Isaac
Years ago
Basketball in China
Thought a few people might be interested in how basketball seems to be doing in China.
In Australia, the sport's well and truly on the backburner. It battles for media coverage, is ignored by most of the population and awareness of players/identities is unlikely to have been lower at any other point over the past 20 years.
In China, it seems to be going through the boom we saw in Australia 10-20 years ago. Endorsements and advertising, public reception/awareness, etc.
Yao Ming is on billboards everywhere with endorsement deals. Not far behind is Yi Jianlian. These two seem to be the most prominent celebrities in the country based on visible advertising at this point, followed by gold-medal winning hurdler Liu Xiang and then the national women's volleyball team.
A brand of bottled water over there was labelled with the five starters of the Chinese basketball team.
Many people, noting Oscar's height, would say "Yao Ming!" and/or ask how tall he was compared to Yao (everyone would stare or turn to look or sneak a photo, but about 15-20% would comment as we walked past). A good number would either say "basketball?" in English, or mutter something about "da lan qiu" to a companion ('plays basketball').
A fair few would also know of Yi.
A number of times, especially in the larger cities, we spotted people wearing Team USA singlets, or Denver jerseys, etc. Basketball shoes are very popular too.
Outside a department store in Hangzhou, massive billboards advertised sports brands featuring Vince Carter, Shaq, LeBron, etc. I doubt there'd be any billboards in Australia plugging a basketball player right now? Maybe a Dragons ad or a 36ers bus ad?
There was one series of TV ads with someone that may have been Dwyane Wade, and a tagline of "No limited!"
In Shanghai, some of the taxis have promotional touchscreens. When we were there, they were plugging the upcoming series featuring China, USA, Russia and Australia. I flicked through profiles of the US team, Bogut's profile, Kirilenko's and saw the pricing to attend a game. Courtside (which apparently sold out quickly?) was around AU$2-6,000/seat? The nosebleeds, from memory, were about AU$20-30. Apparently it was expected to be very, very popular.
At the Gaze's Army vs China game in Beilun, I think someone mentioned that tickets to that game were about $60/seat and yet, despite being in the middle of nowhere (isn't even in most atlases), the game appeared to sell out regardless.
Where here there are a number of threats (AFL, local and international soccer, tennis, cricket, swimming, motor sport, and so on), in China, I think soccer can be popular and the country is always competitive at table tennis and badminton, but there seemed to be little hype about anything else.
If the sport in China does its dash, the lack of real threats going forward could mean that the popularity of basketball could be sustained for some time into the future?
