouldn’t be. After routing a European amateur champion recently, Zou conceded, “He is good. Outstanding. But I am better.” I asked him how he pictures himself when he fights. “I think I’ve combined martial arts and boxing,” he said. “Martial arts have a soft and flexible side, and boxing is more direct. Putting them together is a specialty of Chinese boxing.” He prides himself on distinguishing China in a way that it has never enjoyed. “Opponents looked down upon Chinese players before,” he has said. “They were happy to take on a Chinese boxer, because we were too weak.
“Now they come and shake hands with you. The stronger you become, the more respect you get.”
If he weren’t a boxing champion, Zou figures, he might have been a fashion designer or a d.j. or a chef making French food—“romantic dishes,” he says. His musical tastes lean toward Hong Kong pop ballads, songs like “I Truly Cried” and “Rainbow Heaven.” Zou wishes that he had paid more attention in school and learned English, because it would make things easier when he turns pro—after the Olympics, most likely. Lots of young Chinese adopt English names, but Zou hasn’t found one. A primary-school teacher once persuaded him to call himself Car, but Zou suspected that it didn’t make much sense, and he abandoned it. Although he excelled in sports and music, he never did well in school, and he is self-conscious about the gaps in his education. He has no time for a girlfriend, he says, but he has decided that someday he will marry “a modern, knowledgeable woman.” As he puts it, “I hope to find another half who can make up for what I don’t have.”
Zou’s closest friend is Zang Guangyue, one of the team’s trainers, who rarely leaves his side. Zang is eight years older, wiser and more circumspect, with a round face and large eyes. He started his career with the national canoe-kayak team, before being transferred to boxing, in 2002. He knew little of the sport until Zou, working the heavy bag one day after practice, began showing him the fine points. Zang has spent the years since then managing Zou’s daily schedule, warming him up for workouts, and deflecting overzealous fans. Initially, Zang worked with the whole team, but he has gradually come to spend most of his time with Zou. When Zou can’t sleep before a big fight, Zang massages his scalp or reads aloud from a novel. “I never thought it would turn out that I picked the best horse,” Zang said.
Around his teammates, Zou enjoys no special privileges, and although he has attracted more attention and glory than all of them combined, they betray no hint of jealousy. When I asked Gao Lingzi, another light fighter on the national team, about his first impression of Zou, Gao looked back at me, puzzled. “I worship him,” he said.
Zou greets spectators at the opening ceremony of a match with Kazakhstan and the United States, in Zunyi.
Zou was born in the mountain city of Zunyi, in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. His parents lived and worked in a factory district that produced defense equipment under the ministry of aerospace. His father, Zou Jianguo (his given name means “build the nation”), was an engineer. He was gentle and remote, and worked relentlessly. When Zou’s mother, Song Yonghui, asked her husband to teach their son to swim at the factory pool, the young father couldn’t find a moment away from work. By the time he could, Zou had taught himself to dive. Song Yonghui said of her husband, “If Zou Shiming and I wanted to see him, it was difficult. He was up early, early, and away. He didn’t return until late, late.”
Now in his fifties, Zou Jianguo is slender, with a ripple of tidy black hair. At one point, he considered joining the Communist Party. “I tried, but I did not meet the Party’s standard,” he said. “I always tried. I always tried.”
Zou’s mother was as outgoing as her husband was reserved. She was a kindergarten teacher in the factory school. She excelled at Ping-Pong; he preferred basketball. Their son, an only child, was small for his age, and they kept him close to home. Song is energetic and has an impish smile. The first time I met her, in Zunyi, she was wearing a black-and-white checked shirt, a tailored black jacket, and bell-bottom black jeans with rhinestones on the pockets. When I asked about Zou’s upbringing, she laughed. “When he was little, he looked like a little girl, with his head of curly hair,” she said.
Then she told a story to prove the point. “Once, on a Sunday, we went out with a friend and the friend’s daughter,” she said. “The girl wore a skirt. Zou Shiming was in a sailor shirt, riding a bicycle. The weather was good. So I said let’s go to a photo studio to take a picture. The girl looked rather like a boy and Zou Shiming looked like a little girl. So we swapped the clothes and Zou Shiming had a picture in a skirt.” She smiled.
“My mother raised me too much like a girl,” Zou told me. “I couldn’t talk too loud. I couldn’t run or play around like other boys. Characteristics that should come out didn’t come out. I didn’t like to talk to people, maybe because my spirit was suppressed.”
As he grew up, Zou discovered television martial-arts dramas about fabled swordsmen. One of his favorite heroes was Zhang Sanfeng, a Taoist mystic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, who is considered the father of Tai Chi. Legend describes him as seven feet tall, with immense eyes and ears, and a fondness for clothes made of leaves.
Outdoors, Zou began to practice darting around trees and electrical poles, or threading through shoppers on busy streets. “I was crazy,” he said. “If you’d seen me on the street, you would have thought I had a problem.” He seemed interested only in sports, and when he was twelve his parents enrolled him in a private school to study wushu, a modern hybrid sport based on traditional martial arts. They expected him to end up as a physical-education teacher with a stable job and a pension. But Zou was bored by wushu, which he thought emphasized form over fighting. He was attracted to boxing, which seemed explosive and free. When Zou asked his mother if he could switch to boxing, she thought the idea was preposterous. “You are too delicate,” she recalls saying. “How can you train as a boxer?” And she added, “If you don’t want your mom to sleep at night, then go box.”
Zou told his parents that he would stick to martial arts, but he began training with the school boxing team. “I fell madly in love with boxing,” he said. “In the ring, I could truly let myself go. I wasn’t subject to my mother’s or anyone else’s control.”
In 1995, Zou transferred to the Zunyi Sport School, one of China’s Soviet-style sports institutes. One July day, he showed up with nineteen hundred other children to try out for the school’s athletic teams. The boxing team had only four spots.
First, the young athletes faced the measuring tape. Chinese coaches put extraordinary faith in assessing a child’s dimensions, sometimes with the help of X-rays, to deduce athletic potential. It was the system that identified the basketball star Yao Ming when he was a child. Boxing coaches were interested only in athletes with a long reach—that is, children whose wingspan exceeded their height by three centimetres. Zou’s outstretched arms measured a full centimetre less than his height, and the coaches cut him in the first round.
Two weeks later, Zou showed up for a second round of tryouts, and stood with the other applicants. “I thought, This kid’s clever and he’s willing to suffer,” Liang Feng, the coach who was running the tryouts, told me. Coach Liang, who boxed in college, is now in his mid-forties, and has a deep voice rasped by smoking. He favors a black leather jacket that makes him look like a night-club owner. Once when we went out to eat, he insisted that, as a guest, I down two glasses of beer before he touched his own.
Coach Liang put gloves on the boy and sent him in for a round. It was an unremarkable début. “He was frightened, timid,” Liang said. But Zou’s martial-arts training had given him good footwork, and he seemed to have a natural sense of distance, knowing how to lunge and withdraw to stay just out of his opponent’s reach. He was nimble and willing to train harder than the other rookies. “He was like a machine, just running without stopping,” Liang said. The coach took a chance and put Zou on the team; a year later, in his first big tournament, he made it to the finals against a strong competitor. And then he buckled. “The whole fight, he ran around,” Liang said. “He didn’t dare to fight.”
Still, Coach Liang wasn’t ready to give up, believing that fear could be a form of protection. He had seen a number of more gifted athletes who seemed content to plod into heavy head shots, only to wind up getting hurt and leaving the sport. Zou was quick to avoid punches, and when an opponent’s fist withdrew he counterattacked. He was at the gym all day, every day, except for a few hours on Sunday. When nobody else showed up on the eve of Chinese New Year, he trained alone. When the arena was locked for the holiday, he and a friend hopped a fence to run on the track until a security guard chased them away. Coach Liang recommended him for the provincial team, and failed to mention his arm measurements. “If I didn’t hide that, it would be over,” Liang said.
Zou’s parents continued to disapprove of his boxing, and demanded that he stop. A coach paid them a visit at home. He emphasized the safety of headgear that is designed to protect amateur boxers against head injuries. He argued that Olympic boxing is not like the heavyweight prizefights on television. Whereas professionals pound each other in search of a knockout punch, Olympic boxers win most often on points, relying on speed and accuracy to land the most punches during four two-minute rounds. The coach also mentioned that his own son was boxing, which Zou’s mother found reassuring. “He told us that, in strong boxing countries like the United States and Cuba, children from the age of two or three can go to the boxing gym to train,” she said. “It’s like Ping-Pong in China.”
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