Last July 22, at 7 p.m., at the stage of Han Kyungchik Memorial Hall, a man extremely popular among the South Koreans showed up: Park Chanho, the first Korean Major League player. Park stood proudly on the stage instead of at his usual place on the mound. He talked with the audience and gave a special lecture regarding his new autobiography.
In his special lecture, he told his fans in a no-holds-barred way about the pain that he felt when he first became a Major Leaguer: his loneliness and anger when his teammates told him that he smelled of garlic, and the anxiety and pressure that he felt when his play scores were bad. Also, he said that he held a grudge against the South Korean press, which readily turned its back on him so often even when he committed the smallest mistakes. He was praised as a Korean baseball hero most of the time, but he was suffering. The people he had trusted to be his friends turned their back on him so easily. He added with laughter that he took more painkillers and sleeping pills than vitamins during those difficult days.
“One day, I saw my reflection in the mirror and found out that he was crying. The guy was sobbing horribly. Then I thought to myself, “I gotta save this guy.”
After going through many hardships, he said that he learned something important: Even if you do your best, you can’t change other people. The only way to change them is to change yourself first. So he decided to change himself. He started avoiding Korean food and started studying English with great effort. After a while, the coach, who only used to yell at Park, started talking to him casually. Then his teammates started to befriend him. When the people around him became friendly to him, he finally got the chance to concentrate on his baseball skills. Thereafter, he succeeded in becoming a successful baseball player.
The lecture wasn’t the old-fashioned speech; it was more of a casual conversation between Park and his fans. Without too much formality and morals, Park sincerely shared his experiences concerning pain and trials-and-errors. It occurred to me that this was how Park, a true man, lives his life. Thinking of the hardships he had gone through may be hard, but he reviewed the experiences in his mind again and again to get over them and to learn something from them. Frankly speaking, I don’t know much about Park as a sportsman, but I was touched by how he does not try to run away from his past, and how he snaps out of it by becoming a better person. Personally, this part made the lecture very worthy and meaningful.
