There is a theory, much cited but of apocryphal provenance, that basketball too was invented in China. It is, they say, akin to the ancient Chinese ball-game of shouju.

The veracity of the theory is not the point. If there be no connection to basketball from ancient China, we could just recast that one-liner about cricket in India and say, basketball is a Chinese game accidentally invented in America.

To gauge the Chinese affinity for basketball, don’t look only at the growing viewership for live NBA broadcasts, or at what was billed as the most watched basketball match in history when China took on the US tonight, with President George W Bush in attendance.

Consider just an aspiration.

When the conceptual design of the Wukesong Stadium, the basketball venue for the Beijing Games, went to Swiss architecture firm Burckhardt + Partner, the plan was to have a cubic structure, with massive LCD screens on all four sides, displaying outside the action within. But, according to the architecture journal FuturArc, considerations of cost and light pollution forced abandonment of the screens. Never mind, the ambition counts.

And if local buzz that the game tonight would get an audience of a billion appears un-falsifiable, find the confirmation in the number-crunching instinct of pure commerce. “NBA China has just appointed a CEO who used be CEO of Microsoft China,” informs basketball writer Alexander Wolff. “That tells you something.”

Wolff, author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, says this is the second big Olympic moment for the game. In 1992, he says, Barcelona launched the profile of football. Three years earlier, the International Amateur Basketball Federation had cleared the participation of NBA professional players in the Summer Games, and America’s Dream Team set a standard for glamour and arrogant excellence unmatched in team sport at the Olympics. These Games, he argues, will confirm the profile of basketball in China.

... contd.