Chia Boon Leong: The Homegrown Football Olympian

[Music playing]

Jimmy
Football is a sport that many Singaporeans love, but I’m not sure if the game loves Singapore back quite as much. Sure, we’ve had our local heroes. For those of us of a certain age, names like Fandi Ahmad, Quah Kim Song, and V. Sundramoorthy spring to mind. But they’ve never really played football at the very highest level, like the World Cup for instance.

But we do have someone who came very close. Chia Boon Leong played football at the Olympics in 1948. I’m Jimmy Yap and with me is Nick Aplin. Nick heads the Sport Heritage at Sport Singapore, and he was also a friend of the late Boon Leong. Nick is here to tell us all about the man and the legend. Welcome to BiblioAsia+, Nick. Thank you for coming down.

Nick
Thank you very much for inviting me. This is a very pleasant new experience.

Jimmy
You wrote a very interesting story in BiblioAsia on Chia Boon Leong, who has been described as one of Singapore’'s most talented footballers. And his nickname was Twinkle Toes. So, tell us a bit about this nickname. How did he get his nickname?

Nick
Okay. The story begins in 1951 when there was a touring team from Sweden, I believe. A Scandinavian team managed or coached by an Englishman called Maun. And he was watching the game that they played – almost like a charity game, an exhibition game, something like that. But the coach was very impressed by Boon Leong’s movement, the quickness of his thoughts and his twinkling toes. And so, the name stuck because of an Englishman representing a Scandinavian team in Singapore.

Jimmy
Very, very international. Give us an example, an idea of how talented Boon Leong was.

Nick
I can do this probably in two ways. One is to describe slightly one of the games that he played, or he was represented in, when the team went on tour to China. The second way is – because I never actually saw him play I’m reluctant to make an objective outright statement – I’m going to quote somebody that I know in Singapore who saw him. So, the example, the playing example was when the Lian Hua [United Chinese] team visited Shanghai.

Jimmy
Okay. So, first of all, tell our listeners, you know, what’s the Lian Hua team?

Nick
It’s like the collective Chinese of Malaya team, which was going to visit various countries in East Asia. He was involved in the match against the strongest Shanghai team, the league champions, and there was a huge crowd watching the game. I think it was probably quite cold because it was in November 1947, and the Lian Hua team beat the Shanghai team. I think it was 5-3, something like that. Boon Leong didn’t score any of the goals, but he so impressed the fans that they mobbed him at the end in a friendly sort of way, and they sort of escorted him out and made a big fuss of him. 

And I think that that was a key moment for him in establishing how important he thought the fans’ responses to him were. He clearly was the best player on the pitch. Today, we would talk about assists, you know, that he was helping to create goals and so on. But based on the responses of the fans – Chinese fans to him alone, not to the rest of the team – I believe he was a very, very good player.

Jimmy
I mean, most of the time the supporters of the home team don’t generally go off and congratulate the opposing team who have beaten the home team.

Nick
Exactly. So, they must have been impressed, subject to view. Okay, fair enough. My second illustration concerns a gentleman called Dhillion, Mr. Dhillion, who was the secretary-general of the Singapore National Olympic Council. And this example actually happened in May last year [2023] when we were publishing book two [of Sport Singapore], The Rocky Road. We were talking about Boon Leong. He was one of the highlighted individuals who had been playing during the time period that the book covers. And I thought, “I’ll be very cheeky and to the audience.” And I said, “Look, I’m not really sure, but I know he was very, very good. Some people say he was just as good as Fandi, recently.” Mr. Dhillion was sitting in the row in front of me and he just said, “He was better.”

Jimmy
Okay.

Nick
And this is somebody who’d actually seen him play. But it’s a dangerous thing to undermine Fandi’s status.

Jimmy
Absolutely, absolutely.

Nick
But Boon Leong was one who could do it. So, I’m fully in favor of reinforcing that view that – I used the words: he was in the same class as Fandi, as I think it’s safe to say that.

Jimmy
So how did Boon Leong end up in the Olympics playing for China? Even though he was born in Singapore.

Nick
Born in Singapore, did not speak Chinese.

Jimmy
I didn’t realise he didn’t speak Chinese.

Nick
This just makes it even more interesting. So where to start really… Football in those days, just postwar, was influenced by politics because the Chinese were going to have a revolution. And so, he knew that Singapore itself did not have an Olympic committee. In order to play, your nation has to be affiliated to the IOC [International Olympic Committee].

And Singapore didn’t have any such committee until the 1940s, actually 1947, but they were unable to put together a team anyway. There weren’t enough good players to justify the time and the expenditure. So, for him the only option was China and they knew all about him in China, partly because of their Lian Hua tour in 1947, given how well he had performed, partly because of how he played against some of the Chinese touring teams like Tsingtao.

Jimmy
And this was in 1948, the London Olympics, London Olympics and in China, he was in the starting 11.

Nick
They played one game. Against Turkey.

Jimmy
In which they did not do so well.

Nick
No, I think it’s really hard luck to go all that way and to go straight into a knockout competition and you lose in the first game. That’s it, bye bye.

Jimmy
That was very, very painful.

Nick
Very it’s very painful. But I mean, they knew what the rules were before they went. But whereas nowadays, you have group stages, at least three or four, three games before you move on.

Jimmy
You met Boon Leong himself, didn’t you, about 20 years ago. Tell us about the meeting.

Nick
The first meeting was at Barker Road Methodist Church with his wife. He used to come along to the early morning service and then they used to live in Gold Hill, which is just a short step away. He looked like a well brought up, smart, nicely turned-out gentleman, and he was just sort of standing around. And I thought, I want to go and say hello. You know, I knew who he was. And this was my chance to meet him. And his wife was there as well, and [it was] very easy to get on with him. The main reason being talking about football, this, you know, this was the central thing in his life. So, I explained who I was and I introduced my wife.

Jimmy
You were working for Sports Singapore at that time.

Nick
No. I was at NIE [National Institute of Education], NTU [Nanyang Technological University] teaching the teachers. I was there until 2019. So, in a sense, at heart, I’m an educator. I’m qualified as an educator. I’ve only been at Sport Singapore for four years now. So, we, you know, we met and it became very clear that he was somebody that I wanted to know better for my research. So, I forget how we did it, but we arranged to be invited to his house.

Jimmy
You invited yourself over?

Nick
Not on that day. Not on that day. It took a little while, but we went to visit. And Li Choo, his wife, would make some nice little sweet things to eat. And, importantly, he would show me his albums, his press cuttings and also his medals, or at least some of his medals, because he didn’t have all of them.

So that’s how we met him. And it created a family connection. So, my wife would always come along and she would talk to Li Choo, while I would talk to Boon Leong about his football. So that’s how the relationship started. And there – now I forget which one it was – they had a wedding anniversary. Oh no. Maybe it was his 90th birthday. They had a celebration at the Shangri-La, and he asked me if I would talk about his career.

Jimmy
Oh wow. Okay.

Nick
So quite something for an ang moh to go along to a birthday party and literally be asked to go up to the front. And there were 200 or 300 people there. I guess, you know, it was a big deal. So, my job was to do a presentation and to talk about him and Li Choo. And I revealed some details about their courtship.

Jimmy
What was Boon Leong like as a person?

Nick
A very, very gentle, soft, soft-spoken. He was proud of what he’d done, what he’d achieved, things like the Lian Hua tour, or things like being a representative of Singapore at the Asian Games. So, he had the chance to do that, not represent China.

And he was also a manager for the Singapore [football] team. The year after they won the Malaya Cup in 1977. He was the manager in 1978 when they didn’t do quite so well and then somebody took over and they wanted to get in in 1980. So that was like the golden era. So, he clearly had some impact. He would clearly have been inspirational, you know, to the players who were just being introduced to the Kallang Roar, Kallang Wave.

So, he had a large role to play and he used to take squads over to England to train. He played against other countries. So, he got very, very involved after that. He was caring and sharing. He was very, very keen to go and watch the big games at the National Stadium, even the Sports Hub. Yes, he liked to watch even though he couldn’t play anymore. This was in his heart. You know, obviously.

Jimmy
Obviously, you knew Boon Leong and so that, you know, that helped you to write the article. But tell us a little bit about the research process because you couldn’t just rely on your 20 years of conversations with Boon Leong to write about him.

Nick
No, no, no. It’s been an interesting process. When I first came to Singapore, I was not interested in the history of sport.

Jimmy
When was that, by the way?

Nick
I came at the end of 1985, started work 1 January 1986, and I was employed to teach sport, psychology, motor learning as well as all the different sports in a practical sense. The catalyst, and this is worth knowing, was meeting up with Tang Pui Wah, the first female Olympian from Singapore. And it’s a bit of a convoluted story behind all of that but that was the –

Jimmy
I’m so sorry. But for the people who are tuning in – Pui Wah, what sport was she in?

Nick
She was an athlete. She was a sprinter and a hurdler. She went to the Olympic Games in 1952, which was hosted in Helsinki. She would normally have been engaged in inter-state competitions [and] Malayan state competitions. And she dominated the scene for, I don’t know, a period of three or four years. Very, very difficult to be a woman competing and to commit yourself. At the time, girls of her age – she was 19 when she went to the Olympic Games. And she was then expected straightaway or almost immediately to get married.

So, she was the catalyst for doing research and the initial method of research in history was actually to talk, to interview people. And that has sort of pretty much stuck. But it’s not the way that provides the hardest evidence of things. That’s where newspapers come in, archives come in, and the archives of newspapers: NewspaperSG. And I wouldn’'t have been able to do anything but for that source of information. In the early days there were many, many articles written particularly about football and so on. There are not many biographies or autobiographies to refer to. There were some periodicals or journals that occurred back in colonial times, one called British Malaya, which clearly focused on the expats more than the locals.

But it tended to enrich the sense of the culture of sport and how it was developing. So, tapping into these different sources led to an increasing interest in writing. So, the first book was the one about Pui Wah and her two successors, Mary Klass and Janet Jesudason. That sort of got me going. These three Olympians. What about the others? Who’s going to write about the other Olympians? And so, it became an important personal task to write a book: Singapore Olympians.

Jimmy
There’s something special about sporting heritage. And I was there at the launch of your last book. And the president [Tharman Shanmugaratnam], you took him around, didn’t you, at the exhibition? He was very interested. He was taking out his phone and [taking] pictures of the exhibits on the standees.

Nick
Yes. Perhaps I should tell you part of the story of that… I’d be very guarded because people are going to hear this. I am acquainted with the president.

Jimmy
Ah okay. You have coffee with him regularly?

Nick
No, I wouldn’t say that… It is an interesting story that goes with it. A couple of years ago, I was advised by Tek Yin, you should talk to Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who was a senior minister at the time, because he is a sportsman. He understands these things. He will have some perceptions about the government view of sport and so on.

So, I said okay. So I arranged an appointment or tried to arrange an appointment to meet him at the Treasury, which is where he had his office. My attempts to arrange like an interview fell far short of my expectations. They confirmed, “Okay, you can come on Friday, 5 pm, and he will be happy to talk to you.” Phone call just before: “Sorry Senior Minister’s busy. We have to postpone.” Okay. Next week. Same thing. Friday, 5 pm. Phone call. “Sorry. Senior Minister is busy.” Next week. Phone call: “Yes. He’s prepared to meet you on Friday at 2 pm.” Okay. You know, that’s great. And I’ll get ready for that.

Now, with my advancing years, I thought about the two previous weeks, Friday at 5 pm, Friday, 5 pm. This time it was 2 pm. So, I’m sort of gearing up. I'm having a bit of a snooze. I'm getting ready. Phone call from the PA. “Nick, are you. Are you nearby? Are you coming?” And I said, “Why, it’s 5 pm, isn’t it?” “No, no, this interview is 2 pm. How long will it take you to get down here? He is going to wait for you.” Okay, So I rush, I go down. There’s a thunderstorm when I get down to the Treasury and I’m not sure exactly where to park. I probably end up being an hour and a half late.

Jimmy
Oh no.

Nick
But as you can tell, I wouldn’t be telling this story if there wasn’'t a happy conclusion to this. Tharman was brilliant. It was as though nothing had happened. He’d been working on something else. He came in, and I think we talked about sport and about him maybe for an hour and a half.

Jimmy
Oh really?

Nick
There was never an issue of “Let’s make this quick.” And he was brilliant. He was perfect. And I presented him with a copy of book 1, The Colonial Legacy. When book three was due to come out, I thought, “Can we invite the president?” Because now he was in line.

He was going through the election process. Can we invite him along? Can I have any leverage? Even though I was late. So, I did send him an email and there was no reply. And I’m sure it was because this was during the presidential election. And he’s a very busy man, and he can leave that to one side. So, I spoke to my reporting officer Boon Yee at SportSG, and said, “Do you think there's a chance that we can invite him?” And he said, “Nick, you can’t invite him. This has to be very official, to invite the president.”

And he said, “Let's go and talk to the CEO, Alan Goh.” And the two of them had a quick chat. And this was around about the time that the Singapore team was going to the Asian Games in Hangzhou and CEO was going to be going up as part of the delegation. And he said, “Let me have a word with the minister, Edwin Tong. See what he says, if he thinks this is appropriate.”

Edwin Tong was already identified as the guest-of-honour. And so, to invite the President may have been problematic. Anyway, Alan Goh CEO goes up, talks to the minister, and in principle they say, yes, this is a good idea. He is a sportsman. He will probably be interested. So please go ahead and invite him.

But I think because of his interest in sport and maybe because he wanted to meet this guy who’d kept him waiting, I don’t know. But he was wonderful. He was so affable.

Jimmy
He was clearly interested, you know. I’ve been to these things and people just walk around and nod. But he’s stopping. He’s taking pictures with his phone. He’s talking to you. I did not realise he was that much of a sportsman.

Nick
He was a hockey player.

Jimmy
Ah, okay.

Nick
So yes, but I think he was probably also a cricketer. Maybe other sports – it’s quite common for people of that generation to be multi-talented. It’s not so easy. Yeah. So, he was a hockey player.

Jimmy
Sporting prowess and achievements of sporting excellence are very inspirational. Right. So, you know, as I said, you know most people are not that interested in heritage. We tell them so-and-so had won an Olympic medal, that’s like a big thing. I'm so glad that Sport Singapore is putting effort into Singapore sports heritage.

Nick
To be fair we must give credit to the president himself. His demeanor during the whole process is helping us because other people are aware that he’s connected, that he is a sportsman. And lots of people wouldn’t have known that either. And so, I think it helps create a good, positive environment for sport heritage. And now we see we can always bring in [that] the president launched this.

Jimmy
Nick, you’ve been so wonderful coming today for the podcast. We’ve sort of come to the end of the substantive part of the podcast. Now we want to try and turn to lighter topics. Well, you’ve written a series of books about Kasparov and Karpov. Yes, you know, so you obviously know a little bit about chess. Chess and sport, how are they similar?

Nick
How are they similar? The easy answer to the question is chess is sport.

Jimmy
No, it’s not.

Nick
The normal approach is to say there’s no physicality.

Jimmy
Don’t sweat that much.

Nick
Ah, you’d be wrong there. It’s a highly physical activity. The argument against chess is, you know, you’re sitting down, there’s minimal movement, and so on. And that’s not wrong. In one of the world championship matches, Karpov lost seven kilos during the competition.

Jimmy
Really? Wow.

Nick
It’s because the body has a mental component as well, which uses up energy and so on. So, often the common argument is there is no physicality in the way that athletics is running and football is kicking a ball and running about. But it is physical. It’s at one end of a spectrum, let’s say, in fairness, but in all other ways, all the other components are parallels to what we would consider traditional sports, the cognitive side, the wanting to win, the dedication, the commitment to training. And so, in every other way, it’s like sport. And even on the physical side, there are players today who have a very rigorous physical training regime. They have to be fit in order to go into some of these competitions, which are very rigorous competitions. So maybe during the last, I don’t know, 30, 40 years, physical training has become part of training for chess.

Jimmy
Oh, I did not know this.

Nick
So, it’s not just a sit down and relax and just move pieces and so on.

Jimmy
Take a bite of a cheeseburger.

Nick
So, my position would be, yes, it is a sport because in my case, it satisfies some of the same desires as when I was at school. I played rugby, cricket and on rainy days, playtime. You had to go inside. So, what can I do? That is competitive? I think this is the key. The competitive side of chess makes it parallel to these other things. But you do it inside when it’s right, when it’s raining outside, it doesn’t make it any less of a sport.

Jimmy
Yeah. Are you going to argue that monopoly is a sport?

Nick
Interesting question. Some people will definitely say yes. They will say if it’s treated in a strictly competitive way with rules and regulations, with regular competitions, international competitions maybe, and so on, If it has the same scale, then it will have the same context. I would never say no. I know some activities are more sport-like than others.

Jimmy
Okay, complete the sentence: Sport is...

Nick
Sport is? Complete the sentence. That’s the toughest question. Sport is one of the ultimate challenges physically and mentally that human beings engage in.

Jimmy
Speaking as someone who’s written a bunch of history books, history is…?

Nick
History is very, very dynamic; it’s not easy to pin down. It’s not always objective, but it is fascinating. And for me, the discovery phase of the history process, I mean that, in a sense that happens first, the writing and the critical evaluation comes later, discovering new things that have apparently been forgotten or neglected or disregarded. It’s actually a big thrill.

Jimmy
I fully agree. Yes, thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s been a pleasure having you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. To learn more about Chia Boon Leong, check out our BiblioAsia website. Nick, thank you once again for coming on the show.

Nick
And thank you, because I’ve enjoyed this just as much as you have.

Jimmy
Okay, great. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Nick Aplin, “Chia Boon Leong: The Twinkle-Toed Olympian,” BiblioAsia 19, no. 4 (Jan–Mar 2024).

Nick Aplin, Sport in Singapore: The Colonial Legacy (Singapore: Sport Singapore, 2019).

Nick Aplin, Sport in Singapore: The Rocky Road to Kallang Park (Singapore: Sport Singapore, 2023).

Nick Aplin, Sport in Singapore: Visions for Change: 50 Years of the Singapore Sports Council 1973–2023 (Singapore: Sport Singapore, 2023).

 “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star…,” New Nation, 18 April 1975, 10–11. (From NewspaperSG) 

Sonny Yap, “The Match of His Career…,” New Nation, 18 April 1975, 10–11. (From NewspaperSG) 

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Nick for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.