Spurning Soccer For Basketball: An American Sports Epidemic

Jinan is subject to what meteorologists call “temperature inversions.” I can’t claim to completely understand what temperature inversions are, but from what I have gathered, a temperature inversion is an anomalous layer of air in the atmosphere that acts like a cap or lid, preventing normal weather meteorological occurrences from occurring. Hot air under the inversion can’t escape upward (which it usually does), and cooler air from above can’t trickle down to the ground (which it usually does).

The best image I can conjure is the door of a sauna. Regardless of what may be going on in the area outside a sauna, the door acts as a barrier, thwarting any cool, dry air that may otherwise seep into the room. 

I’m quickly learning that, during the summer, Jinan is that sauna. The inversion to which Jinan is subject keeps the city’s bountiful heat, humidity and smog on the ground, allowing it to accumulate into a dizzying tonic that you can almost reach out and grab. Now, I’m from Kansas City, so I grew up with heat and humidity. But there is something different about the heat and humidity in Jinan, probably because it is infused with such a healthy dose of pollution and airborne crud. It’s hard to describe without having actually walked around in it. Just trust me that it’s gross, oppressive. 

Still, where there are basketball courts and free-time, I can’t help but want to hoop. So my buddy Jonathan, who you may remember from the swindle post, and I decide to head over to Li Ball’s court at about 4:30. Maybe there will be people playing, and if not, oh well; we’ll play each other. The heat is a little less oppressive than it was a few hours earlier, but not much. After all, the inversion in the atmosphere does to ground-level heat what a tourniquet does to blood: it prevents it from going anywhere. 

We are sweating by the time I stop at a little shop to buy water three minutes into the walk there. I spurn the refrigerator and its cold water and instead buy four bottles of water that are the same tepid temperature of the little shop in which they were sitting. Jonathan, who seems to be almost annoyed by my affinity for warm and hot water, informs me that he has three bottles that, for the past three hours, have been cooling in his freezer. I shudder at the thought of feeling the sharp, prickly feeling of ice-cold water shocking my insides; I forgo my usual public health announcement that cold water causes cancer, while hot water prevents cancer (and even relieves stress!). 

After a lazy 10-minute walk we round the corner into the apartment complex which houses Li Ball’s court. As we make the turn, we realize that, like a pair of high schoolers didn’t bring No. 2s to the SATs, we didn’t bring a ball to the basketball court. And there is no one else playing, which means no balls anywhere. This is a distressing revelation, for it means that one (or both) of us will have to retrace our steps back to the apartment, and then once again back to the court. It’s annoying on a practical level, and downright aggravating in light of the fact that sweat has already seeped through our shirts. 

At this moment I hear someone call my name from behind. It is no doubt a Chinese person, for the V is David is not pronounced like a V, but instead a W. There is no real V sound in Chinese, which insures that there is no real way for a Chinese person who didn’t major in English to ever say my name right. Take a moment to try to say David without even touching your top set of teeth to your lips; that’s how David sounds when a Chinese person says it. (This no V thing also seriously complicates teaching the number “5.” Invariably, it comes out sounding like “fi” with a W and three vowels tagged onto the end: fiwaue. At least when my kids try it.)

The person who said my name is a regular at Li Ball’s court, someone, if memory serves, who has been there every single time I have. He is a totally normal looking man, probably about 40. Average height, decent looking, a full head of hair that is combed to the side. I have a rapport with this guy, so we exchange pleasantries the best we can for sharing a combined 48 words. 

I tell him that we do not have a ball: Women meiyou qiu. I learned each of these words on Jinan’s basketball courts: women, or we, I learned from people saying, “Our ball”; meiyou, or don’t have, I learned because people shout it when someone takes a stupid shot; qui I learned because…well, that’s a no-brainer. The man nods understandingly and tells me that that is no problem. He either does not understand the quandary or knows where a ball is at the apartment complex. 

The latter is true. When we step foot on the court he points to the near baseline and seems to tell us to stay put. He then walks slowly to the other end of the court, the way you walk when it’s a million degrees outside. He mosies past the other baseline and opens what appears to be a closet on the ground floor of the apartment. Sure enough, he emerges with a ball and rolls it from about 50 feet away. It’s a strike, beelining to my feet as though guided by some invisible force. He waves and walks off; he’s not playing today.

Jonathan and I play a few games of one-on-one before the heat-induced fatigue/laziness reduces us to just shooting around. Our unspoken conclusion seems to be that, with the weather the way it is, there really is no point to turning this into a rigorous exercise session; that could do more harm than good. So we just shoot around, sweat and chat. 

We spend a good bit of time talking about basketball, about his Celtics, about whether or not Tom Izzo would make a good NBA coach, about how Derrick Rose is going to be better than Dwyane Wade over the next five years but no pundits want to say it. Eventually, though, our conversation turns to soccer. We are in the throes of the world’s greatest sporting event, the World Cup, and soccer is on our minds.

After a few minutes, I say something about soccer that is without a doubt true: I could have been better at soccer than any other sport, including basketball. Jonathan quickly and earnestly responds, “Yeah, me too.” 

To me, this is pretty incredible: Two guys who embraced basketball over soccer, though they both acknowledge that they could have been better at soccer.

My body is much more built for soccer than basketball, the sport which stole my heart and ultimately prevented me from ever cultivating my potential soccer talent. I am a hair under 5-11, which is hardly an ideal height for basketball, a sport which, more than any other, discriminates in the favor of vertical giants. What’s more, I am not a great jumper. I have the hops to shoot jump shots, but not to really soar the way that would be required if I were ever to become a truly formidable athlete on the basketball court. I’m also thick through the legs – mom used to call me “Thunder Thighs” – which seems to be a common denominator among some of the world’s best footballers. 

Body aside, my ability to play soccer belied how much I cared about it. That is, I was always good in little league even though I never played or cared about the sport. Had I cared, who knows? The skills that are required of basketball – limitless energy, ability to understand passing angles, knowing how to play physically but not recklessly – made me a good soccer player when I played on rec teams all through grade school. But once middle school hit, and once I started devoting my weekends to basketball tournaments and trips to inner-city gyms in Kansas City, Mo., soccer was nixed from the mix. 

Jonathan’s story is not dissimilar. He played soccer all through grade school, but he never really devoted himself to the sport the way he did basketball. He is tall and strong and coordinated, and like me his build is more suited for the pitch than the court. (Importantly, he is tall only on a normal-person scale, not a basketball-player scale. He’s probably 6-3, which is the height of many quality guards. That is not, however, the height of quality forwards, which is what Jonathan always played growing up.) 

So, here we have two fairly athletic 24-year-olds, each of whom played soccer, and played soccer pretty well, even though we never really cared about it. Alas, each of us spurned soccer in lieu of basketball, a sport that, per the physical abnormalities required to play it at an elite level, we couldn’t really thrive at. 

That’s not to say we wasted our time with basketball, or that we harbor regrets about our sport of choice, or that we aren’t good at basketball. I was, after all, invited to walk-on at my Div. II university on the strength of my buttery shooting touch, and I will always be good enough to get picked up when I played at random gyms because the ability to rain jump shots is a skill that even the tallest and springiest of basketball players don’t often possess. And while my basketball experiences with Jonathan are confined to the courts of China, I’m sure that he, too, will never have trouble playing pick-up ball because, even though he’s short by NBA standards, he’s no midget. An athletic six-foot-three guy, like a guy who can rain jump shots, will always be a commodity in non-competitive hoops.

But the fact that we never devoted ourselves to soccer is a telling (and damning) testament to the sport’s place among American youth. Just think: The United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, when we were both impressionable eight-year-olds. We both watched that Cup (and all ensuing Cups) zealously, for while we ultimately didn’t choose soccer, we nonetheless appreciate and enjoy the game. Still, we couldn’t be bothered to dedicate ourselves to soccer: Despite the fact that so-so white athletes are the minute minority in the upper-reaches of the basketball world, we made the conscious choice of basketball over soccer. That is, we chose a sport (basketball) in which we were resigned to relative mediocrity over a sport (soccer) in which we had the physical tools to compete at a higher (if not elite) level. 

And this is what has always happened in America, and likely what will continue to happen, even with the endearing 2010 U.S. squad’s jaunt to the knockout round in this year’s World Cup. Kids rarely choose soccer, even if it makes sense for them to do so.

As I watched the States’ final game again Ghana, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like had, say, LeBron James opted for soccer. Every time Landon Donovan lofted a searching ball into the box – balls which invariably skirted across the tops of the U.S. players’ heads – I fantasized about LeBron soaring in to head one home. And while guys who, like LeBron, are 6-foot-8 don’t oft succeed at the highest levels of international soccer, you can’t convince me that he wouldn’t be a kick ass soccer player. He is a true physical anomaly, a never-before-seen mix of power, athleticism and coordination. Remember, had a scholarship offer to play wide receiver at Ohio State, even though he was the nation’s best high school basketball player. Someone who could have played at one of the top football universities in the nation but instead opted to become the first overall pick in the NBA Draft surely could have learned to play soccer, right? 

It’s easy to envision a number of top-flight American athletes playing soccer. What if you put Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson out on the wing? Or the majestically coordinated Chris Paul in midfield? Had these guys been born in any other country in the world, they would have likely been trying to cultivate their immense physical attributes into soccer skills. Instead, they’re playing American sports. Which is exactly what Jonathan and I did.

Look, I’m not saying that Jonathan and I would have been anything special at soccer. Could we have played in high school? Yes. Could we have played at a small-time university? Maybe. Could we have played in the World Cup? Certainly not. But even if we aren’t world-class caliber athletes, our story rings true across the country: Kids who knew full well that they were better suited for soccer still chose to devote themselves to basketball. And are still devoting themselves to basketball.

A Sick Move, I

Li Ball’s court, first introduced here, has become my go-to spot to play basketball here in Jinan. When I started this blog, I figured Shandong Normal University would be where most of my balling took place. That is, after all, where I first developed any sort of camaraderie with Chinese players, and where I thought I could establish myself as a regular with people who were more or less my own age.

Indeed, I still make the trek over to SNU sometimes. But Li Ball’s court, which is right up the street, has supplanted it as my favorite place to play for reasons that transcend proximity (although in a city of millions with shoddy public transportation, and with a motor bike that is broken as often as it’s not, proximity does play a factor). The backboards at Li’s court are glass, the balls are always properly inflated (and won’t scrape the clouds like they often do at SNU), the court is perfectly flat. The flatness of a court, at home, would be a no-brainer – like saying an infield had dirt. But in China, where cracks and divots and cancerous lumps dot courts everywhere, having a flat court is a veritable luxury.


Li Ball is the one in the white shirt.

And then there are the players themselves, starting with Li Ball, who I like to think of as the court’s Don Corleone. There he is, after the games have ended, welcoming the players over the base of the goal where he sits to cool down. “What is it?” he would say. “What can I do for you? You know I can’t say no on the day of a basketball game.”

Even if Li doesn’t possess Corleone-type power, he is nonetheless the most prominent figure at the courts. He is the one who always calls me to play; he is the one who dictates the teams; and often times instead of playing he’ll instead stand attention along the sidelines, dishing out officiating decrees and announcing the score in a way that is never questioned. This is a welcome change from the games I used to play at my old stomping grounds, 24 Hours Fitness in Kansas City, Mo. There, berserk argument would erupt about the score at least once a week. There was of course bickering about foul call, which is to be expected. But the score is the one thing that is subject to the unbending edicts of mathematics, and even that would inspire incredulous shouting and cussing the likes of which never failed to make me laugh (and cringe) with exasperation. Sometimes when these arguments would flare up, I would just dip out in the hallway and get a drink of water while people bitched about the score. All too often, nothing was settled when I came back. Part of the problem was ego; part of the problem was that if a team lost, they could be sitting for up to 30 or 40 minutes. Thus, no one wanted to lose, even if it meant forgetting/flubbing the score in your favor.

There is none of that hear, though. Li Ball is in control.


There even seems to be less smog when I play at this court.

The other players are cool too. I have been introduced to them all, but for the life of me I can’t remember their names (save the short fat dude who introduced himself as Tom). I know their faces, though, and I have even run into a couple of them out on the streets of Jinan, never far from the courts themselves. They range in age from young (a handful of 20-somethings) to old (30 to 45). Before long I’ll join that second segment of the playing population, all those 30-plus year-olds who have lost their hops and have to increasingly rely on guile to get things done on the court. Thankfully, I’m not at the age yet. I still have a few ounces of athleticism floating around in my legs, though I know it will soon leak out. There are a few other guys who still possess my sprightliness, and I invariably end up guarding them. (Linguistic note: In America, defensive lingo is always a variation of the verb have. Something like, “I have this guy,” or, “I’ll get him,” or, “I got ball.” In China, the verb for playing defense it look or watch, as in, “You watch him,” which translates to “Ni kan ta.” – “You look him.”)

Bottom line, the court is great, there are always games to be played, and everyone is nice – no malicious elbows to the head, no long stints sitting – even if you lose. As such, Li Ball is who I call if I want to play.

A Sick Move, II

There is, however, one big drawback to Li Ball’s court: It’s dirty as hell. This uncleanliness is hardly unique to Li’s court.; maybe it’s just more noticeable because there are few other defects. Today one of the regulars has taken a big broom – essentially a long wooden stick with a bunch of wispy bits of straw on the end – and is doing a windshield-wiper motion along the baseline. In the process, he is sending plumes of dust into the air that force people to scatter out of the way. I don’t how much of an impact this has: Even with the housekeeping, whenever anyone takes a dribble, dust is displaced like water that has been struck with a rock.

Now, basketball is hardly a sanitary activity. Really, anytime a bunch of guys are clamoring to handle something (cards, video game controllers, etc.), it pretty much can’t be clean. I get that. But when you look at your hands after playing a few minutes of basketball in China…wow. It’s disgusting.

And while it could well be true that dirt isn’t all that dirty, it’s not just dirt that makes China dirty. Which brings us to a larger point about China in general. Like Li’s court, it’s dirty as hell. The polluted air is what you hear about when people talk of how dirty China is, and that’s not an exaggeration. But now that I’ve been here for 10 months, the smog’s not even what bothers me anymore. It’s the dirtiness, the germiness.

I came to China a little on the OCD side about germs. But instead of curing me of my germ aversion, China has merely made me more sensitive to it. And there are any number of things that Chinese people do that are downright gross. (Having now reread this post, I don’t know if there is any way for me to make this not sound discriminatory: the Chinese do a lot of gross stuff. But at the same time, I don’t know if there is any way to dispute the claim that, by the American standards I grew up with, it’s not true. That’s not to say the Chinese are stupid or mean or savage or lesser. I’m just saying that they have some tendencies that would never fly in America – just like Americans have tendencies that wouldn’t fly in China. I know that I am speaking from an American viewpoint, not a privileged viewpoint. Heck, maybe America is just too sensitive to cleanliness. This article and this article seem to hint at just that.)

You can’t walk one block on any remotely-populated street and not hear someone make a deep, guttural hacking sound – a telltale prelude to a huge loogy. Just yesterday I got off a train (I spent the last 10 days in Chengdu, hence the dearth of recent posts), and at the exit gate I looked down to see a pair of stringy, yellow-green clusters of stuff that used to reside in the area between someone’s mouth and lungs. To be fair, at least this person cleared their throat after they got off the train, which is more than can be said for innumerable people who added that putrid, hacking noise to the soundtrack of the 30-hour train ride. And in a land of 300,000,000 smokers, I can assure this is a never ending soundtrack. The staircases at my school, where parents conglomerate to wait for their children, are another hotbed for spitting. Really, all of China is a hotbed for spitting.

Then there is also the move where people blow their noses, but without a handkerchief or Kleenex. They just send the contents of their nose jutting toward the ground. When I was a kid we called this the “Texas Air Hanky.” The last time you saw it was either during a hockey game or on the streets of China.

It is also not uncommon to see little (or big) piles of vomit resting at the base of a tree. If you have to puke then you have to puke; I get that. But I’ve seen more ground vomit in my eight months in China than I did in my 24 years in America. And I’ve been to a lot of bars in America.

People are also apt to relieve themselves on sidewalks. “People” in this case could mean everyone from itty-bitty toddlers (who wear crotch-less pants for quick and painless popping-and-squatting) to old men (who know better but just don’t care). Quick story about public relief of the excretory system: my mom, dad and I came to visit my brother in China a few years back, and on a plane from Xian to Guilin, my dad was the odd man out on a seat, stuck sitting on the other side of the aisle from my brother, mom and I, who controlled our own three-seat section of the plane. Pa was wedged next to a little kid who was wearing the bottomless pants. (If you’re having trouble imagining what this looks like, just think if you cut a big oval-shaped hole in your jeans from the top of your zipper, through the legs, back around to the midway point of the seat. Or you could just >look here.) Well, this kid – seated about five-and-a-half inches from my dad – unloads his bowels then and there, right after takeoff. It gets on the mom a little bit, and while it didn’t actually touch pa, he nonetheless got an eyeful of doodoo. It was a cultural experience he could never have had in a land where parents, you know, make their kids wear diapers.

This may all seem like superficial stuff. OK, so there is spit on the ground. So there is a little puke tucked against the base of the occasional tree. So kids relieve themselves everywhere, but who has ever been successful telling a 14-month-old when and where to go? (Anyway, is having a bunch of soiled diapers that much cleaner than the occasional puddle?)

The thing is, it’s not all superficial. The eyesores are accompanied by a host of things are more than just eyesores. It really is dirty – and not just dirt dirty. It’s really dirty.

There are, for instance, no soap dispensers in public restrooms, save nice restaurants. (Beijing and Shanghai pay a little more heed to soap, but like I’ve said, Jinan ain’t no Shanghai.) The bathrooms at our school feature puddles of piss, and soap dispensers with soap that’s so watered-down it surely houses more germs than it prevents.

And it isn’t just our crummy school. It’s the country at large. There wasn’t a drop of soap on the train I got off yesterday. The people who handle the food you buy off the street don’t wear gloves on their hands – just a discernable layer of brownish crud that can’t possibly be clean. And those Texas Air Hankies don’t just happen on the street. The last time I went to McDonald’s someone was pulling the time-trusted maneuver in the sink in the dining area.

Like so many of the things I talk about on this blog, the germiness of China is hard to quantify (heck, germiness isn’t even a real word). How the Chinese are always drinking hot water, how much the Chinese like to stretch, how much counterfeit clothing there is: these things are all observable, but not necessarily measurable.

The same goes for the sanitation conditions. I haven’t the scientific prowess to conduct a study of the actual germiness of China – just the time and inclination to write about it and to make up words to describe it.

But even if I can’t convey in any sort of statistical way just how germy it is in China, I can rehash an event that beats home the sanitation issue.

After a 24-hour trip that started in Kansas City, I landed in Beijing in early September. If you recall, early September was at the height of the H1N1 craze – that is, the Pig Flu craze – and people were all in a tizzy about it. Especially in China. This article, for instance, entitled “China faces grim situation as H1N1 escalates,” was published the very day I landed in China. The country took to quarantining people – like this guy, a professor from the University of Michigan, and this guy, the mayor of a major U.S. city. If you rode on a plane with someone who turned out to be sick, you could be quarantined. If you coughed a little bit too much, you could be quarantined. If you looked extra fatigued, you could be quarantined.

As another precaution, there was a rapid spread of what looked like little plastic handguns that, when stuck up to someone’s forehead, gave a quick temperature scan. One of these guns/thermometers was pressed against my forehead as I exited the plane in Beijing. I was a little bit nervous, because anything from the mildest of temperature abnormalities to a slight technical malfunction could have landed me in a Chinese quarantine, something I’d rather not see first-hand.

By the grace of God, I waltzed through the sickness-detection chamber A-OK. (I was, after all, in fine health.) But after the lengthy flight and comp coffee, I needed to hit a bathroom when I got on the ground, so I headed for the nearest bathroom. It was just like an American airport bathroom – a cavernous room with urinal upon urinal against a teal-green wall. I relieved myself and, when I was heading out, beelined toward the sink to rinse up. The American equivalent to this WC would have had a bounty of soap and a hand sanitizer dispenser as well, just in case you’re too lazy to actually wash. (Even the Kansas City airport has hand sanitizer dispensers, so it can’t be that far-out of an addition. Like I said, I’ve always been a bit of a germophobe, so I notice these things.)

Alas, there was no soap in the bathroom. So one moment I was getting my temperature taken, an obligatory procedure that could well have landed me in a quarantine because Chinese officials are paranoid (justified or not) about the spread of H1N1. The next moment, I am taking a leak in a bathroom that doesn’t have any soap.

Li Ball’s court doesn’t have any soap either.

Is it In You? Well, It's In China

Food can be something of an issue in China. It’s not that the food here is bad. On the contrary, there are a slue of dishes that I love, even if I can hardly say their names. But eating Chinese food every day can be wearying. It’d be like going out to eat Chinese food every day of the week in the States. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do that. When you live in China, though, that’s basically what you’re doing. That’s why, just as I used to go to Chinese restaurants in America for a break from the domestic diet, I often go to restaurants that boast foreign food cuisine in China for a break from the domestic diet.

There is a pizza place in particular that has become a staple of my diet. I found it almost by accident, which, unless someone took you there, is the only way you could find it. It is located on a street that looks like any old street in Jinan. To the left of the restaurant is a karaoke bar and clothing store; to the right is an alley and a lady selling a variety of snacks and drinks out of her mobile store, which is little more than a wide, non-functioning refrigerator with wheels.

Most restaurants that boast foreign food in China are descript – that is, they are designed and marketed in such a way that you know they aren’t your run of the mill, rice-and-whatever restaurant. KFC, for instance, which is huge here in China, always boast huge cutouts of Colonel Sanders smiling invitingly at would-be customers down on the street. McDonald’s, also huge here, flaunts those golden arches at least as much as they do back home. And Pizza Hut – which price-wise is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan – has two locations here, each of which are encased by flashy walls of windows looking in, and table after table of affluent customers looking out.

Indeed, if a restaurant has foreign food on the menu, then a restaurant is something of a novelty (at least in Jinan). And if your restaurant is a novelty, then there is a good chance that you will let passersby know that your restaurant is a novelty by advertising, and advertising loudly.

But this restaurant doesn’t do that. Nope, it’s just slipped onto Any Street, with a nondescript green door acting as the gateway into an awesome (and reasonably priced) dining experience. They have pasta and French Fries and, above all, a variety of pizzas. All-veggie pizzas. All-meat pizzas. All-cheese pizza. And, my personal fave, The Hot One, which is decked with spices and peppers and all sorts of other goodness that you could expect from a legitimate pizzeria.

What makes this place all the more endearing is that the whole scene looks like a pizza joint from any college town in America. When you open the door, there is a 25-foot-long strip of the wood floor cutting down the middle of the narrow interior, leading to another door – this one with the top half cut out – that leads to the kitchen. On either side of that walkway are tables. The first six are tables with chairs; the ones closest to the kitchen are booths.

After my girlfriend and I eat our pizzas and play Scrabble for like two hours, she indulges me in a trip to a nearby basketball court. It’s 9:45 and dark, but these particular courts, which we stumbled upon last week, house basketball well into the night.

It’s a bizarre scene, unlike anything I’ve seen in America. There are maybe 20 courts, each partially lit by varying levels of light radiating from the streetlamps on the adjacent street. The courts are situated on the edge of a university campus, and the players who are shooting around tonight reflect that demographic. Guys (and one girl) from the ages about 18-20 are beating balls into the ground across a swath of land that spans about three-fourths the area of a football field. There are so many players, and so many balls, that it sounds like the basketball camps held at my old high school, where a few hundreds kids would squeeze into the high school gym and frantically run drills with the omniscient thwack of the balls resonating throughout the fieldhouse. Of course, there is no field house here. But the acoustics are such – what with the sprawl of concrete – that it is a veritable echo chamber, like a series of loudspeakers surround the area and are pumping in nonstop thwacks.

Tonight I am just snooping around, opting not to play on account of the nine-inch pizza and three beers occupying my stomach. But I do survey the scene with intrigue. It is kind of eerie, the way everything looks and sounds. You can make out where the people are, but the light is so faint on some of the courts that people are merely silhouettes, the noise of the ball revealing as much as anything you can actually see. You can tell that shots are getting lofted rimward, but with no nets, the only way to decipher between a make and a miss is to listen for the metallic clank of the rim. If there is a thud, they missed. No thud equals a make. Or an airball.

Luckily there are some things more discernable than makes and misses. Like, say, the plethora of sports drinks lining the sidelines. Unlike myself, the kids playing ball tonight have opted against beer, and are instead imbibing in bottles of Gatorade, which are sold – along with ice cream, candy and cigarettes – at a kiosk near the entrance. Seeing these bottles of Gatorade is nothing new, for Gatorade has, like adidas and the aforementioned KFC, made a concerted push into the Chinese market.

And the success of this push – and it has indeed been successful – is no doubt linked to Gatorade’s strategic marriage to basketball.

The ubiquity of Gatorade bottles now, in June of 2010, can be linked to a marketing move made back in March of 2007. It was back in ’07 that Gatorade expanded its relationship with the NBA, which itself was increasing its popularity march around the globe, in an effort to tap into Asian markets, China in particular. From the Sports Business Journal:

[Gatorade], which has been an NBA sponsor since 1984, becomes the 17th company to partner with the NBA in China….

“The NBA is growing internationally, and it makes sense to do it together,” said Gatorade’s Jeff Urban, who officially assumes his new role with the company as its senior vice president of sports marketing on April 1.

Gatorade’s expanded deal comes as the NBA targets aggressive growth in China leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The league is expected to play preseason games in China in October and is working to attract private investors to create a separate NBA China entity to further develop its international business.

Gatorade currently sells products in China but until now has never directly partnered with the NBA in those efforts.

The company is a sponsor of USA Basketball, which is marketed by the NBA. Last summer, Gatorade featured Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade on bottles of Gatorade sold in China when the men’s USA Basketball team played two exhibition games in Guangzhou leading up to the FIBA World Championships in Japan.

“We had a relationship with Gatorade in Hong Kong five years ago, but this is the first time they have partnered with us in China,” [an NBA official] said. “They were a major partner in USA Basketball and they had a ton of activation around the games in Guangzhou. That helped make their decision easy as they looked to do more with us in China.”

Gatorade also will activate on the grassroots level with the NBA in China by partnering with the league in the NBA’s Jam Van touring promotion that begins this month with visits to 24 cities in that country.

And from the Sports Business Daily:

Gatorade has expanded its NBA marketing partnership to include China for the first time as part of a multi-year renewal….

Gatorade, the official sports drink of the NBA, WNBA and NBA D-League, is also continuing to work with the NBA on a weekly basketball reality show called “NBA Zhi Zao” (“Made in the NBA”), which airs on 43 channels in China…

The move appears to have paid dividends. Not only is Gatorade the drink of choice the courts tonight, but also over at Shandong Normal, where Wang, the Refreshment Man, peddles Gatorade side-by-side with his water. And along with cigarettes, the chain-smoking dudes from that other university were indulging in bottles of Gatorade between games. (It’s unclear if Gatorade’s physiological properties can outweigh the effects of a pack of cigarettes, but that seemed to be what they were trying to figure out.)

And it’s not just basketball courts. You can find a bottle of Gatorade at any street shop (of which there are an infinite amount), and the sports drinks section at supermarkets are invariably huge. At least some of this boom is the result of Gatorade’s 2007 partnership with the NBA, a move that was in no way haphazard.

While PepsiCo, which owns Gatorade, has already invested heavily in China, and while anecdotal evidence (such as Gatorade-lined basketball courts) suggests that PepsiCo products like “G” are already going strong here, the company recently announced plans to pour even more money into the Chinese market. From the Associated Press:

PepsiCo Inc. said Friday that it plans to invest an additional $2.5 billion in China in the next three years on new plants and research facilities as the food and beverage maker builds up its presence in the growing market.

The company made the announcement in a news release Friday from Shanghai, site of the Shanghai Expo, where PepsiCo is a sponsor of the USA Pavilion. That planned spending is in addition to the $1 billion investment it announced in 2008 and plans to complete this year….

Money from PepsiCo's additional investment in China will be used to open 10 to 12 new manufacturing plants, create a new research and development center, open five new farms for potatoes and oats and to build its brands.

The company will research and develop new products just for the Asian market. It already offers drinks inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and Lay's potato chips in flavors tailored just to the market, including cool cucumber and crispy prawn.*

"We are building expertise and infrastructure now so that we can have a strong, sustainable manufacturing and agricultural base to serve the diverse and growing needs of consumers across China," Chief Executive Indra Nooyi said.

* I can attest that these are as nasty as they sound.

On an editorial note (do I need to specify that on a blog?), it is impressive what PepsiCo has done in China. PepsiCo not only owns Gatorade, but also some other successful enterprises in China. As I mentioned earlier, KFC and Pizza Hut are both big-time chains in China, and each is owned by PepsiCo (or, more accurately, by Yum! Brands, which was spawned by PepsiCo to handle the company’s restaurants).

It’s not at all uncommon for kids in class, when game time rolls around, to blurt out “Team KFC!” when I ask what they want their team name to be. Moreover, each of the three Jinan branches of my school have KFCs within walking distance; one of the schools has two KFCs within walking distance. And Pizza Hut is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan. I have only eaten there once, but on that one occasion I dropped more than 100 yuan for dinner. Convert it back to dollars, and it’s about the same that you’d pay back home. Anytime you convert something from yuan to dollars and it’s the same as you’d pay back home, you know that you’re spending a pretty penny for whatever it is that you happen to be buying. Tropicana juice and Doritos brand chips are also staples in Jinanese stores, and both of them are also owned by PepsiCo.

And tonight at least, PepsiCo also owns the sidelines.

Kicking It at a Soccer Game

I have made no bones about how easy my job is. In fact, the disparaging remarks I’ve made about the shameful ease of my professional life could warrant its own label on the right side of this blog. The tag could be, “My job: the void in my soul,” or maybe, “Idiot’s guide to playing games with six-year-olds.”

Nonetheless, Sundays kick my ass. I teach from 8:00 to 5:15 each Saturday, and then turn around and clock an 8:00-to-7:00 shift on Sunday. Even if you’re just dicking around with kiddos and concocting variations of basketball and bowling that can be played in the confines of a hot, cramped classroom, working 11 straight hours will drain you. Sure, it’s not the same fatigue that a physicist has after a long day of crunching numbers, or the fatigue that a college student has after churning out a trio of final exams in one week. But still, Sundays are brutal.

But somehow, I summon the energy at the end of day today, Sunday, to join some co-workers for a professional soccer match here in Jinan. Jinan is home to Shandong’s team in the Chinese Super League, which is China’s (bastardized) equivalent to the English Premiership or the German Bundesliga. Founded in 2004, the CSL has 16 teams. Shandong won the whole thing in 2008 and 2006, and last season the squad finished fourth. So we have a decent side to support.

I get off work at 7:00, hop on my bike and take a 10 minute jaunt over to Shandong Provincial Stadium, which I’ve driven past but never been inside. With the setting sun as the backdrop, I can see the stadium from at least a half-mile away. I can’t tell if it is an abomination or an interesting bit of architecture. It is shaped like an oval and dwarfed by four massive banks of lights jutting inward, like they used to stand upright but have since been slanted by a microburst. Built in 1988, it has some vague, fleeting sense of communism. Every inch of it is gray, and the flashing neon lights that dot the upper perimeter don’t hide the fact that the structure itself is utterly devoid of color – and life. It’s like they went out of their to build it in such a way that no one could possibly have any opinion about it, good or bad.

I don’t know if they’re going to sell beer inside, so I stop and buy four cans of Tsingtao at a nearby supermarket. (Interestingly, Tsingtao cans have more alcohol than the bottles – 4.3 percent to 3.1 percent.) I park my ride at a nearby intersection, which has turned into a quasi-parking lot, and pay the overseer one yuan for her trouble. She is probably 65 years-old and walks with a noticeable limp. As I’m locking up my bike, she keeps on pointing to my basket, which holds an old, falling-apart pair of shoes (which act as my brakes). I reckon that she is telling me that she’s not responsible if the shoes get stolen, but if someone steals those things, they probably need them more than I do.

I weave my way through the throngs of people hocking tickets. It’s not entirely clear whether they are sanctioned ticket vendors or scalpers, and I don’t have the linguistic chops to figure that out. One of these vendors/scalpers is literally standing at the window for the actual ticket office when I get there. He points to a map of the stadium as he tries to coax me into paying 200 yuan for a ticket that is apparently worth 300 yuan. But I have no intention of paying even 200, especially when my objective is to simply get in and find my friends who are already inside (they don’t have to work until 7, like I). I pay 30 yuan for a ticket and walk over to the line to get in.

In an exchange that is 40 percent speaking and 60 percent pointing, I ask a security guard if it’s cool for me to take some beers into the venue. I have little doubt that it’s allowed because, after all, you can take beer almost anywhere in China (or at least Jinan). You can B.Y.O.B. at restaurants, and no one will think twice if you are walking down the street with a brew or even if you hop on a bus toting some suds. Not that it’s common to see people traipsing around with beer, but it’s certainly not a huge deal. This phenomenon of unmitigated drinking prompted one of my co-workers’ friends to opine, after a visit to China, that people in China are freer than people in America. In the case of alcohol, it’s probably true. (In the case of the media, Internet and a semblance of a democratic legal process, it’s probably not true.).

Alas, the security guard delivers the bad news that you can’t bring your own beer, and I am left with a slight conundrum: should I down these four beers as quickly as I can and miss the first several minutes of the game (which has just begun), or should I part with the booze in exchange for catching all the action. That’s when I remember that it’s soccer, not basketball, and as such there IS no action. (Mandatory dis on soccer for being boring, check). I trade 12 minutes of game time for the four beers, then I go in.

Once in, I set out to find my buddy Toby. Working against me are the facts that I have no idea where he is, that this is a 40,000-seat stadium and that I’m slightly buzzed. Working in my favor is the fact that Toby is a 6-5 black dude, and in China, 6-5 black dudes are about as common as teetotalers at Mardi Gras. It takes me all of three or four minutes to spot Toby, who is sitting just about parallel with the end line on the west side of the stadium. I join him and his Chinese girlfriend for the remainder of the first half, which thoroughly dispels my notion about soccer being devoid of action. In the 30 minutes that I catch, there are three goals (two by Jinan), and two more shots clank off the crossbar. In addition, there are a pair of sizeable scuffles – big enough to prompt guys to enter the fray from the bench and for the ref to give guys yellow cards. It’s actually pretty exciting.

The fans also add to the entertainment. Now, the place is still empty – there are probably 12,00 people. But the fans who are in attendance are doing a hell of a job making it feel lively. Part of that zest manifests in timely, knowledgeable cheering. And part of it comes in the form of venomous chants directed at the other team’s fans. That venom may be due to the fact that the opponent was from Hunan, and according to Toby’s girlfriend, Hunan doesn’t have the best reputation in China. I don’t have any proof of Hunan’s shady underbelly – and neither does she. But when it comes to vilifying and discriminating against people for nothing more than their place of birth, you can argue that rumors and perception are (at least) as important as the facts. With disdain in her voice, Toby’s girl says that Hunan is known for criminals, and that it is the epicenter or China’s vast fake clothing market. Again, I don’t know if this girl was spitting facts or B.S., but she took them to be fact, and that’s what’s pertinent here. The hatred being spewed toward the Hunan fans backed up the idea that Hunan is indeed loathed, at least by people from Shandong.

The Hunan cheering section, which is off to the left as I look at the field, is small. There are probably 200 people wearing Hunan jerseys, waving Hunan flags, and chanting Hunan chants in a sectioned-off nook of the stadium behind the north goal. There are nearly as many security guards sitting in that section as there were fans, to either prevent or protect. The Shandong fans are shouting and pointing quite a bit during the first half, especially when the little scuffles broke out, but that disdain only intensifies after the break. Hunan quickly knots the score at two apiece, and this seems to galvanize their supporters. They are boisterous as ever, and when Shandong makes a few substitutions, the Hunan fans start up a chant that, according to Toby’s girlfriend, was something to the effect of, “You switch one c*^t for another c*^t!” There are all sorts of other things being chanted and yelled, but Toby’s girlfriend can’t quite make it out. Suffice it to say that they aren’t well-wishes.

As for the actual soccer, it’s not that great. Even I can tell that there are a lot of flubbed chances. There is one play in particular where the Hunan defender falls flat on his ass, allowing a Shandong player to race unabated up the sideline with the ball. Somehow, despite being handed a golden opportunity, the team doesn’t so much as get off a shot. And then there is another play by Hunan where they have a free kick from about 25 yards out. One player taps the ball to his right, directly in the path of a streaking teammate who is all geared up to smash the ball goalward. Well, he smashes it all right – about 20 feet over the crossbar. He was roundly applauded and mocked by the crowd, but truth be told, he is no worse than any of Shandong’s players.*

* Quick note: as is the case with professional basketball in China, professional soccer teams are allowed only a few foreigners. Shandong’s foreigners are Fred Benson (Netherlands), Siniša Radanović (Serbia) and Carlos Santos de Jesus (from Brazil, by way of Croatia), and Roda Antar (born in Freetown, Sierra Leone). None of them appear to be any good.

After the game, I say goodbye to my friends and walk along the sidewalk toward the intersection housing my bike. As I walk, I notice a throng of Shandong fans conglomerating on the north side of the stadium. They are yelling with great hostility, but when I look at the stadium to see who they are yelling at, I see no one. The crowd and the yelling swell, and the tangible sense of hostility intrigues me to the point where leaving is out of the question. I join the throng, unable to deduce what’s going but hopelessly curious nonetheless.

Eventually people in the crowd take to throwing water bottles at the stadium. The stadium has two tiers, and they are launching them at the upper tier. I immediately feel bad for whatever poor sucker(s) is standing on the concourse up there, but upon inspection, there is no one standing there. It’s just an empty concourse and a 10-foot-wide entryway into the a section of seats. Yet the Shandong fans keep chucking, bottle after bottle. A roar goes up when one of the bottles finds its way into the entryway; that’s where they are aiming. More and more bottles are launched at that entryway. At this point it becomes like that scene from Independence Day where all of the planes take aim at the alien spacecraft – that entryway is the spacecraft, the people are the planes, the bottles the missiles. I still can’t tell what’s going on though, but the bottles keep flying.

Finally, I conjure up an image of the stadium in my head and realize that this entryway – which is labeled with a giant “7” – must be just about where the Hunan fans’ section was. Yeah, that’s about right: I was sitting along the end line, to the west, and then I exited and walked around the north end of the stadium, which is where I am now. The Hunan section was to my left as I watched the game – to the north, that is – and now there are hundreds of people standing around the northern concourse, more than a few of them hurling water bottles at the entrance into the section of seating that must have been at least close to the Hunan sheering section.

The cops eventually break up the bottle-throwing party and I gladly head home. It would have been fun to see what transpired had the Shandong fans been allowed to persist, but at the same time I’m pretty tired. It is, after all, Sunday.

Should anyone have read this and expected it would at some point turn to basketball, I promise we’ll get back to hoops soon…

First-Team All-Swindle, III

“You got tea-scammed?” she asked excitedly, as though it were part of the experience of going to Shanghai. And then it hit me – I was scammed.

My cynicism regarding Chinese swindles isn’t natural. It has been learned – the hard way. The first time I was swindled in China was in 2007, when my brother and I went to Urumuqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province. On the bus from the airport to our hotel, we were befriended by a guy who spoke pretty good English. We chatted for a while and, when we were about 15 minutes from the hotel, he tossed us a sales pitch about his tour group, Turpan Happy Tours. We could pay 400 yuan for an all-inclusive package that included trips to a series of things that my brother and I wanted to see anyway. We would ride camels and go to a grape farm and peer into ancient caves and do other things unique to the Urumuqi area; this guy’s taxi-driver friend would provide the transport. Sounded good.

The dude came to the hotel with us. Inside the hotel was a huge poster featuring package-deals that included many of the same sights that this guy was offering. The major difference was that those tours were considerably more expensive. Thus, we agreed to terms: four-hundred yuan; sites A, B, C, D and E; his friend would drive; 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Come 8 a.m., his friend rolled up in a nice taxi – even had leather seats. We would first go to the furthest destination, where camels and caves awaited. Well, instead of getting on a camel straight-away, which is what we were anticipating, we were first asked to pay. “No,” my brother said in his broken but serviceable Chinese. “We already paid.” No we hadn’t, they said. “Yes, we gave 400 yuan to this guy,” at which point we showed then the Turpan Happy Tour card.

Turned out the 400 yuan wasn’t all that inclusive. This wasn’t what we were led to believe, of course. The Happy Tour was to include transportation and admission to all these sites. Not so. Thus, we ended up being nickel-and-dimed all day. Money for the camels. Money to enter the caves. Money to traipse around the grape farm. Money here, there and everywhere. The Turpan Happy Tour turned into a Turpan Crappy Tour.

More recently, I was swindled last fall in Shanghai. While walking around the city center, a nice-looking group of four approached me to chat. They were all Chinese and said that they were on vacation. They’d just gone to an art museum, and they were now on their way to get tea. They invited me to join them, but I declined. The woman who spoke the best English persisted. “Please,” she said. “You need to experience a Chinese tea ceremony. You seem so nice!”

I had other things on the docket, so I again said thanks but no thanks. Afterward, though, I felt a twinge of remorse. Maybe I should have gone, I thought. I mean, it probably would have been cool – experiencing a Chinese tea ceremony (whatever that was) with a bunch of Chinese people. It was a missed opportunity.

Luckily, though, about four hours later I was again approached to have tea. A pair of guys shot the breeze with me for about two minutes and then casually said, “Well, my cousin and I are going to have tea now. Have you ever been to a Chinese tea ceremony?” No! “Would you like to come?” Yes! I didn’t hesitate; I wasn’t going to miss another chance to experience a Chinese tea ceremony (whatever that was) with some Chinese people.

The sanctity of the ceremony was offset by the fact that it was held on an upper floor of a shopping center, that you had to walk past a series of clothing stores and manicurists to get there, and that the hostess of the occasion was wearing jeans. Whatever, I thought. Just Westernization.

The three of us sat down opposite the jean-clad hostess, who explained the prices. It would cost 39 yuan per person just to be there, and then 49 yuan for each variety of tea we drank. I was a little taken aback by the prices; it seemed insanely overpriced. But, then again, we were in Shanghai, and things are expensive in Shanghai. Plus, I was on vacation. What the hell!

There was a hokey explanation for what each tea was supposed to do – this one is good for your breathing; this one is good for men. After about 15 minutes and two different teas, the bill came to 137 yuan per person. I gave one of the guys 150 yuan, and he left the room with the hostess. The third guy didn’t pay anything, but explained while we were alone that his cousin was spotting him. I got my 13 yuan back and felt good as I left. I may have foolishly forewent a cultural experience when I passed on tea this morning, but at least I made up for it.

That night I met my friend, who was teaching in Shanghai, for dinner. She asked what all I did today. I told her that I went to an English language bookstore – can’t find those in Jinan – walked around the Bund, etc., etc. Shanghai stuff, basically. “Oh, and I went this tea ceremony thing.”

“You got tea-scammed?” she asked excitedly, as though it were part of the experience of going to Shanghai. And then it hit me. Yes, I was scammed. One-hundred thirty-seven yuan for a few sips of tea and 15 minutes of sitting in an annex buried atop a mall, presided over by some bimbo wearing jeans and paid for by an invisible exchange that took place outside the room? Scammed, indeed.

I have friends who have been scammed, as well. And heck, maybe there are other times when I’ve been scammed and I didn’t even realize it. Basically, scamming in China is not uncommon. And when Goel disappeared and informed us that he needed 200 yuan, it reeked of a scam.

Jonathan, John and I continue to play basketball. John’s intensity never relinquishes, and our squad rarely loses. Eventually, though, we tire of playing and decide it’s time to head out. Jonathan and I stuff our money and phones into our pockets, noticing that John’s phone is still nowhere to be found. Nor was Goel. I then give my phone to John to call his phone to see what was going on. Goel answers and says that he’d be about five minutes.

The three of us slowly walk over to the entrance and sit down next to Court No. 1, waiting for Goel. The people playing there invite us to join them, but we are played out. Five minutes passes and Goel is nowhere to be found; my swindle theory is looking stronger and stronger.

Then a cop car rolls up. Goel hops out of the backseat and jogs over to John to give him his phone. “Sorry!” He says. “Sorry I was gone a long time!” John earnestly isn’t upset and tells Goel not to worry about it. Jonathan asks what happened. “I called them to meet and give them the 200 yuan, but they said that they wanted more money. So I called the police.” He punctuates this last sentence by pointing to the police car. “Sorry again,” Goel says to John.

“It’s no problem,” John assures him. “Good luck getting your stuff back.”

I don’t know if Goel ever did get his things back. I do know, however, that he wasn't swindling us or trying to trick us. Nonetheless, I successfully tricked myself.

No Balling, Just Brawling

Arm extended, he eyes the back of his victim’s head like a tennis player transfixed on a floating ball, ready to smash a serve over the net....

When I sit down at the corner table, I don’t know I’m about to see the biggest fight I’ve ever seen. I don’t know that, in a few minutes, I’ll have to inspect my food for blood, or that I’ll see someone get cracked over the head with a chair WWE-style, or that I’ll have to ask myself, “Is it safer for me to stay here in the corner or leap over that table toward the door?”

No, when I sit down for dinner, none of these things are on my mind. Actually, my mind is on food. I scarfed down a bag of frozen dumplings this afternoon, but now, at 8:45, I’m hungry again.

So I mosey to the restaurant on the corner nearest my apartment. It is a chuanr joint. Chuanr is kind of like barbeque, originating in China’s western-most province of Xinjiang, where most of the people are Uighur, an ethic minority in China but the ethnic majority in Xinjiang. Once Xinjiang – formerly Turkistan – was incorporated into China, chuanr was adopted far-and-wide in places throughout the country. It’s big here in Jinan, and you can’t get much further from Xinjiang than Jinan.

The food itself is pretty simple: sharp sticks lined with small chunks of meat and fat and garlic. Once dressed, the skewers are set atop a long, narrow charcoal grill and doused with spices. Having grown up in Kansas City, I can assure you it’s not barbeque the way Americans think of barbeque. But it is nonetheless a favorite for me and most of friends here – at least the ones who aren’t vegetarian.

As a regular at this restaurant, the owner recognizes me when I enter and leads me to one of the few open tables; it’s crowded tonight. There is no chair at the table, so I grab one of the empties from a nearby group of men. This chair, like all the others, is about 12 inches high with a taut cloth seat that stretches across the wooden structure. It is collapsible, and when I grab it to move it to my table, the cloth goes limp and the wooden legs dangle. I set it down, open it up so the legs form a sturdy X and park myself at the table, which is in the very front corner of the restaurant, right next to the wall of windows looking out onto the street. There are two rooms – one of which you enter upon walking into the restaurant, and another smaller room in back, accessible via a doorless, six-foot-wide entryway. I am sitting directly across from that entryway, with a view into the backroom.

I ask for 10 sticks of this killer combo with alternating chunks of garlic and chicken. I tack on five sticks of beef, which has pieces of fat interlaced with the meat instead of garlic, and two pieces of bread, which is cooked over the same coals and coated with the same spices as the meat. All of this food runs me 12 yuan, or about $1.75 USD. Not bad.

I place the order and proceed to bury my nose in my book, Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler, an authoritative and cleverly orchestrated history of China. The bread is brought out as I am reading page 97, which ironically is set in a chuanr restaurant. “Polat had kept his word; he was nowhere to be seen,” Hessler writes. “Except for me, the Uighur restaurant was empty.”

I haven’t read even two sentences past that line – nor taken more than two bites of my bread – when a man comes storming out of the back room. For a second I think he is simply loaded and running around drunkenly, jovially. That theory is dispelled, however, when two men come storming out after him. The first guy could have bolted out the front double-doors, which are a few feet in front of him. Instead, he stops in his tracks, like he is digging in to hold the line. Now I notice that he is wielding a chair. He cocks the chair high over his head and – timing the chair’s descent to coincide with the moment the men are within arm’s reach – brings it down with all the force he can muster. The wooden weapon doesn’t catch anyone cleanly; it is engulfed by a tangle of arms.

More men pour out of that back room. It is hard to tell exactly who is fighting who; I wish they were wearing jerseys. It doesn’t appear to be a total free-for-all – I reckon the men have teams, so to speak – but amid the grabbing and punching and chair-swinging orgy, deciphering who’s on who’s side is, for me, like trying to decipher Chinese characters. It’s all guesswork – most of it futile.

In a matter of about two seconds, six men are locked in a tussle in the middle of the front room. They all have chairs, but they are too close to really deck each other. Not that getting hit in the face by a chair feels good. It’s just that, per a lack of space, there aren’t a lot of huge blows being landed. It’s like what happens along the offensive line in a football game: the guys engaged in battle are trying to kill each other, but there aren’t usually any memorable hits being landed by offensive lineman on defensive linemen, or vise-versa. They’re too close to generate any oomph. The big hits, therefore, are always landed by the linebackers and safeties – the guys who stay out of that initial fray, survey what’s happening and then swoop in for that crushing blow.

Well, there is a free safety lurking in the restaurant.

As the men tussle in the center of the front room, I see a guy with a sinister look on his face come strolling up to the melee. All of the fighters are engaged with one another, like a four-man front wrestling with an offensive line. But this guy has gone unblocked. And with measured malice, he plants his feet on the outskirts of the fighting – left foot forward, right foot back – in a stance that is part boxer and part right-handed batter.

This may sound twisted, but I have never been averse to watching a good fight. Ever since my buddy Mick pummeled his nemesis Alex on the soccer field in sixth grade, fights have always struck me as entertaining. Alex wasn’t seriously hurt – just puffy-faced and a little purple – so I took away nothing from that other than a few giggles. I saw another devilishly entertaining fight in high school. Two girls – who could kindly be described as...well, they can't be kindly described – starting duking it out in the middle of a major hallway during passing period. One of them was a tall blonde, the other a short brunette. If these two girls had a weigh-in, money would have come pouring into Vegas on the blonde. But you can’t always tell who’s crazier just by looking at them, and after about 15 seconds, the short girl had splattered a good bit of blondey’s blood on the nearby windows and, better yet, was holding a huge wad of golden hair. It was awesome.

But those fights were nothing compared to what’s going on here. Not only are the guys involved in this one bigger, but there are weapons – collapsible chairs, which are nothing less than handy, easy-to-swing pieces of wood. Those other fights I stuck around and savored because there was an innocence to them, if that makes sense. Now, though, I am contemplating getting out of the restaurant because as chairs and arms fly, I realize that someone could land a shot on me.

The free safety’s feet are now properly planted. Everyone in the scrum – which is now bordering on an out-and-out brawl – is locked in a knot of arms and chairs, oblivious to anything transpiring on the outer reaches of the fruckus.

One of the fighters is about 6-feet-1, wearing a tan-brown jacket; the free safety and I are sharing an unobstructed view of the back of his head. I have an unfortunately perfect line of sight as the free safety reaches the chair high into the sky. Arm extended, he eyes the back of his victim’s head like a tennis player transfixed on a floating ball, ready to smash a serve over the net. Then the safety/boxer/batter/tennis player brings down the chair.

The sound it makes – like a drumstick hitting a table – ends the internal debate I am having about whether or not I should watch this fight: it’s time to go. Leaving my food and book, I leap over a table and chair standing between myself and the door. The small size of the chairs makes them a more accessible weapon, but also an easier obstacle to clear should escape become necessary. And after the free safety swings his chair into the man’s head with everything he has, I deduce that escape has indeed become necessary.

I take about five strides once out the door and then turn around to watch. The fight rages on. The owner of the joint, the one who had graciously welcomed me and sat me at the table, is now on the phone with the police. I cannot tell exactly what he’s saying, but there are a few phrases that I pick out, phrases that are repeated over and over again – “quickly” and “I don’t know.” Some of the culprits scurry out the front door, while many others stay put. Things simmer down a bit, with little flare-ups that are more manageable than before. People are either chilling out or realizing that they need to stymie the blood pouring out of their skulls. The guy with the tan-brown jacket presses a wad of white napkins against his head. They are red within seconds.

Usually I have a little notebook with me to jot down notes about China and basketball and Chinese basketball – you know, for the blog. But not thinking that there’d be enough going on at this restaurant to warrant note-taking, I left it at the apartment. Thus, I send a series of disjointed text messages to myself, trying to capture everything that’s going on. The first one is sent at 9:01 p.m.

21:01
start texting myself. napkins soaked in blood. people calling the police. people still wanting to fight

21:04
blood on dude’s jacket [and] neck. they [owners] apologize to me. [people] still wanna fight. i’ve had three bites of bread. hop over chair and table and leave. think and hope my food’s ok and bloodless

21:08
cops show up. paramedics too. one dude in particular led to cop car. they bring me my food and book. food tastes fine. doesn’t look like any blood. medics tend to wounded. people [on the sidewalk] watching. dude with wicked but [cut] under eye picks up a chair…just to sit

(I was sure someone was about to get cracked in the head when he picked up that chair.)

21:10
wounded telling their stories to cops. [owners] mopping up blood.

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Rockets, Bulls and Toddlers, II

Toddlers playing ball, stores marketing Battier and Artest, an old-timer with a Bulls hat. I didn’t play a lick of basketball today, but that’s not to say there was no basketball.

Annoyed that no one is playing basketball – or rather, that people are playing basketball but I can’t – I leave the campus and set out to find some blog fodder.After a few minutes’ walk, I spot posters of Ron Artest and Shane Battier, two players who achieved fame here because they played with Yao Ming in Houston; I decide to pop into the store boasting these posters. It’s a Peak sporting goods store, replete with balls and shoes and clothes. It’s like a Nike store, kind of, only instead of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant playing the role of company poster boys, it’s Ron Artest and Shane Battier. I see some Battier shoes and an entire rack of Artest hoodies. The hoodies simply say “Artest” in big, block, capital letters. There is nothing appealing about the shirts at all, but still they cost 269 yuan, or about 40 U.S. dollars. That’s not cheap here.

I mosey back onto the main road. A man is taking a piss to the right against a concrete wall; popping into an alley is apparently too much hassle. After a few minutes I take a right onto a narrow street lined with shops, mostly clothing stores, that would be too narrow for two cars to navigate side-by-side. About 30 strides down that street I see an alley to the right, and about 30 strides down that alley I see a little boy, maybe four years-old, dribbling a basketball.

I walk toward the boy and a small common area – hidden from the road – appears. It is dwarfed on all sides by apartments that rise high into the sky. Children are hanging out; the kid with the ball is far from the only one on hand. They are playing in a variety of ways – toys cars, running around aimlessly, swinging around on the various playground equipment, and of course that basketball. The ball is a regulation-sized one, making it bigger than the heads of any of these kids.

On the far side of the playground, two boys stand on either side of a tree. The tree is shaped like a Y: the trunk runs vertical, and about five feet up there is a clean split in either direction. A game has been concocted – one boy will toss the ball up and try to get it through the gap in the tree. Should it get through, the other one will try to match the feat. Remember, now, that the ball is huge compared to these kids. And the fork in the tree comes at a not insignificant height of five feet. Thus, it is a task to get the ball through the gap, akin in difficulty to a grown person hitting a three-pointer.

They chuck the ball up like this over and over, almost ritualistically. Sometimes the ball will clank off the trunk, never reaching the proper height. Sometimes is will hit one of the branches and bounce between the two like a pinball before being discarded back in the direction it came from. And sometimes, of course, the ball will fall neatly through the gap and land on the other side, at the other boy’s feet, where the process will be repeated.

While I am watching the kids play – as entertained with them as they are with their game – I hear a woman call my name. This is odd. I am a 20-minute bus ride plus a 10-minute walk away from my apartment, so I’m not close to home. Plus, you know, this is China, which owns an uncanny percentage of the world’s popular. Sure, Jinan is no Shanghai (17 million people) or Beijing (13 million) or Guangzou (12 million), but there are still a hell of a lot of people. The population estimate ranges anywhere from two to 6.5 million people, depending on what you take to be the actual boundaries of the city. It’s bigger than anything we have in Kansas, that’s for sure.

Know what? Forget the numbers. I’ll just tell you: it’s crowded. A couple days ago I went to an enormous supermarket and was dodging shoppers left and right, even though there’s enough space in there to play a football game. Sometimes buses are so crowded that people have to drop their money in the slot at the front and then double-back to the rear doors because it’s packed too tight to even get on. Basically, bumping into someone at random in a Chinese city is somewhat rare, especially when, like myself, you don’t know that many people.

But it sounds like that’s exactly what’s happened. I whirl around to my right, where the person said my name, and the mother of one of my students is standing over me. “Hello! I am Tyler’s mother.” I say hi and then turn back to the kids, trying to pick out any I recognize. I have something like 210 students spread over 11 classes, so I’ll forgive myself for not immediately spotting one of them. The mom eventually calls out for Tyler, first in English – which doesn’t evoke a response – and then in Chinese. After she says his Chinese name, Tyler looks over and sees us.

He is in a class called “Fingerprints,” which, depending on how you look at it, is either a money grab by my school or a chance for young kids to get a head start – a huge head start – at learning English. You could call it a money grab because the kids are too young to really retain anything; they hardly speak Chinese. We just wrapped up week four, and they still don’t have a firm grasp on the Q&A sequence of “Who are you?”…“I’m Tyler!” You could claim it’s good, though, because if kids this young are learning English, then by the time they’re teenagers – heck, by the time they’re eight – they will have had years of experience. For better or worse, the class exists, and I teach the eight kids who are enrolled.

The mom beckons Tyler and he scurries over holding a tiny car, one of the ones that you can propel forward by rolling it against the ground and winding up its internal gear. Separated from the other children, I recognize him immediately. He is one of my favorite students in that class. He behaves pretty well and is really cute, one of those little kids who you just want to squeeze sometimes. He has huge eyes that give a curious, inquisitive look, and his voice is gravely and rough. Not low-pitched – just gravely.

He wears a confused look when he reaches us. The mom cues him to say his name, and he spits it out: “I’m Tyler.” He immediately runs away to play, and I talk with his mom for a few minutes. She is about eight inches shorter than me, a pretty woman with long black hair whose only visible defect is the faint outline of black hair lining her upper lip. Her English is spotty, but we can hold a bit of a conversation; she studied in college, she says.

Eventually the conversation turns to my work schedule. This is, after all, Monday afternoon at about 4:00, a day and time when people are generally at work. I tell her that I actually only work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and her eyes pop open in surprise. With those wide eyes, she looks exactly like Tyler. Not wanting her to think I’m a bum, I tell then that I write on the rest of the days, a fact that seems to impress her.

“You like watching children?” she asks, not knowing the connotations of that statement in America. (At least I hope she doesn’t know.) I change the subject away from work and my affinity for small children and ask about Tyler.

“I want him to learn English,” she says in a labored but serviceable tongue, “and make many friends and go to another country. Like you,” she adds, smiling.

I nod and we both look at Tyler. “Well, Tyler is one of the best students in the class.” She whips her head back toward me and smiles with wide eyes. Whether it the language barrier or selective hearing, the only words she seems to up are “best student.”

“He’s the best student?” she asks proudly, happily.

“Um,” I say, not wanting to dig myself a hole, “he’s very good. Very good.”

We speak for a few more minutes. She looks at her watch and says that they have to go. I say bye to Tyler and they take off.

I immediately reach for my little notebook, which is in my left pocket, to note this conversation. My eyes follow the same path as my hand, shooting to the left as well. There, standing a few feet away, is an old man with what must be his grandson. The man is literally the first thing I see after waving goodbye to Tyler and his mom. His face is leathery, and his skin is blotched with orangish patches. Still, despite his aged and weathered face, he is a stately looking guy. He is wearing all black – black slippers, black pants, black coat and a black baseball hat. The hat has a loud red bill which is perfectly – and I mean perfectly – straight, and sitting atop the bill is the Chicago Bulls logo: a snarling, menacing bull staring back at you, his horns encasing the word “Bulls,” which is stacked just below the word “Chicago.” I make some notes about the chat with Tyler’s mom, but only after an internal chuckle about this dude’s hat.

Less than an hour ago, after I was spurned from playing at the university, I was convinced that this day would be devoid of basketball. But I was wrong. I immediately saw Battier and Artest adorning a store front, and immediately noticed those ugly, overpriced Artest sweatshirts. Then, a few minutes later, I see some little boys playing their own brand of basketball – playing basketball, basically, without actually playing basketball. And then this old man is donning a Chicago Bulls cap, the exact type of cap you could find all over America (save the plank-like bill).

Toddlers playing ball, stores marketing Battier and Artest, an old-timer with a Bulls hat. I didn’t play a lick of basketball today, but that’s not to say there was no basketball.

***

I talk with Wang later that night. Wang, if you don’t remember, is a guy I met at the tail end of February when I went over to Shandong Normal to play some ball. He spoke a little bit of English and said that he wanted to drink beer with me sometime. But I haven’t spoken with him since we first met and exchanged numbers; I thought I may as well give him a ring and take him up on those beers.

I send him a text message that says: hello! this is david. i played basketball with you last month. we should drink beer if you have free time!

He sent me a text message that simply said: D a v i d

I don’t know what to make of that, but a moment later he calls me.

“Hello,” I answer.

“David! Hello!”

“How are you, Wang?” I ask.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” There is a moment’s pause. “Um, you still watch Chinese people play basketball?”

“Yeah, all the time!” In fact, I was taking a break from writing this blog to call him.

“That’s not interesting! That’s boring!” I laughed. “I miss you. I wish you look at me and you write something funny! Maybe my English is very bad, but maybe I like you. I want to see you. I know your number. I will call you after, uh, 13 or 14 days, you know?” Why 13 or 14 days, I’ve no idea.

It’s funny the way Chinese people sometimes slip in phrases that, in English, carry some unintended meanings. Not to knock them; indeed, Tyler’s mom and Wang both speak English way better than I will ever speak Chinese. But think about some of the things they said today. You like watching little children?...I miss you…I like you. I want to see you. This happens both ways. For a while, I was conveying my lack of Chinese skills with the word sequence “My” + “spoken Chinese” + “is” + “bad.” After a few months of this, I was informed that saying “My Chinese is bad” is akin to saying “My Chinese is vulgar and dirty.” Oh well.