My 2008 Beijing Olympic Moments, I: Seeing Olympic Basketball

I have to say that I've always been pretty indifferent to the Olympic Games. I can't remember the last time I watched the Olympics on TV, but I do remember that I spent the 1996 Olympic Games doing a 150 mile north-south backpacking trek along Sierra Nevada Mountain Range's crest. I started that trip at Pine Creek Pass and then hiked down the John Muir Trail to Mount Whitney. This journey had been my longest hike ever up to then, and by the time I left America for China in the summer of 2005, I'd hiked some 1,500 miles in these magnificent mountains and bagged over a dozen peaks there.

I think this activity was truly in line with the Olympic spirit, certainly more so than being a lazy couch potato staring at the games on the god-awful boob tube (I absolutely loath television and strongly feel that it has been a complete national disaster). It's bad enough putting up with all the touchie-feelie athlete profiles and the incessant jingoistic cheerleading from the sportscasters, but even worse is enduring countless inane appeals to buy light beer, SUVs and pickup trucks. I haven't the slightest intention of every purchasing any one of those products! (Regarding the cheerleading, I have to say that my friends who watched the Chinese TV coverage of the 2008 games told me that the jingoism there far exceeded anything they had previously seen on Western TV networks.)

So prior before the Olympic games began, I seriously considered fleeing the capital. In particular, I feared that Beijing would be flooded with foreign "tourons"--this is a slang term for "tourist" + "moron". However, an opportunity to earn some extra money arose in late July at the language center where I teach part-time on weekends, so I decided to stay in town. And my fears about all the "tourons" turned out to be exaggerated.

To be sure, there were plenty of tourists in the city, but not as many as I had feared. The subway, buses, and restaurants were certainly crowded, but not much more crowded than they normally are during the usual peak summer tourist season. A few people told me that cabs were a lot harder to get, but I hardly ever use them to get about, save for getting a ride home at 1 am after an evening at Houhai's East Shore Jazz Club.

Moreover, much to my surprise, I actually wound up seeing two Olympic basketball games. I got this opportunity thanks to one of my very best expat friends here in Beijing, an Irishman named Diarmuid O'Brien. We got to know each other through an extraordinary coincidence, namely his older sister and my younger sister are next door neighbors back in my home town of Fresno, CA. It really is a small world after all!!

Diarmuid is an attorney and works at a major international law firm, Squires, Sanders & Dempsey. One of his co-workers is married to a high-level GE executive in China. Since GE was a major Olympic sponsor--the Chinese word for sponsor is 赞助商 (the first two characters are "zan" and "zhu," both of which are falling tones, while the third one is a flat tone "shang")--this lady got lots of free tickets to different Olympic events from her husband. Naturally, she passed on more than a few them to Diarmuid.

One of these tickets was for the August 16th evening basketball games between Germany and China and the US and Spain. So when Diarmuid called me a few days before these matches and asked me if I wanted to go with him to see them, I naturally said, "sure!"

I must confess here that I've never been a really big basketball fan. In fact, my feelings about the game echo the hilarious comment made by Woody Alllen's second wife in "Annie Hall:" "What's so interesting about ten pituitary glands trying to shoot a ball through a hoop?"

That said, I knew this would be my first and certainly last chance to see an Olympic sports event. I also figured that my China saga would be incomplete if I didn't see at least a bit of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games while living in the capital. And basketball is hugely popular in the Middle Kingdom, so watching this game would be another way of getting in touch with the contemporary Chinese zeitgeist. Finally, I thought to myself, "You won't get another opportunity in your life to see in person Yao Ming, Lebron James, and Kobie Bryant play basketball."

In any event, I am very happy to have gone and will be forever extremely grateful to Diarmuid for having giving me this opportunity. To start with, the facility at Wukousong is absolutely beautiful and first-rate. Since we arrived just as the Chinese National Anthem started, there wasn't any time to take pictures outside the facility, plus it was too dark anyway (fortunately, it didn't take long to get through the security check). The photo at the top of this post is a shot of the arena taken at the end of August. That was about as close as I could get to the facility on that day to shoot the picture.

I did, of course, shoot some photos while watching the two matches. Alas, my camera doesn't have a zoom lens, so the players, who were lined up during the Spanish National Anthem prior to the second match, naturally look very small in the photo below. I include the picture because readers who look real hard at it will notice that there are still some unfilled seats on the opposite side of the arena, both to the left and right of the big dispaly screen hanging from the ceiling.

Like our seats, which were located right above the press section, those still empty seats had been purchased by corporate sponsors. While the Beijing Olympics were in general a stunning organizational success, many Chinese people, including those who are my friends here, complained about all the seats that were reserved for these sponsors. They noted that many of them remained empty during events, as lots of the corporate guests just went to the pre-game parties and skipped watching the actual events. And one of my former students, who did volunteer work at this event--more on that in a later post--informed me that the scalpers, or 黄牛 (rising tone "huang" and "niu," or literally "yellow cow"), were charging 8,000 RMB for tickets. That's well above what most people in Beijig earn in a month.

As for the games, the China vs. Germany match, which was the first one played, was hands-down the best of the two. That was not because the teams played all that well. For example, the Germans made some steals, but converted hardly any of them into baskets. It was the better of the two because the game was close. China struggled to win by five or six points and actually trailed by a point or two at the half; I think the final score was the low sixties for China and the high fifties for Germany.

Unlike the later championship rematch between the two teams, where US had a bit of fight on its hands, the second game was a complete blowout. The American "dream" or "redeem" team was clearly in a league of its own, being faster, more aggressive, and better shooters than any of the other teams. The US led by 20 points at the half, and the Spanish team simply folded and threw in the towel during the second half. The final score wsa something like 120 to 80 (the score in the other game might have been the low sixties for China, the high fifties for Germany).

Diarmuid and I left the game a bit early to beat the crowds heading out to the subway and trying to get taxis. We hopped into a cab and topped off and very satisfying evening by having a few beers at Paddy O'Sheas, an Irish bar in Dongzhimen not far from where I live. This Olympic moment was definitely another great experience and terrific chapter in my ongoing China adventure. I'll be doing another post about watching the para-olympic games in the not too distant future.