Nothing I studied in Canada prepared me for "my sporting career" in rural China.  There I was teaching English in Sichuan province, South China at the Southwest Petroleum Institute in the middle of these steamy green hills.  The twisted steel pipes of the institute's oil refinery towered above rice paddies plowed by water buffalo.  I was working with a few other Canadians teaching English to Chinese engineers bound for Canada.  There wasn't much to do on campus, so our Chinese hosts turned out to be terrific sportsmen.  The university had built basketball courts, put in a cinder track, a gymnasium, and even a swimming pool.  "To give the students strong bodies to work in the oil fields," was what Professor Zeng of the Foreign Affairs Department told me.

              Right after I arrived, the Department organized a basketball game between the handful of Canadian and American teachers here and a Chinese team.  We Canadians should have graciously declined.  After all, hockey is our national game, not basketball.  But our hosts were so enthusiastic that we agreed to play.  Before we knew it, our pick-up match had become "the Canada-China Friendship Tournament" -- an international championship before a thousand people.

              I knew we were in trouble the moment I saw the Chinese team.  They had uniforms.  Resourcefully, someone found some coloured chalk and we sketched in numbers on our t-shirts.

              Now basketball might have been invented by a Canadian -- My almanac tells me it was James A. Naismith of the YMCA -- but I still find it pretty hard to remember what all those lines on the court are for.  And I wasn't alone in my confusion, either.  Another Canadian, Richard Abma, playing centre, mistook the referees' hand signal for a friendly gesture and shook the ref's hand. 

              The whistle blew.  The ball whizzed back and forth between the Chinese players.  Whenever one of us could lay hands on it, we dashed into their court and lunged at the basket.  We grew so tired, we had to call “Timeout” to catch our breath.  It was the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey game all over again.

              I'd like to say that I played well, that I rediscovered whatever basketball skills I'd ever had.  But I never had any skills.  One whistle blew after another.  Offside.  Technical foul.  Travelling with the ball.  I played so badly that whenever I was called in as a substitute, a cheer swept the crowd.  They could hardly wait to see more of the basketball player who had tried to kick the ball.

              No, we weren't skunked.  We had two excellent players who'd even been on university teams.  One was an oil drilling consultant who sank one basket after another until he dropped to the court in exhaustion -- "I'm 36, not 26 any more!" he gasped.  The other player, David Wilson, turned out to be an expert shot.         

              We almost played to a tie, but we lost.  Actually, the game couldn't have ended better though.  The home team won.  The foreign guests were beaten.  We were given a warm applause.

              In their journals the next day, the students in our classes wrote -- "Mr. Wilson was `a good shotter,'" "Mr. Abma was not," or about me, "he had great courage."  I didn't know what to make of that comment.  And to my surprise, people on campus whom I'd never even seen before kept complimenting me on my basketball game.            

              Finally, I spoke to Professor Zeng, "I played so badly," I said.  "It may be," the professor frowned as he searched for the right words.  "That may be," he said in sudden inspiration, "however, you played with great spirit."

              I told the other Canadians that the professor sounded a lot like an ex-Canadian hockey coach.  A sort of Chinese Don Cherry -- "They aren't a good team.  But they got a lot of heart."  Now I figure that if we start training, maybe we can get together a hockey team by Christmas.

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