Thirty years after Washington became the first NBA side to visit China, veterans of the team plan a return trip to the basketball-crazy country next month.
Hall of Famer Wes Unseld, a star of the 1979 team then known as the Bullets, will be joined on the visit from Sept. 5 to Sept. 15 by current Washington Wizards players Caron Butler and Randy Foye, along with another former Bullet, the towering Gheorghe Muresan of Romania, the team said in a news release.
The trip will include a series of basketball clinics, including one with last season’s China Basketball Association champion Guangdong Hongyuan team.
The visitors will visit Beijing and Shanghai, along with parts of Sichuan Province that were devastated by last year’s massive earthquake.
“We thought the best way to pay homage to the anniversary of our historic trip in 1979 was to return to China, because 30 years ago it was unheard of to travel overseas with an NBA team,” former coach Abe Pollin said.
The 1979 visit came at the invitation of former Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) as part of celebrations of the forging of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing earlier that year.
The team, led by center Unseld and fellow future Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes, played exhibition games against the Chinese national squad and the People’s Liberation Army’s Bayi team. The Americans were also shown historic sites, including the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China.
Since then, basketball’s popularity in China has soared. State television began showing NBA games in the late 1980s, and in 2004 the Houston Rockets and Sacramento Kings played the league’s first games ever in China, a pair of preseason exhibition matches.
Teams and sponsors have also found a lucrative market for their merchandise in China’s booming economy, and NBA stars such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard receive rapturous receptions from fans during their regular offseason visits.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier