Even reach of the greatest can’t touch everyone

Watching Des Bishop travelling and breaking China the other week, it struck us just how far a certain sport has travelled as well.

Back when Michael Jordan was a college player at North Carolina, his legendary coach Dean Smith would give his players some perspective if he found that they were worked up too much about a big game or defeat: “Just remember, there are more than a billion people in China who don’t know or care that we’re playing.”

These days in China they care about basketball. Over 200 million Chinese watched Yao Ming’s NBA debut. Over 350 million play the game. It was estimated in 2010 that there was at least one basketball court in every village and 800,000 nationwide, including, as Bishop amazingly discovered, even one on the top of the magnificent Mt Huangshan.