Swept away in my own hoop dreams

I'm living in a fantasy world. The NBA basketball season tipped off last week, which for me is reason enough to rejoice. I am an NBA junkie, and after months of going without my medicine the return of the thunderous dunks and high arcing three-balls have soothed my anxious cravings.

But what I'm really addicted to - perhaps to an unhealthy extent - is the phenomenon known as fantasy basketball. I'm not talking about the fantasies of the high-school hoopsters behind my apartment, shooting baskets at lunchtime imagining themselves as Yao Ming or Yi Jianlian hitting game-winning fade-aways to the cheers of 20,000 imaginary fans. Fantasy basketball is all about numbers and box scores. It's a celebration of individual statistical performances rather than team cohesion - in many ways it's a perversion of the unencumbered love of the game seen every day on playgrounds around the world.

Nevertheless, I'm hooked. The game is "played" with leagues made up of usually 10-12 teams, each managed by a different person. At the beginning of each NBA season, each manager drafts a team featuring the most statistically robust stars of the game. A "fantasy team" performs according to how its real-life players do on the court.

Needless to say, it requires hours of obsessing over otherwise insignificant stat lines with little regard to real-life winners and losers. It's really quite a nerdy endeavor and, some might argue, a colossal waste of time. But I can't imagine life without it.

This is the seventh season of my obsession. In what we like to call "The Bro League", a core group of friends and I crunch numbers and talk fantasy smack to each other from thousands of miles away. While I enjoy the titillation of watching box scores fill up, playing fantasy hoops also keeps me closely connected to the friends I left at home, a nice reprieve in these lonely winters spent away.

In a basketball-crazed country like China, I expected hoops fans to be as ravenous for these fantastical exploits as me. With two Chinese stars to cheer for (Yao and Yi), the NBA is as hot here as it's ever been. My Chinese co-workers - basketball nuts in their own right - can rattle off Yao and Yi's nightly stats like their own birthdays. It's exactly the type of devotion to the numbers that makes a good fantasy manager.

But I discovered something different among Chinese basketball fans. They certainly have a fervent interest in the careers of their countrymen - Yao and Yi are two of the biggest things ever to happen to Chinese basketball and they have spawned an entire generation of new basketball fans.

Yet the national interest is not about the numbers or necessarily how one individual performs on any given night. The Chinese care about the game, the team and how the individuals work within it. The Chinese understand what every youth basketball coach in the world tries to drill into his players: "There's no 'I' in 'team'."

Perhaps Confucius said it better: "Seek not every quality in one individual." Fantasy basketball indeed favors the individual over the team, and though it may be a twisted take on the notion of team sports, it remains my reality.

(China Daily 11/09/2007 page20)