People always want what they cannot have.
When I was younger, I used to joke that I loved basketball, as a Chinese kid, because it represented everything I wasn’t. I bought into all the negative stereotypes about Asians. While we may have been seen as smart and really good at math, we were short. We were not athletic. And being a professional basketball player was everything we could not have.
I didn’t grow to be taller than 5 feet until I was in the eighth grade. But there was no cultural or athletic figure that drew my passion and obsession more than Allen Iverson.
Allen Iverson (A.I.) was the Philadelphia 76ers star who was barely six foot tall, and had somehow willed his team to the NBA finals. Iverson played every game like his last, and won through sheer skill and willpower: he put his body on the line on every play, colliding with defenders 7 feet tall. He had a slick crossover that broke defenders’ ankles. He had a crazy midrange jump shot.
If he could make it to the NBA Finals against the likes of Kobe and Shaq, maybe someone like me could too.
He defied the odds and played like an underdog, and to the naked eye, A.I. seemed to win through sheer hard work, effort, and determination. I started watching basketball a year before the infamous “practice” rant where Iverson complained about reporters asking him about practice and used the word 22 times, so that reputation for hard work and tenacity grew a bit more complicated.
I was not the first or the last Asian person to love basketball. Its popularity has absolutely exploded in China, the Phillippines, and other Asian countries, not to mention basketball’s intense popularity among the Asian diaspora. Every time Kobe Bryant visited China, people acted like they had seen Jesus, especially the kids who worshipped him.
According to Rakuten Today, an Asia-based research firm, basketball is the most popular sport in the Phillippines and Taiwan, as well as the fourth most popular sport in China. It’s more popular among men than women. As of 2019, according to Yahoo Finance, the China market accounts for almost 10% of the NBA’s global revenue, and the fanbase in China is growing rapidly, which is a major reason why then Rockets and now 76ers President Daryl Morey’s 2019 tweet in support of Hong Kong against the Chinese government was so bad for business.
Helen Gao at The Atlantic notes there’s a long history of why basketball is so popular in China, in particular. In 2019, the deputy commissioner of the NBA noted that about 300 million people played basketball in China. And it all started in the 1890s when a group of YMCA missionaries brought the sport to China.
During the infamous leadership of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party also embraced basketball. Gao states that Communist Party soldiers and officers played basketball to boost solidarity, community, and a sense of teamwork. During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao and the Communists cracked down on a plethora of Western texts and arts, one thing the Communists never cracked down on was basketball.
Even people who lived in extreme poverty played basketball, since it could be played with minimal equipment. It was during the Cultural Revolution that military basketball teams in the People’s Liberation Army became the best in the country. It became, according to Gao, the most popular hobby among soldiers, and military teams would often hold basketball tournaments. One team, the Bayi Rockets, was the best team in China during this period of time and well into the 1990s, producing the first Chinese player to make it to the NBA, Wang Zhizhi.
But the appeal of basketball goes beyond history. One reason is culture — basketball is almost synonymous with height. A lot of Chinese people are absolutely obsessed with height. In China, many people underwent the controversial leg lengthening surgery designed to make themselves taller. A doctor would insert steel pins into someone’s bones and insert a metal frame, theoretically forcing new bone to grow in to fill in the gaps. The surgery was banned in 2006 because of its severe repercussions: many who had the surgery could never walk or run again.
The fact that so many sought the surgery says a lot — many Chinese people believed being taller would give them a leg up in their careers or prevent discrimination in the workplace. Height discrimination is perceived to be a huge thing in Chinese society, especially for men in the dating market.
So there’s a huge stereotype that Asians are short, and much of this came from a time period of malnourishment. Between 1985 to 2019, there was an almost 3.5-inch increase in height in China. Right now, the average height of an NBA player is 6 feet 6 inches, so being an Asian person in the NBA means that you are, physically and culturally, a class above your other Asian peers.
I think there’s a reason why basketball is so different from ping pong, tennis, or swimming. Whether true or not, the latter three sports are sports where you can get good through super methodical training, tons of practice, and robotic-like coordination. They require a ton of structure and rigidity.
Basketball, on the other hand, is a sport that seems to be a lot more free. You can make a shot through dunking, a post-up hook shot, a three-pointer, or a 180-degree layup. Any player on the court can make or break the game. The worst team in the league can beat the best team and completely defy expectations. The 8-seed can beat the 1-seed. Anything can happen, and it’s usually unpredictable.
China is always in the running for the most gold medals in any given year, but I think everyone can agree that one sport where China will not win a gold medal for the foreseeable future is basketball.
For these reasons, it was hard, growing up, not to feel like Asians were at a genetic disadvantage when it came to basketball. We were statistically shorter and less athletic than White and Black NBA players. Look no further than the absolutely ridiculous statlines of NBA players who played in China. 37 to 38-year-old Dwight Howard averaged about 23 points and 16 rebounds while playing in China. In China, O.J. Mayo spent a season averaging 28.4 points after his career foreseeable ended in the NBA. After Stephon Marbury’s career fizzled out in the NBA and when he (ostensibly) left his prime, he became a star and a champion in China.
But I am still left unsatisfied with many of the stated reasons of why Asians love basketball so much, including the emphasis on teamwork and solidarity.
When Jeremy Lin underwent his “Linsanity” tour to become a huge cultural phenomenon, especially among Asians, my father and I went to one of his games at Madison Square Garden. My father and I have, at times, had major disagreements and tumultuous periods in our relationship over different priorities and values. But there was nothing we bonded over more than our sheer excitement over Jeremy Lin.
We went to a December 2011 game where Jeremy Lin made clutch basket after clutch basket to ice the Dallas Mavericks and extend their win streak. Jeremy Lin could do everything Kobe could — he could dunk, drive past defenders, make contested midrange and three point jumpers, and make clutch baskets time and time again.
I’ve never seen my dad excited over, well, much of anything. But when in the last several minutes, when Jeremy Lin continued to make shots, we both instinctively got out of our seats, screamed and cheered.
That game, although a tiny blip in the 26 years I’ve been alive, was likely the most fun we’ve had in our father-son relationship.
Jeremy Lin was as much of an underdog as they came. He was sleeping on his friend’s couch, cut from team to team. He didn’t seem like he had much of a future in the NBA at all.
But if Allen Iverson expanded my imagination for the hopes of a short Asian person like myself becoming a professional basketball player and making it into the NBA, then Jeremy Lin expanded that imagination like an earthquake. Yao Ming was, literally and figuratively, too large to be someone to aspire to be like. Not a lot of people grow to be 7 feet 6 inches, so Yao’s superhuman-like gift was really cool, but not something that inspired and touched so many of us like the success of Jeremy Lin.
By high school, I grew up enough to realize I probably wasn’t going to play in the NBA. But for a time, Linsanity made the dream of someone like me playing in the NBA significantly more plausible.
He just did something no Asian person could do, and something I believed at the time, no Asian person was really capable of doing: being an NBA star without having Yao Ming level height. Here I was being proven wrong about Asians having a genetic disadvantage when it came to sports where athleticism mattered. We were supposed to be math whizzes, nerds, people pushed into being engineers, doctors, software engineers. Basically, we were conditioned, by our parents and by broader society, into thinking we had no future other than becoming these robots who only engaged with STEM.
Jeremy Lin shattered that notion. It was not only that he had success, but how he played. It wasn’t in a methodical, structured way, like Yao Ming. He played so freely — he crossed people over. He dunked on them. He would make a layup in a crowd of three defenders after a spin move to get past his defender. He was super athletic and simply faster than a lot of defenders, too.
He wasn’t Kobe, but he played like Kobe. And he excited so many Asians so much because his success and playstyle pushed the boundaries and barriers of what we thought Asians were capable of.
I understand this was the case historically, particularly in Mao’s China. But I want to push against the notion that basketball is so popular because of its emphasis on teamwork and solidarity.
Yes, basketball requires teamwork to be successful.
How, then, can we explain the Jesus-like popularity of Kobe? Kobe, for better or for worse, had a reputation as the antithesis of teamwork. He was seen as a ball hog for an extended period of time, someone who would score 81 points, 2/3 of his team’s points, and only record two assists in the process. If anything, Kobe’s reputation was that he was a selfish player who could only win with the assistance of a dominant big man, whether it was Shaq or Pau Gasol. He would often take extremely contested midrange shots when a pass to someone else could have yielded a significantly more open shot with a higher probability of success.
I don’t think Chinese people love Kobe in spite of his playstyle — I think they love Kobe because of his playstyle. He was confident in himself and his way of playing. He relied on his individual skill, technique, and midrange shot. When he didn’t get along with a teammate, he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut to keep a sense of harmony — no, Kobe let that teammate know exactly how he felt. When he felt like a teammate wasn’t working hard or wasn’t tough enough, he called them out, often publicly. He and his co-star, Shaq, didn’t always get along and had notorious public feuds.
He could be seen as selfish, but Kobe was edgy, exciting, authentic, fearless, and undeniably worked very hard.
If anything, I speculate that Asians love Kobe not because he represented something against group values of harmony and solidarity, but more individualistic values. While many people living in Asian countries feel like they always have to act in the best interest of their group or the family, watching basketball and watching someone like Kobe likely feels like a break and a chance to live and breathe. I think it’s an exercise in a dream — a dream of working hard and being the best while not being constrained and held back by the group.
To me, I’ve always loved basketball because it represented everything I could not have, entry into a fascinating world I knew I would likely never be a part of. And I don’t know whether it’s that deep for other Asians and everyone has different reasons for loving basketball.
But I do think there’s something there. Even if I can only speculate and make my hypotheses, basketball hits at something profound for a lot of Asians, particularly for Asian men.
