To Savor Later: Hoop Dreams & Hoop Schemes – Basketball and China
This year has been a historic one for the hoop game in China. Jeremy Lin has caught the public's imagination in the States while Stephon Marbury has done much the same over here while in leading the Ducks to their first championship. What better time than now to take a deeper look into basketball's relationship with this country?
“Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference” by Wells Tower
GQ
Before Stephon Marbury was a Beijing Duck (and after he was a New York Knickerbocker), he was ever-so-briefly a Shanxi Brave Dragon. This hugely entertaining profile from May 2011, which covers Starbury’s first few months in China, depicts him as a shrewd businessman with a genuine appreciation of what China means for his career. (5700 words)
Excerpt:
“The girls wore an unhookerly mufti of jeans or miniskirts or T-shirts or Annie Hall–style sweaters and, as far as I could tell, were not quite prostitutes but merely young women who drew a paycheck to ply lonely men with beer and grapes, and pinch them on the knee. … [In came] a girl resembling an Asian Julia Child whose eyes happened to be crossed. There was no immediate clamor for her company. She stood before the room for a painful length of time. Finally, Marbury, who'd been obliviously drinking Sprite and BlackBerrying through the whole escort-disbursement procedure, looked up and invited the big girl to his area of the sectional, a quiet act of valor that put the rest of us to shame.”
“The N.B.A. Is Missing Its Shots in China” by Jim Yardley
New York Times Magazine
Using Wilson Chandler (Denver Nuggets/Zhejiang Lions) as a frame story, this exhaustively researched overview of the NBA’s history in China is a must-read for anybody who is interested in the business of sports. (4433 words)
Excerpt: “The top official in the Chinese league is a creature of the old age, an old-school Communist Party bureaucrat named Xin Lancheng, who put his foot down, prohibiting Chinese teams from signing N.B.A. players who were already under contract at the time of the lockout. Only free agents would be eligible — and they would have to sign that binding contract. This was partly about pride, and arrogance, but it was also consistent with an ethos that has prevailed since China opened itself to the outside world in 1978: foreigners are not invited to China to profiteer; they are invited to make the Chinese better. Even N.B.A. players.”
“Home And Away: Yao Ming’s journey from China to the N.B.A., and back” by Peter Hessler
New Yorker
Yao Ming is so familiar to us now as an elder statesman of basketball; we tend to forget that his success in the NBA was not a foregone conclusion when he started out. This extensive profile from 2003 covers the summer after Yao’s rookie season with the Houston Rockets, when he returns to play for Team China and starts to grapple with the divided loyalties that some say shortened his career. (8000 words)
Excerpt: Moochie Norris runs the point for the Rockets. Moochie has cornrows, a barrel chest, and four Chinese characters tattooed on his left wrist: “huan de huan shi.” (“Never satisfied,” he told me, when I asked him what it meant, and then I crossed to the other side of the locker room and asked Yao. “It actually doesn’t have a very good meaning,” he said. “Basically, you’ll do whatever it takes to protect yourself.”)
“Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory” by Nicholas Schmidle
New York Times Magazine
Are your name-brand sneakers real? Are they fake? Do you even care? (Did you get a good price?) This 2010 article about the hidden-in-plain-sight shanzhai factories of Fujian discusses the shoe assembly line, the US-based anticounterfeiting efforts, and even introduces a private detective whose investigation of the fake-goods distribution networks involves wigs, fake teeth and hidden cameras. (4127 words)
Excerpt: “While looking the shoes over myself, I noticed the label on the inside of the tongue read “Made in Vietnam.” That was all part of the subterfuge, Lin said, adding that there are “different levels of counterfeit. Some are low quality and don’t look anything like the originals. But some are high quality and look just like the real ones. The only way to tell the difference between the real ones and ours is by the smell of the glue.” He took back the shoe, buried his nose in the footbed and inhaled.”
Photo: Sulekha.com