The year was 2000 and Kevin Hunter was just completing his freshman year at duPont Manual High School in Louisville when he started hearing from his cousins about a trip they were planning to play soccer in China.
An avid player himself, Kevin was interested in an opportunity to play friendly matches with teams in Shanghai and Beijing. He wasn’t part of the Christian school team his cousins played on, but a few of the members of the team couldn’t afford to make the trip, so there were a few openings.
When his uncle, who was one of the coaches, asked if Kevin would like to make the trip, he didn’t hesitate. He even recruited a friend of his to go along with him.
When the team landed in Shanghai, 16-year-old Kevin started to notice there was something strange about the trip.
“What happened was we were told when we were planning that we would each get one checked bag,” he says. “What we did not realize at the time was that two bags were actually checked under each of our names. It had been apparently decided that we were going to check the bags and then some bags were going to be picked up on the other side by a carrier. We'd never see them, so we weren’t even supposed to know about them.”
The traveling party included three adult chaperones (including Kevin’s uncle) and 17 players.
“When we landed – and this is when we first got the idea that something was up – apparently whoever was supposed to pick up the extra bags got detained or wasn’t able to make it, so we actually arrived at the airport and were told, ‘Hey, there are actually two bags for everyone, so we need to get these bags out of the airport.’”
Kevin felt uncomfortable and decided to only carry the bag he’d checked in back in the United States. Most of his teammates carried two bags – theirs and one of the mysterious extras.
“The coach piled up a bunch of people’s bags on a big cart – bags he was sure were people’s actual travel bags and not the extras. He was up front with that cart, and was at the customs checkpoint,” Kevin says. “He was making all these weird motions with his arms, and while that was happening, the rest of us were able to make it through with no issues.”
He says they took the extra bags outside the airport, and someone came and picked them up.
“Like, something seemed shady. I kept my own bag and didn’t take one of the random bags that were there,” he says. “Only later did I find out through my uncle that all of those other bags were full of Bibles.”
Under Chinese law, it is illegal to bring printed religious material into the country if it exceeds the amount for personal use. “There's no doubt in my mind,” he says, “if not all of us, at least those people would have been thrown directly in the jail.”
Kevin says he later found out that was the whole point of the trip – to get Bibles into China. “Being 16 and having a chance to play soccer and go to another country, though,” he says, “I still would have gone even if I had known.
“But I probably would have been more freaked out when we landed,” he adds. “Especially when we heard that the pickup person wasn't going to be there. And for all I know, some of the other kids on the trip may have known since they went to the school.”
They managed to get out of the airport without issue, and their first friendly competition was against a team in Shanghai. It didn’t go well.
“The elevation was so different,” he says. “They said was like being in Colorado – the air's a little thinner and you can tell. When we were running around and trying to play, it was just hard to get your breath. Plus, it was really hot,” he says.
They lost 4-1, with Kevin assisting to his cousin on the team’s only goal.
“Normally I play defense – fullback,” he says. “We were having to switch people out so much and the other team was always on offense pretty much. It was almost like they were toying with us. But I got moved up to a wing. The ball came up to me. I dribbled down, crossed it to [his cousin] and he scored.”
After the game, the team went out to dinner with their opponents. “That was a really neat experience,” Kevin says. “We didn't talk too much about anything. It was just school and soccer. They taught us how to use chopsticks and the big thing we wanted to know was – what is the food we were eating?”
He said the restaurant had large round tables with a lazy Susan in the middle. “And we had no idea what they were bringing out. It was almost like a buffet type thing. They would just bring out food for the table and then we'd rotate it around. It was like, alright, who's going to be the guinea pig on this one? You try that. And then he’d tell us if it's any good and everyone else would then try it.”
Asked about the weirdest food he ate there, Kevin says he has no idea. “I wish I could tell you,” he says with a laugh. “We were never told what food was. Anywhere from the dumplings to whatever it was, they had such weird looks that for all I know, I could have had tiger testicles. I don't know.”
Tiger testicles?
“I know for a fact that my uncle had what they later told him was tiger testicles,” he says. “That's what brought it up in my head because during one of the nights when we first got to Beijing, he and the other coach actually were invited to the embassy. It was a big thing and were eating and he wasn't told what it was. They just told him to eat this and then laughed when he did. “Ha ha! You ate tiger testicles!” That’s what I was told. So that's why that popped into my head.”
Kevin’s favorite meal the Peking duck. To this day, he says anytime it’s on the menu, he orders it. “I that doesn’t happen often,” he adds. “The Tousey House Tavern has it, but that’s really the only place I’ve seen with Peking duck on the menu.”
He was also pleasantly surprised when the team was served wine with dinner. “That was the first time I ever drank alcohol,” he says.
It wasn’t their only opportunity to share a cold beverage. “We were all young kids,” Kevin says. “We enjoyed our time there and most of us were really good and stayed away from the mini bar that was in [our rooms]. A couple of them, before that first game, got into the mini bar and got drunk.
“One was our goalie. Another one was supposed to be a forward. And so the next day when we went to play, I've never seen our goalie play better, the score was 4-1, but could have been so much worse. He was making dives like he no longer cared about his life, making all these dives and saves. The other guy – the forward – was on the sidelines puking his guts out.”
He says between official games, they played at a public sports complex that was similar to Town & Country in Wilder. They had to take a taxi, and Kevin remembers what the adults had told them – do not ride in a taxi with a black square on it because those are ones you have to negotiate a price with the driver, and they’d likely get ripped off.
“And let me tell you – those drivers in China are crazy,” he says. “For one thing, we were told that it was rude to buckle your seatbelt because it showed you don’t trust them. I was in the backseat and my friend was in the front seat and he went to buckle up and the driver said, “No! No!” and was waiving his arms. And so we didn’t buckle.
“And we instantly regretted it,” he says. “Cars … if the road we were on had three or four lanes, the cars were six wide. They were constantly swerving in and out of the lanes. We were at a stoplight and you’d look out and there would be two cars in the lane and our car was on the line between them. It did not feel safe in those instances.”
And Kevin says the sheer amount of people that were riding bikes made it even more perilous. He also recalls whizzing past people who had set up dominoes tables on the side of the road.
“At one point we did have a culture shock where the bus made a wrong turn and we found ourselves in an area they did not want us to see,” he says. “So where they kept us, everything looked clean, everything looked precise. We stayed in high-end hotels and they even had a soccer stadium.
“But this wrong turn that they took – it put us on a dirt road. Immediately, you could just see little straw houses on top of houses. A lot more people, a lot more bustling around. And you could tell people were a little bit more malnourished. More people, less clothing, kind of begging for stuff. They had done their best to keep us away from that before,” Kevin says. “We definitely weren't supposed to turn down that road.”
Once they arrived, the team played some adults who were there, even though the adults spoke little or no English. “So there was less communication, there,” Kevin says. “It was more like here’s a ball. There’s a goal. Let’s play.”
The team made their way by bus to Beijing, where they would play their second official game of the trip. The second friendly started similar to the first, with their Chinese counterparts scoring two quick goals.
Then what Kevin described as rains like he’d never seen started to fall. “The water felt warm – it was nice,” he says. “But the entire field had no irrigation. Puddles were forming to the point where the ball was just floating on the field.”
The storm served as an equalizer. “When that happened, the other team had zero ball skills against us,” he says. “That’s when we shined. We were flicking the ball up from puddle to puddle.”
His team scored two goals, tying the game and shifting momentum into their favor for the first time on the trip. “But then the other team ended up scoring a third goal before halftime.”
The game was called due to the storm. “We definitely would have won if the game had continued into the second half,” he says.
Kevin learned a new term during the match: black dragon goal. It’s a phrase the Chinese use to refer to an “own goal” – when a player kicks the ball into his own team’s net, scoring a point for the opponent.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he explains. “It was before the rain. They came down, and I’m on defense. The ball crosses over and I get in front of the offensive players so that way he doesn’t get it. The ball rolled up my leg, hit my knee and went back towards my own goal. Our goalkeeper didn’t stand a chance.”
“I like to say that in China, we outscored them, but they won the game,” he says, “because of my goal.”
There were plenty of highlights on the trip as well, though, including visiting Tiananmen Square, site of a large-scale protest that was crushed by China’s communist rulers a little over a decade before Kevin’s trip. He also remembers seeing a lot of buildings like you might be familiar with from TV and movies – those that emphasize feng shui and have allusions to various cosmological or mythological symbols.
He recalls climbing the steps to the top of the Great Wall of China – a massive structure built over centuries that protects China’s northern border. He and his cousins did what any self-respecting soccer players would do up there: they kicked the ball around.
Kevin says the wall where he was stood about as tall as SD1’s Main Office and was about 15-20 feet wide. “It was wide enough,” he says, “that if need-be, a car could go on there. Except for the fact that as you’re going along, because it follows the landscape, you’ll go flat and then it’ll have 10 steps you’d have to go up and then it’d be flat for awhile and then maybe five steps going down.”
The wall stretched as far as they could see. “Every so often, they had lookout-type towers that you weren’t allowed to go in,” he says. “You would see on one side the city with civilization and on the other side, it was just not much – mostly just trees and fog.”
Some details of this story have been omitted to protect the people and/or organizations involved.
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share via Email
