March Madness

I was talking to my class today and realized that none of them knew what the NCAA Tournament was. Basketball, and specifically NBA basketball, is huge in China. All the students know it at least a little, and all the guys watch it constantly. They watch the local Chinese league also, Xinjiang has one of the best teams every year, but it's really an NBA crowd. That's why I was so surprised that no one at all had heard of the tournament. In some ways it's ever bigger than the NBA finals even if college basketball as a whole isn't as popular as the NBA. I explained it to them, and I think they understood it, but they didn't seem like they were going to go out and start watching the games either. It's very odd what catches on and what doesn't from what I understand basketball being big in China is a pretty new phenomenon as well, and I wonder if it ever would have reached its current heights if not for Yao Ming.

There is one other Chinese player in the NBA Yi Jianlian who plays now for the Washington Wizards. All the students know who he is, and I get asked about him sometimes. I try not to say too much about him because he's, frankly, not any good. If you're playing for a team as bad as Washington and not starting, that's certainly saying something. I wonder if it would take some young Chinese star going to play for a good US college to get the students here interested in March Madness. Though the problem with that would be that there is so little really high level competition in China that the player would sort of have to be like Yao, someone so tall he can get by largely on that, to be taken seriously by any good US school. All I know is that the first US school to get a good Chinese player is going to sell a hell of a lot of jerseys, even if most of them are knockoffs.