No Dunking Please, We’re Chinese…

One of the more interesting memes to emerge from the press conference after tonight’ s USA-China basketball game was this: two questioners, one Chinese and one guy who sounded European, asked US coach Mike Krzyzewski whether his team wasn’t rubbing it in a little by dunking so often and with so much flair. Even as the question was being asked, Coach K was shaking his head. But the answer he gave was a bit disingenuous. He said his team was playing a tough opponent with a great center, Yao Ming, so when his guys went to the hoop they had to go hard and dunk if they could, lest Yao block their shots.
Well, ok. But an awful lot of the showiest dunks came when US players were all alone on fast breaks. And—contrary to anyone who thinks that was insulting to our hosts—the people who would have been the most befuddled had Kobe, Lebron and D. Wade NOT brought the house down with their breakaway stuffs would have been…tens of millions of young Chinese hoops fans.
They understand, as well as any basketball fans in the world, that so much of the excitement of the game is the bit that’s played above the rim. Julius Erving started it, Michael Jordan elevated it, and today’s global stars know it: the essence of the fun of basketball, for the fan and the young player with dreams, is watching guys fly. The very idea that Lebron or Kobe would take the ball on a break and daintily lay it in, as if it were 1952, is laughable. No one would have been more befuddled had that occurred that any of the young Chinese guy’s I play basketball with at a playground in Shanghai.
China’s coach Jonas Kazlauskas (which province is he from again?) was honest when asked why this game was difficult “psychologically” for his team to play. “The NBA is big in China. There are games on all the time.” For many of his players, he said, the guys they were playing against tonight “are their heroes.”
Exactly right. They are the Global Gods of hoops, taken where they are by a combination of their own considerable skill and the Nike-Reebok marketing machines. This doesn’t mean they will win the gold. BUt understand this: when the Gods take it to the rack, they dunk. They dunk hard, and they dunk with as much flair as they can muster. And the reason they do it—as, thankfully, every young Chinese hoops fan knows (even if some reporters don’t)– is because it’s FUN. F U N. It’s fun to watch, and even more fun to do. That’s why we watch sports, and that’s why we play sports.