A player on the Athletes in Action team — an evangelical organization representing the US — in this year’s Jones Cup basketball tournament was recently quoted as saying that his team was playing for an “Audience of One,” a reference to the Christian God. It is possible, however, to take this reference more literally, because the dreadful crowd turnout at the Jones Cup this time around has not been much higher.
It is not difficult to establish why the crowds have stayed away. It is an invitational competition and does not necessarily attract the strongest or most celebrated national sides — some of which are not genuine national line-ups anyway. It also receives live coverage on cable TV, which keeps away potential spectators who balk at traveling to Sinjhuang in Taipei County.
But most of all, it would appear, local crowds are not interested in watching a competition in which the local team struggles to be competitive and wins one out of nine games.
Taiwanese are notoriously fickle sports fans, suggesting that “fans” might be the wrong word. All too frequently, a lack of genuine passion for sports and teams manifests itself in abandoning struggling national sides that would otherwise play much better with a sizeable home crowd.
The frustrating thing in the case of basketball is that it is supposed to be a sport in which Taiwan excels. It has a professional league, garners large amounts of print space and broadcast coverage and is reasonably adept at promoting senior players to the level of celebrity.
The reality, however, is that allowing for all of the resources being thrown at the sport and all of the self-congratulation at the domestic level, the standard of basketball here is diabolical.
The first problem is that so few attached to the sport seem to recognize this, despite contest after contest of listless international performances.
The second problem is that even if basketball authorities did acknowledge their sport’s pallid appearance, the attitude of smugness and elevated sense of achievement that defines too many of the players may well defeat any chance of reform.
“Attitude” is an appropriate word to use here, because it is also the name of a documentary produced to trumpet the Taiwan Beer basketball team that opened in three — count them, three — theaters in Taipei on Friday and a smattering of screens in other cities.
As the Taipei Times review of the film said yesterday, the film — and the team, for that matter — is hard to take seriously if you take into account the Beermen’s petulant withdrawal from a competition last year because of an isolated violent incident suffered against a Chinese side.
There is tremendous enthusiasm for basketball at the grassroots level, but the system is falling apart in the transition from domestic celebrity to international duty.
We have discussed at length the reasons for Taiwanese sporting teams’ difficulties in performing well internationally — a lack of credible patriotic symbols, Chinese meddling and so on — but for once it can be said in regard to this sport that Taiwanese audiences, players and administrators only have themselves to blame.
The next generation of players deserves better.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS