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James Naismith (on the Requirements)

Linus is probably over-thinking this.

I stumbled, in a long-familiar and typically random way, on a reference to The Inventor and First Coach’s 12-part prescription. It was a hand-written guide for how to be an effective participant in his as-yet unbranded off-season training game for the more dedicated rugby players, this at a YMCA International Training School in Massachusetts. This new sport was being played exactly nowhere other than a Springfield barn at this time in 1892, but The Young Men’s Christian Association had been around for nearly 50 years by then, and already had a strong international presence. James Naismith couldn’t have devised this odd, indoor game in a better place for it to become the world-wide phenomenon it is today. But this document, “The Physical and Mental Requirements of Basket-Ball”, was an effort by the muscular Christian Phys. Ed. teacher to get  his muscular young Christian students to think the game. (This is still a hard sell with players –except for the very best ones — but I admire his pure-hearted drive to make the game MEAN something, right from the start.)

 

A copy of the “Requirements” hangs in a museum in The Inventor and First Coach’s hometown of Almonte, near Ottawa. It is so quaint, quirky and remains true:

“THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL REQUIREMENTS OF BASKET-BALL”

“Agility, accuracy, alertness, cooperation, initiative, skill, reflex judgment, speed, self-sacrifice,

self-confidence, self-control and sportsmanship.”

Go ahead.

Break it down. Think them through.

I did. I like this list. The many words that ensued can be found up there in It’s All About Sports!, although it actually isn’t. (All about sports, that is, though my wife and mother-in-law are overwhelmed by eye-rolling when I say this. “There’s more to life than basketball,” I insist, “but there’s more to basketball than basketball, too!” They reply, “Mmm, not so much…”) But you may want to read my ruminations on each requirement.

Better Read Than Never: Yardley’s BRAVE DRAGONS

Reviewed: Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing by Jim Yardley (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 304 pages)

[A slightly different version of this review also appears at www.Niubball.com, the best English-language look at all things basketball in China. It was published Feb. 22, just after T-Mac’s apparent farewell to China. Grown men cried in the airport as he left.]

I still remember that raised eyebrow, when I said, “It’s not really about basketball!” I was trying to convince my mother-in-law – potter, BBC-watcher, library ghost, someone for whom the Canadian Broadcasting Corp’s Radio 2 has gotten too damned poppy – to watch the superb documentary Hoop Dreams, a window into poverty, race, sport and education in America. This was a few years ago, and I was a new-enough son-in-law that she was still willing to give me the grudging benefit of her considerable doubt. She did finally watch it, and the review was fairly brief: “My dear, that most certainly was about basketball! But there were some interesting parts.”

So let me be clear. Brave Dragons by the American journalist Jim Yardley,

Jim Yardley, second-generation Pulitzer winner, hoops fan.

really is about the Shanxi (Taiyuan) Brave Dragons, their unpredictable owner (Boss) Wang Xingjiang, their 2008-09 season in the Chinese Basketball Association, and about Bob Weiss, the first former NBA bench boss to work in China, and the very mixed bag of players he had to work with. (I remember the chronically slump-shouldered Weiss, with a pained expression on his face, imploring referees or his Seattle Supersonics players to listen. Were I older, I’d remember him as a resilient, nothing-keeps-me-out-of-the-game player for the Chicago Bulls. Both of these qualities made him the perfect person to try to

Weiss, who came back for ANOTHER year (though not in Taiyuan).

coach in Taiyuan under Boss Wang.) It spotlights the babes-in-the-Chinese-woods that wide-eyed young Americans, imported for their superior skill, are in adjusting to hoops with Chinese characteristics. If you like basketball and find the idea (or the reality) of living in China fascinating, you’ll love Brave Dragons, but neither condition is necessary.

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Not My Brother’s YMCA

I’m looking out the 9th floor window of the Salisbury Street (downtown) YMCA in Hong Kong. Actually, I’m in Kowloon, all part of the territory so proudly reclaimed by mainland China in 1997 from the British, but Kowloon is the part attached to the mainland. The black and silver, soaring, hugely titled buildings — Panasonic, Olympus, Epson — across the harbour are on Hong Kong Island, along with Kowloon the densely populated, high-rising part of the “New Territories” of HK. (By the way, in Mandarin the newly returned “Special Administrative Region (SAR)” is known as Qiang Kang, “Fragrant Harbour”. It looks reasonably fragrant on this bright afternoon.)

It’s a city that works, that is remarkably clean, one that genuinely enacts the concept of “mass transit”, moving incredible numbers of people efficiently and, at least in the district where we are, making walking a useful and do-able way of getting around. They’ve maintained, through the decades, a lovely downtown park with massive old trees and lots of water.

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