CBA Playoffs with Aidan

Aidan and I are walking through the Shougang Gymnasium parking lot when I call our ticket scalper. My Chinese is such that I can tell him we are at the west entrance and understand that he is at the south entrance. After that I am lost so I hand Aidan the phone. Aidan talks to him a bit and relays that the scalper is at the east gate. It’s a pretty small gym so we are at the east gate quickly and there are a bunch of folks milling around. I am the only foreigner so I am expecting the scalper to walk up to me. No luck. I call him again and Aidan says he’s by the fast food restaurants just inside the entrance. We go there and mill around. After a few minutes we call him again and I look for someone answering their phone. I follow a middle age man as he walks out of the gate and stares into the distance apparently thinking we are arriving by helicopter. He has a 10 year old chubby boy with him. I yell at him a hello and he sees us and we walk back inside. He says something to me that I only understand part of. Something like, if you are hungry have dinner since I don’t have the tickets. I call Yang who is forever playing tennis and in between games she calls back and talks with the scalper. He doesn’t have the original lower bowl tickets we had asked for but does have some upper deck tickets for double face value which Yang bargains down to 150% of face value. The scalper wanders into the fast food restaurant and suddenly slips me the tickets. I walk a few paces and hand him the money which makes him nervous because it is too exposed. No one notices buy him.

Aidan has been getting interested in basketball and I’ve been wanting to take him to a game for some time. Tonight's game was a CBA (China Basketball Association) game between the Beijing Ducks and the Zhejiang Lions. Our tickets were right behind the basket on the second level. The gym itself is about the same size and layout as USF’s basketball gym, seating 6000 people. There is an NBA size arena where the Olympic basketball was played but the CBA doesn’t generate enough interested to sell out 18,000 seats and during the regular season cannot even sell out the 6000 of  Shougang gym.

Each team in the CBA can have two foreigners on it and it appears that during the first half only one foreigner from each team can play at a time. In the second half, no such restriction. With the NBA lockout a few front line NBA players joined CBA teams and were required to stay with their teams until the regular season ended but were allowed to return to the NBA when the playoffs began. Such was the case for the Zhejiang Lions who best player, Wilson Chandler, left prior to the season and they backfilled with a former NBA player who was playing in Seoul. The other foreigner on Zhejiang stood nearly 7’4” and was booed every time he touched the ball. You could see why for he had a mad at the world attitude and didn’t mind using his body to push folks around. On the other hand you could see why he had a mad at the world attitude as the Chinese players flopped when he barely touched them and a foul was caused. There was one moment when a 6’10” Chinese player – who looked small next to the 7’4” giant tried to pick a fight with him. I was reminded of the Georgetown men's college basketball brawl against a Chinese team here last summer.

Every time the 7’4” player, his name is Peter John Ramos, touched the ball the crowd would hiss. When he fouled a player they would curse. Two young men behind were yelling curse words at him and the guard for our section asked them multiple times to stop. At one point the young man asked the guard “Are you from Beijing?” as a way to demean him since most guards are migrants. The guard stood up, called for the boy to come to him, and was going to take care of business when they adults sitting nearby called them down. When Peter Ramos himself got upset, which occurred a number of times, he walked to his teams bench as a precaution and vented. A middle age Chinese woman and came up to about his hip bone would walk up to him and consul him.

From what I can tell game itself follows NBA rules. 12 minute quarters, 24 second shot clock, same three point line, same definition of the key. Play itself was pretty crisp especially in the first half. It is less vertical than the American game but plenty of ball movement and decent shooting. Players must stay seated when not playing and are cautioned to sit down if they jump up after a good play. The refs let the teams play in the first half and like good refs anywhere called more fouls when the players started to get testy in the second half.

The star for the Beijing team is Stephon Marbury formerly and NBA all star. The rep on Stephon is he’s a selfish player and not that great of a guy. Recently there have been stories about how he’s reformed and is a great unselfish teammate. He did, in fact, seemed reformed. He was one of the few players to greet the refs before the game, he passed the ball almost to a fault with to his teammates, and he high fived the kids doing the dance routine between quarters, and he kept his cool when things got testy. And his team one 104-87.

Aidan liked it and was riveted on the action. He brought his basketball and dribbled it all the way to the car on the way home.