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Features
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Saturday, 03 May 2008 |
The success of Heilongjiang-born snooker player, Liang Wenbo, in this
year’s World Snooker Championship in Sheffield has further confirmed
the ever-rising status and future popularity of snooker in China.
Liang’s mark in this highly-esteemed competition is unprecedented,
becoming the first Chinese player to reach the quarter-finals, and
allowing him to further cement his no.2 position in China’s snooker
rankings behind compatriot Ding Junhui. But why is the sport so popular?
Snooker is a game for the individual, and like all solo sports, it
requires incredible levels of concentration, self-discipline and mental
toughness. Snooker players spend countless hours alone in the practice
room, hitting ball after ball after ball, strategising, thinking...
it’s a lonely sport. But China has embraced the cue and chalk to an
extent which has made it the second most popular sport in the country,
led only by basketball. Almost 50 million people in 300 snooker halls
throughout China play, and its rise is set to continue.
And why not? In April of this year, at the China Open, players were
treated like film stars as they walked down the red carpet with snooker
sticks in cases, to be welcomed by none other than Jet Li (a man known
for being handy with a variety of sticks himself). Children and adults
swarmed to see their favourite stars flash a smile before the
competition began, and marvel at the men who are fast-becoming their
new sporting heroes.
Looking ahead to the Beijing Olympics, there is little doubt that China
will wipe the floor with most of the competition, including the
‘winners’ of the last Olympic Games in Greece, 2004 – USA. But the
medal count from 2004 tells an interesting story. China won 32 Gold
medals. Only 1 of those was for a team sport – Women’s Volleyball.
There were also a small number of ‘pair’ winners, such as mixed doubles
in badminton and women’s synchronized diving, but the majority were the
individual categories – canoeing, hurdling, diving, gymnastics, judo,
shooting, swimming, weightlifting and wrestling.
This evidence, combined with the popularity of solo sports like
snooker, tennis and golf, would suggest a gaping hole in China’s
ability to win as a team, to unite and to share ‘victory’. Football,
though improving slowly in terms of world ranking and domestic
popularity, has hardly had the same level of impact as the
aforementioned sports in the Middle Kingdom. Is it an all-too-obvious
conclusion to draw that China’s socio-economic background that
encourages single children to fight for their place at the top of the
class, to vie for positions at the top of the company, is nurturing a
sporting nation of solo champions? If so, then is the ‘team game’ a
pointless pursuit for China’s children?
There are no definite answers, of course. But one thing is definite,
thanks to players like Liang Wenbo and Ding Junhui, the queue (or
should that be ‘cue’) for China’s snooker halls is getting longer and
longer by the day. But in the grand sporting scheme of things, let’s
hope that the element of ‘team’ isn’t neglected too much. There are 15
red balls in the game of snooker, each worth a single point. There is 1
yellow ball, which is worth 2 points. Though the red balls are less in
value than the yellow ball as individuals, their strength and worth
lies in their value together as a group.
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