Jottings from the Granite Studio » sports

We cannot stop the Linsanity, we can only hope to contain it…

Jeremiah — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:02:29 +0000

I have played a lot of basketball in China and I’ve written before about some of the quirks of the game here in the PRC. Obviously, the sudden emergence of Jeremy Lin for the New York Knicks over the past few weeks has generated more than its share of media attention, much of it focusing on how Lin, a Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, seems an unlikely NBA superstar. As a high-profile athlete of Asian descent his race has become an issue in the US and abroad, and in the PRC Lin has become more fodder for an ongoing debate over what it means to be “Chinese”.

Richard at The Peking Duck has a post, following up on an excellent essay by Adam Minter at Bloomberg, which poses the question of whether China could have produced a Jeremy Lin. The Chinese government and media can seem obsessed with sports as an indicator of a national development and even national strength. As a result, the relative lack of success by China’s men in international team sports, like basketball and soccer/football, is not only troubling for the sports fan but also raises disquieting issues of nationality, gender, physicality, and, of course, race.

In the past few years, China has done much better in the individual events. The usual argument is that you can badger a kid into being the best chess player, weight lifter, gymnast, or sprinter because in the end, despite all the coaching and support, once in competition it’s you, your skills, your training, and your thoughts against everybody else.

Whether you can really manufacture champions at individual sports or not, preparing for success in team sports is not as simple as churning out perfect athletes on an assembly line. Yes, you need to develop individual skills but the best teams (and the best players on those teams) are not always those with the greatest collection of individual skills. Most great players developed their game by playing thousands of hours on dozens of teams throughout their life, from local rec leagues where the moms bring the orange slices and every kid gets a trophy, up through the ranks — traveling teams, high school varsity, camps, invites, college, pro, national. The system is flawed as hell, but it does produce some incredible athletes.

Like a lot of things in China, though, this is changing. At the courts where I play basketball on weekends, I’ve seen increasing numbers of ordinary kids, both boys and girls, practicing and playing for ‘local’ teams, with their parents showing up carrying water bottles and oranges and a harried old coach taking time out of his weekend to teach 15 rambunctious eight-year-old girls how to dribble the length of a court. Some of the kids come with limited skills but lots of enthusiasm; others show a bit of early promise. Will any of them ever play for China’s national team? Probably not. But if any of them do, those early years spent playing with their peers will make them much stronger competitors at the higher levels. And those that don’t become sports stars will learn about teamwork, camaraderie, and good sportsmanship, all the while getting a little physical exercise, the lack of which is becoming a serious problem among urban Chinese kids. Of course, rec sports leagues require money and volunteers. Even in the US many communities are finding it harder to provide recreational sports opportunities for kids. Not all Chinese communities and parents have the affluence or motivation to establish a rec sports league.

The US also has a deeply ingrained and well-established system of university scholarships for athletes. Yes, the NCAA is so corrupt it makes Chinese local government look like a model of transparency and self-sacrifice, but it does provide a ticket to university for a lot of men and women student-athletes. (How many actually graduate is a whole other story….) There’s nothing like that in China. If you want to go to a top school in China, you study and everything else comes second. Sure there are parents who see value in children participating in sports as part of their development, and that number is growing, but it will be a long time, before China has a youth sports culture on the same level as the United States.

In the history of the league, six Chinese players have suited up for an NBA game.[1] That’s a respectable number. Not all of those players have had Yao Ming’s career, but it’s not like China hasn’t contributed to global basketball culture. Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese-American Christian from California is an unlikely standard-bearer for “Chinese basketball.” But he’s fun as hell to watch, and if it gets kids interested in playing ball here then I’m for it. While academics like me can talk about discourses of race and the body and Chinese government officials fret about the implications of “Chinese-ness” in a global world where nationality seems to matter less than group affinity, Chinese basketball fans can simply sit back with fellow hoops fans around the world and enjoy the next miraculous episode of the Linpossible Dream.[2]

[1] I was going to say “born in China” but then we’d have to include Tom Meschery, who was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Meshcheryakov in Harbin in 1938 to White Russian refugee parents. He grew up in a Japanese internment camp before the family emigrated to the US where Tom went on to average 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds for the Seattle Supersonics and the Philadelphia/Oakland Warriors in the 1960s.

[2] There was no chance of me not dropping at least one “Lin” pun into this post. Just be happy I removed the other 48.

On Kiwis, Kakapos, and the export of Chinese sensitivities…

Jeremiah — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:47:20 +0000

Down in the antipode this week, an international scuffle broke out and it had nothing to do with the criminally atrocious officiating last night in both the Germany/Serbia and US/Slovenia matches…*

Russel Norman, MP and leader of the New Zealand Green Party, marked the arrival of Chinese heir-to-be-but-we’re-still-not-telling-anybody-officially-yet Xi Jinping to Wellington by waving a Τibetan flag and calling for Τibet’s independence.

A tacky move I’ll grant you, and one that probably would have rated a mention on page 23 of the Dominion Post (right after the rugby scores) if the Chinese security forces had the sense the Good Lord gave to a drunken kakapo.** Lest the very sight of the Τibetan colors mortally wound the delicate sensitivities of CHTBBWSNTAOY, Xi Jinping’s security detail harassed the MP with the Chinese counterintelligence weapons of today (the umbrella) and yesterday (a good old fashioned elbow in the ribs).

Mr. Norman wishes to press charges. Good luck with that.

The WSJ has a roundup of the mini-fracas and the international fallout which ends on a point I’ve made in this space not a few times. In trying to “manage” situations which have a potential to be embarrassing for the Party or the PRC, Chinese officials and their goons have an innate knack for displays of staggering buffoonery that THEN become the story. As the WSJ notes in the final paragraph, if Xi Jinping and his boyos had just sucked it up and ignored the blatherings of a Kiwi lefty politiciain, would this be making international news? Probably not. But then again, nobody ever became poorer for betting against the propensity of the CCP for diplomatic foolishness, rash overreaction, or political shortsightedness when the issue of China’s claims to Τibet are questioned publicly. So…I guess this is all just par for the course.

UPDATE 2:30 p.m. CST. WSJ follows-up with a report on China’s official reaction to the incident.

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*Seriously, we’ve found Tim Donaghy’s Malian cousin. I can’t even speak rationally about this right now. First the refs absolutely JOBBED the Celtics yesterday morning and then last night’s debacle in South Africa. No joke. I’m a wreck. I just might seriously explore an intravenous drug habit to take my mind off of it all…Either that or I REALLY need to stop caring about sports so much. Either way.

**I think it’s a kind of parrot. I just love the word. It’s the five-year old inside us all. And if you don’t think that my next fantasy baseball team will be named “J.D. Drew takes a kakapo” then you don’t know me.

Soccer as a metaphor for Corruption

Jeremiah — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:26:33 +0000

James Montague and Jaime FlorCruz have a feature piece up on CNN.com on the state of soccer (sorry, football) in China. It details the trials and tribulations of establishing a professional league in the PRC and FIFA’s hopes to tap into China’s legions of soccer fans in the face of corruption and match fixing. The whole piece is worth a read, especially for sports fans, but author Rowan Simons makes a point which bridges the gap between the world of athletic competition and the ills which face Chinese society as a whole:

“The CSL was already the third attempt at setting up the league because the other two collapsed due to corruption and fan violence,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts, a recent book about soccer in China, told CNN.

“There’s corruption at every single level of the game, from the top to the very bottom. It’s an indictment of wider Chinese society and representative of a much bigger problem with corruption and nepotism. It’s more visible with football because your results are taken by your performance in international competition. So there is nowhere to hide. They are 85th in FIFA’s world rankings with a population of over a billion people.”

And with that, I will continue watching the Celtics/Magic game because there’s no corruption in the NBA, right?

Confessions of a Fen(way)qing or “Everything I know about Chinese nationalism I learned as a Boston sports fan”

Jeremiah — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 04:01:49 +0000

I want to come clean: I am a Red Sox fenqing. Mao may have had his Red Guards but I’m a card-carrying armband-wearing brainless slogan-chanting member of the 红袜兵.* Hey, we’ve got our catchy songs and marching anthem too.

You have a problem with that? Didn’t think so, because there’s a bleacher full of guys behind me who will find your ass, pull you out of your seat and get all Dropkick Murphys on you…

You can hold me down, prop open my eyelids with rusty nails and make me watch video of David Ortiz plunging needles into his body like he’s filming the last 15 seconds of Kurt Cobain: The Movie and I still won’t believe that Papi was juiced on steroids even though he went from hitting 20 home runs a year with Twins to bashing 50 home runs only after joining the Red Sox and making the acquaintance of one Manuel Ramirez.

The cover of Sports Illustrated with Nomar Garciaparra that caused every red blooded New England male to question their sexuality for .000001 seconds? Yeah, nothing going on there. Oh sure…right AFTER steroids became a big deal Nomar started breaking down like a decade-old Xiali, but he wasn’t slamming hog hormones between his toes. Nope. Nope. I will NOT believe it.

Don’t talk to me about history…or at least history that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t care about how racist the Red Sox were; How they were the first team to pass on Jackie Robinson and the last team to integrate. That’s the PAST…We’re all about the future. Here and now, leadership should do whatever it takes to beat the evil imperialist powers and emerge a stronger nation, respected and feared.

86 Years of Humiliation is not quite a century, but we trusted the regime — a closed inner-circle given to palace intrigue — to make it right. We BELIEVED. We had FAITH.

Stories of censorship and media manipulation are just New York Post propaganda. Even though the Red Sox own their own television station and have the largest city newspaper firmly in their back pocket and Boston’s sports journalists — one famous columnist in particular — make The China Daily and The Global Times look like epic heroes of independent reporting, it DOES NOT MATTER. If they tell me that $14 million is a fair price to pay for J.D. “Called Strike Three” Drew, then I will brook no counter-narrative. It is THE TRUTH.

(Oh yeah…and that whole business about taking our most famous historical figure and preserving parts of his body for future generations…SO WHAT? Like you never pickled or froze a departed relative for posterity? Yeah, right…)

Nothing makes me more irrational than sports. If you’re massacring kittens for the Burmese Army but you’re doing it while wearing a vintage Yastrzemski jersey, than hey — You’re okay in my book. Saving drowning orphans from shark infested waters while wearing a Yankee hat? Yeah, hope you oiled yourself up in tuna fat first, buddy….

I am not just some loser supporting people who take my money and don’t care what I think…I’m part of a NATION!

And I am not alone. If my team isn’t doing well, it’s not OUR FAULT, it’s because the Yankees have more money or the league hates us or ANY OTHER reason other than “We suck.” Rational truth and reason ARE NOT my friend. I AM A FENWAY-QING!

Game on.

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*红袜兵 (For the Chinese-impaired, Hong Wa Bing (“Red Sox Guard”) a play on the Chinese name of the Red Guard 红卫兵 Hong Wei Bing.)

New Global Times Column: Basketball and Sino-US Relations…no, really.

Jeremiah — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:34:04 +0000

Another week another column for The Global Times. (And in case you’re wondering, my soul feels no less decayed than usual.) This one is on basketball with a little foreign relations thrown in by way of metaphor. Enjoy.