Even Jimmy Butler Had to Witness the Hottest Village Basketball League in China By Jonathan Cheng, Aug. 11, 2023, Wall St. Journal

TAIPAN VILLAGE, China—One of the hottest tickets in China this summer didn’t cost a penny—just a plane, train and taxi ride to a remote mountain village in one of the country’s poorest provinces.

Call it Friday Night Lights, Guizhou edition.

Here in this village of 1,200 residents, an amateur basketball league became an improbable nationwide phenomenon, and a window into China’s enduring love for the American sport. It’s known across China as the “Cun-BA” (pronounced TZOON-bee-ay)—
literally, the Village Basketball Association.

In the shadow of the local Communist Party village office—“Obey the Party, Follow the Party,” implores a slogan hanging over one basket—amateur ballers sweat it out in the open air before a packed house of some 20,000 spectators, many dressed in
the distinctive traditional dress of southwestern China’s dozens of minority groups.

Hundreds of thousands more across China follow along on livestreams on short-video apps.

As buzz around the grassroots league exploded across China last year, the local crowds were supplemented by out-of-towners hoping to catch one of the country’s hottest spectacles.

In recent weeks, they have included retired NBA star Stephon Marbury, now a coach in China’s professional league, and Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler, who dropped by Taipan village late last month, fresh off his NBA Finals appearance. Butler, donning
the distinctive ornate silver hoop necklace of the local Miao minority, took the mic at center court to praise the “incredible” scene. “I’m glad to be in front of all of you. And I’m glad to watch basketball.”

Basketball was first brought to the mountains of rural southwestern China in the early 20th century, likely by Western missionaries. By 1936, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency, the sport had come to Taipan village, spawning an annual
tournament staged around the Miao harvest festival.

In more recent times, the annual tournament, falling in late July this year, began to attract attention beyond the impoverished mountain villages of Guizhou. The hype exploded last year, when Chinese vloggers began sharing livestreams of the games,
interspersed with traditional dance routines and performances by visiting ethnic minority song-and-dance troupes from across China’s continent-sized land mass.

A parallel dynamic has played out several hours away in another Guizhou village, where the local soccer league, dubbed the “Village Super League” after the country’s professional China Super League, has attracted a similar wave of nationwide
curiosity. A local form of bullfighting, too, has also grabbed some of the spotlight.

But it’s China’s embrace of basketball, a quintessentially American sport, that stands out in an age of rising geopolitical tensions. Here, reverence for the NBA runs deep, with knockoff Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Tracy McGrady, Jeremy
Lin and Michael Jordan shirts peppering the stands.

One local boy, a 6-foot student in a Kobe Bryant T-shirt, was taking in either his seventh or eighth year of “Cun-BA” action, and played a few games too, winning two matches before being eliminated a week earlier. “What’s great is that anyone can
sign up to play,” he said.

Though the 20-year-old, who only gave his surname, Yang, was quick to acknowledge his love for the NBA, he was quick to emphasize: “Personally, I think the ‘Cun-BA’ is better.”

“The NBA’s too far away,” he added.

Admission is free, and action can stretch well past midnight and toward daybreak. The waving of massive Chinese flags is encouraged. Play-by-play helps novice spectators follow the action, delivered in the local dialect by a wisecracking hype man, who
doesn’t hesitate to mock air balls or sloppy turnovers. Big plays are rewarded with the clanging of cymbals and pounding of drums, or a coordinated chant of the local cheer, adapted from the local bullfighters: “One—two—three—woo—woo—woo!”

The festival-like atmosphere is reinforced by stadium karaoke sessions. On Friday evening, the MC ran around the arena, imploring someone—anyone—to grab the mic and belt out 1990s Cantonese pop hits with him. In another pregame act, dozens of boys in
matching basketball jerseys and do-rags tepidly mimicked breakdancing moves to a bouncy remix of “I Will Survive.”

No money is involved, but the top teams, drawn from villages in the area, can take home a grilled pig, a grilled goat or a bunch of grilled chickens.

On July 30, which marked the finals for the current season and the biggest night on the calendar, dozens of disappointed fans waited outside the gates for a chance to take in the action.

Wu Fang, who had made the five-hour-long drive from her Guizhou village, Bijie, made the mistake of stepping outside the arena for a restroom break—there aren’t any inside—and then couldn’t get back in.

Yet Wu, a 27-year-old kindergarten teacher, was ecstatic simply to imbibe the carnivalesque atmosphere. While she’s watched plenty of NBA games on television, Wu has never been to a game. She didn’t see how the professional league could possibly top
the village one.

“There’s no way the NBA can compare with the Cun-BA,” she said, as the crowd roared just inside the gates. “The village-versus-village dynamic is the best part.”

Lin Zhiyan, a 39-year-old woman from Shaanxi Province—roughly 600 miles away—came down with some friends to take in village soccer, and then the basketball finals.

“If I wasn’t able to get in tonight, even if it’s a bit later, we’d still like to get into the venue after it’s all over and take a look,” said Lin, who first learned about the games on Douyin, the domestic Chinese version of TikTok. “What
we came for is the atmosphere. You can’t get that from watching the livestream on your cellphone.”

When basketball season rolls around, the whole village of Taipan is transformed into a small mecca to the sport, with red banners draped across nearly every shopfront, and meat grillers lined up on the sidewalk, sandwiched between vendors selling Jimmy
Butler T-shirts, watermelon peddlers and an unnerving number of dog meat restaurants.

For all the hoopla, the draw remains the basketball, and the amateur passion on display in a country where sports heroes—including Yao Ming, the avatar of modern Chinese basketball—have long been nurtured in a government-sponsored system engineered
to maximize Olympic medals.

“I never thought that the ‘Cun-BA’ would get this hot, because we’ve been doing this for years and years,” said Gu Yechang, a 30-year-old high school art teacher from a nearby village.

When Butler showed up, Gu recalled, he thought to himself: “In my whole life, I never thought I’d see the day that an NBA superstar came to town. I couldn’t believe it—there he was, in the flesh, standing before me.” Just thinking back on it,
he said, “it gives me goosebumps.”

—Qianwei Zhang contributed to this article.

https://www.wsj.com/sports/basketball/china-village-cun-ba-jimmy-butler-8d489f02

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