While living in Beijing, I have had to learn to watch certain sports I wasn't grown up on. When residing outside the US in general, one should watch and know soccer (and call it football). If you want to be included in bar conversation about sports with your European friends, you need to at least know the best teams in the Premier League and follow the European Cup. But soccer aside, these last few months of tuning in on CCTV 5 (China's lame version of ESPN) have been extremely educational for me. I have watched countless volleyball matches, ping pong matches, badminton matches, weightlifting competitions, and I am sure at some point I will succumb to watching snooker.
So you can imagine my excitement now that the basketball season has started. China has a less competitive CNBA league which is not very entertaining, but NBA games are shown regularly especially those that include the Houston Rockets (Yao Ming) or the newly accepted Minneapolis Bucks (Yi Jianlian). China is simply crazy about this sport and it has been reported that around 300 million Chinese play basketball in their free time - that's the whole population of the US. So its not hard to understand why the NBA has invested millions of dollars in developing a market that may one day overtake the US. Drafting Chinese stars like Yao or Yi means big money for any franchise and so it's not uncommon to hear that someone like Phil Jackson or Joe Torre is in town - that's right, the Yankee empire is looking to East to help deliver retribution next season.
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