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 边走边唱系列：【精彩照片】姚明到西雅图助阵 （2004年5月西雅图） |
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边走边唱系列：【精彩照片】姚明到西雅图助阵 （2004年5月西雅图） -- 安普若 - (7665 Byte) 2004-5-07 周五, 12:44 (4303 reads) |
dongbeilaoge
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头衔: 海归上校
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加入时间: 2004/02/20
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来自: 现居美国
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作者：dongbeilaoge 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
PAGE ONE
Full-Court Press:
Promoter Envisions
NCAA in China
Dr. Bloom Shoots for Stars,
But He Has Few of Them;
7'6" Center 'Out of Gas'
By KAREN RICHARDSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 22, 2004; Page A1
CHANGCHUN, China -- On a dingy basketball court in the center of a sprawling university campus here, 6-foot-6 freshman Wang Yangming's attempt at a three-point shot was smothered in a tangle of elbows.
From the sideline, Leonard Bloom forced a smile. "Well, let's just say there's a lot of room for improvement," he said.
Dr. Bloom, a sports promoter and former dentist, has made a modest name for himself in second-tier leagues. He owned the now-defunct American Basketball Association's San Diego Conquistadors, where Wilt Chamberlain briefly coached, and the short-lived Los Angeles Sharks of the World Hockey Association. Now, he's trying to pull off a long shot in China. For the past five years, Dr. Bloom has been working on building a modern basketball league -- with televised games, logos, sponsorships, even cheerleaders -- from the rubble of China's ossified college sports system.
A humbler version of Dr. Bloom's grandiose vision is scheduled to tip off, perhaps as soon as May 8, with the opening game of the Friendship Basketball League -- an eight-team university league. Most of the teams hail from China's frigid north, home to China's tallest people, where basketball, or lanqiu, is now played with a fervor once reserved for table tennis.
But Dr. Bloom's drive to Westernize China's sports culture isn't a slam dunk. His dream has already cost him more than $1 million, and he could wind up being on the hook for much more. The big-time sponsorships and TV deals he hopes will one day turn this into a money machine have yet to be sealed. His league's balls and uniforms still aren't ready.
Dr. Bloom, who declines to give his age, has built stadiums, concert venues and clubs from Florida to California. He says he first went to China in the late 1990s, after state education and sports officials got wind of some promotional work he had done in Russia.
China's sports system is still rooted in a socialist-style program that plucks promising gymnasts and divers from elementary school, and then secludes them in special academies where they train for the next decade. Though this has produced a fair share of Olympians, and some professional exports such as Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, it hasn't helped nurture home-grown amateur and professional leagues that produce a regular crop of world-class stars.
China's professional basketball league, the CBA, has been struggling since it was established in the early 1980s. Many university games are so haphazard that official scores or rankings sometimes fall by the wayside.
At one game two years ago, Mr. Bloom was stunned to find a 7-foot-6 center. "He could have been Shaquille O'Neal," Mr. Bloom recalls. But after grabbing one defensive rebound, the giant "ran out of gas," he says, and loped breathlessly down the court.
Dr. Bloom couldn't get universities to sign up for his league until he met Pei Haihong, director of the Public Physical Education and Research Institute at Jilin University in Changchun. With five campuses and 52,000 students, it is the country's largest school. A former guard for the Jilin Tigers, a CBA team, Mr. Pei had long been trying to raise the profile of university teams in China.
Dr. Bloom speaks no Chinese and has a hard time distinguishing between common names such as Chang and Zhang. But with the Mr. Pei as his guide and translator, he got to work. He handed out Chinese training manuals with daily exercises for stretches, endurance and the toning of fast-twitch muscles. He gave out copies of a 109-page rule book that he compiled by blending European and U.S. basketball rules and then had translated into Chinese. He made some changes: His rules allow for six fouls instead of the usual five, to make for feistier play. He also told the coaches that if their teams had mascots and better uniforms, they'd draw more fans to games.
Soon Dr. Bloom, a teetotaler, was being toasted with fiery sorghum wine at banquets by dignitaries and school deans eager to get their schools into a league that the American promised would lead to trophies and eventually royalties.
Dr. Bloom came up with new names, logos and uniforms for each school, a change for the Chinese players accustomed to shabby, ill-fitting game garb. Most of those changes went over well. But not all.
When he proposed that one university team be called the "Dynamos," Song Guangfa, the school's highest-ranking communist official, protested. Although in English the name seems fitting for a sports team, in Chinese it translates as "Driving Force Team." That, Mr. Song informed Dr. Bloom, "sounds like the name of a factory" from the era of China's now-discredited Cultural Revolution. Mr. Song suggested a proper Chinese name that has no English equivalent: "Pili," or "quick as lightning." Dr. Bloom accepted it.
Dr. Bloom plans to recoup the money his closely held company, Marquee Corp., has spent. He has signed on as the exclusive agent for all 80 league players for five years after they graduate, ensuring him a 10% cut of their contracts if they go pro. That share would be high, though not unheard of, for an NBA promoter. University officials have agreed to let Dr. Bloom sell league merchandise on campus -- including about 100,000 of the regulation Friendship balls he designed -- for half the profits.
The balls come in eye-catching red-and-yellow, the colors of the Chinese flag. But though they're manufactured in China, they're weeks late in delivery. Not all of the uniforms have been ordered because at least one university hasn't settled on four players in its lineup. "Sometimes things like this will happen when you're doing something for the first time," he says.
Write to Karen Richardson at [email protected]
作者：dongbeilaoge 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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