Нашел в сети (спасибо Hollander'у). Публикую без перевода. Дочитайте до конца
original Korean text written and posted on the web by Yi Young Ho (1999-12-07)
« Yoda Norimoto... in a sense the name sounds a little bit eerie to me. No particular grand reason. When you picture a sort of food chain in the ecology of professional sports, you see someone in the upper position, the other in the lower. And Yoda's position was in the upper. Yeah, fans will be amused to see even the world-best invincible player Yi Chang Ho has some jinx opponents. But as his blood brother I just couldn't like this jinx.
This is what happened in the Asia TV Baduk Championship 1999 this spring in Tianjin, China.
The Asia TV Baduk Championship is a mini-international cup held annually since 1989. There are usually seven qualifiers, one defending champion and six finalists from Korea, Japan, and China. (the KBS, NHK, and CCTV finalists of the year) It adopts a knock-out tournament system, all of its matches are rapid play. Time limits permitted to each player are 5 minutes [with 30 seconds per move]. To those professional players who usually use more than three hours in a game, the Asia TV championship is like jazz musicians' jamming.
As always, this year seven grand masters of this improvising art were gathered including Yi Chang Ho and Jeong Soo Hyun from Korea (the KBS finalist), Yoda from Japan, and Chang Hao from China to vie for the championship.
After a few days of matches, my brother reached to the final round. And in front of him there was Yoda. Last big boss, kind of too melodramatic but that's the way it goes, always. Who would be the last man standing? Neither of Yoda nor my brother could stand back.
It's a famous legend that my brother is vulnerable in the early phases of a game and as these stages pass by he becomes stronger and stronger. Almost every games of him I'd watched had been in this pattern. This time it did not go that way. In the early phases he went on leading his opponent. I felt a little hilarious, maybe because the opponent was Yoda. But in the end a series of mistakes from my brother caused him nearly ten points' damage. As the saying goes in professional Baduk world, half a point's difference is fortune, one and half a point is competence. That is to say a mere difference of a point is a huge standard which decides the levels of the professional players. And my brother lost 10 points to Yoda. That was an enigmatic mistake by my brother, a legendary figure whose play was praised as accurate as an atomic clock. He did several counterattacks in the later phases, he couldn't make up for previous losses, and finally with a margin of two and half a point he had to yield the championship to Yoda.
I was disappointed, even a little bit wrathful. Once again Yoda's Force befell my brother. Yoda tends to put a stone on the Baduk board too fiercely producing a loud clash. That day's match was no exception. Actually he had crashed a Baduk stone into three pieces. That behavior seemed to me a menace to my brother. So I felt anger. My hatred grew bigger and bigger inside that he seemed to me a Darth Vader or something.
In the evening dinner, the sponsor invited all the participants. After a while, to my surprise my brother approached Yoda with a cup of alcohol in his hand. I strained my eyes. Wait a minute, you can't knock down Yoda with that tool... I thought.
My brother said to Yoda through a Japanese interpreter that he really congratulated his victory... And proposed a toast to him. After he drank a cup of alcohol he invited Chang Hao to Yoda's table, a No.1 player in China who had been defeated by Yoda in the semi-final. My brother proposed a toast to his Japanese and Chinese rivals and three of them drank a cup of alcohol each.
After a while, this time Yoda came to our table. Chang Hao had been sitting around the table with us. Yoda wanted to propose a toast in the meaning of solace Chang Hao and my brother's defeats. Again they cleared their cups.
Last loop. It's Chang Hao's turn. He proposed an another toast to the other two men. Each of three of them again drank a cup of alcohol.
As I saw the scene in front of me, my brother drank more than five cups of Chinese alcohol which is two times more intoxicating than Soju [Korean rice wine]. This was an unusual event because he usually doesn't drink much.
In that place they were nor competitors, nor rivals. They were friends. They congratulated a victory to the winner and solaced a defeat to the losers. It was a touching scene to Baduk fans. My brother who tends to scarcely laugh, was grinning from ear to ear that evening, maybe due to the influence of alcohol.
Many thoughts went through my head. I was just an ordinary man. I felt myself ashamed to have tried to judge Yoda only by results of a few matches against my brother. Their spirits were above the dichotomy of victory and defeat. They had been in the jungle of survival for decades since their childhood and would be for more decades. They knew how to keep themselves in the environment. If there are winners, automatically there happen to be losers. If you too cling to a single result of win or loss in a myriad of matches, you become to see only trees not the forest in the life of professional sports. If you cling to victory you can't get it. You must know how to free your mind from the paranoid. That's the way a professional player lives. In a way my words sound to be quite vague, but this is what I felt seeing these professionals in front of me. »
____________________________________________________
Профессиональный любитель Го ^_^
Путь деревянного меча - [
bokendo.ru]
