Strange that such a height-challenged nation would embrace this most heightist (not to mention most boring) of sports, but it has. Basketball has probably displaced table tennis as the country's favourite game; and the American NBA league is gaining a high profile here - particularly over the last 5 years, since the amiable giant Yao Ming switched from the Shanghai Sharks to the Houston Rockets. Yao is the biggest sports star in China. Which means that Chinese people are unable to comprehend that he is not also the biggest sports star in the world. Any suggestion that Yao is not the best player in the NBA is likely to win you scorn, and perhaps a light pummelling. Any suggestion that China and America are the only two countries in the world that give a damn about basketball is met with shocked disbelief.
Basketball is the world's No 1 sport. Yao Ming is its greatest player. We must all support Yao and his team, The Rockets (even though they never actually win anything). All other viewpoints are unharmonious, and will be ignored or suppressed.
2 comments:
HOW can you say basketball is the most boring sport?! you come from the island that invented cricket!!!!!!
Cricket is a much larger and more various drama. Protracted does not equate to boring. That's why - thankfully - people are still able to appreciate Hamlet and Anna Karenina and Lawrence of Arabia.
Because a game of cricket is long drawn-out, you experience it, appreciate it in a completely different way from shorter, more intense, more soundbite-y sports.
It's difficult to experience any sport as really emotionally and intellectually involving unless you've grown up with it, are versed in its subtleties. So, cricket is fairly inaccessible to North Americans. Basketball is thoroughly incomprehensible to almost everyone but North Americans.
Actually, what really gets me about basketball (and I have spent a lot of time in North America.... even went to a game once), is that even people who purport to be serious fans of the game don't actually enjoy the game that much. They enjoy the spectacle, they enjoy the event (the excuse for going out for the night), they enjoy the sense of being a fan, of following your team's progress through the year. But a hardcore football (soccer to you, I suppose, Moonrat) fan in England goes to every single game (or at least, every home game). Basketball fans I've spoken to in America go to only a fraction of the games; most of them only go to the 6 or 8 biggest home games of the season..... and they don't even watch the whole game!! I've lost track of the number of times I've been told that the arena only gets jammed in the second half of the final quarter. The rest of the time (however long these damn games last for.... seems like days to the uninitiated), most people are hanging out with their buddies, getting beer and hotdogs, only watching the odd few minutes here and there, mostly trying to keep up with the flow of the game from monitoring the score.
Now, I admit, that is basically what happens with cricket. But in cricket, the score is far more informative, dramatic, prone to seismic shifts. And the game is supposed to last all day, not just one hour. Serious fans who find their attention span tested by a game that only lasts 60 minutes?! Now that's what I call a boring game.
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