Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 10 - All About Duke

This week's block is "All About Duke", so if you are a Duke-hater, you can skip this week :-).

Thursday night, the Duke mens basketball team played a game here in Shanghai as part of their Friendship tour in China and Dubai. This shouldn't be confused with the Georgetown Hoyas Friendship Tour in China, which turned into a brawl in Beijing, also on Thursday night. THe Duke team played the "Chinese Olympic Team" according to all of the reports here although sometimes I hear them called the "Chinese National Team". The list of players on the team shows players ranging in age from 19 to 33 and heights from 6'3" to 7'3".

Interestingly enough, we felt a little weird walking through the Arena since we are used to being a huge minority from being non-Asian, and we saw more non-Asians in the arena that night than I think we have seen in China all put together since we arrived almost 3 months ago. Seems that there are some Duke supporters who will travel the globe with the team. There were actually travel packages put together: "Special arrangements have been made for Duke fans to travel with the team over the entire 13-day tour and travel packages to join the team on the ground in Kunshan, Shanghai, Beijing or Dubai". For the price of a used car (a little under $14,000), you can travel through 2 countries and 4 games with the team.

The tour has the Duke team playing in Beijing and Shanghai (the 2 major cities) as well as Kunshan, where Duke is building a branch of the school called DKU (Duke Kunshan University) which is scheduled to open in Fall 2012. The site is located in Kunshan Yangcheng Lake Science Park, about 37 miles west of Shanghai. It will end the tour in Dubai, one of the cities in which Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has established a significant presence.

Okay, so now to the game night! The game was held at the Mercedes-Benz Arena, formerly known as the Shanghai World Expo Cultural Centerl. It is a new indoor stadium and started being called the Mercedez-Benz Arena in 2011 and it was home to the Expo 2010 Shanghai China. The shape and lighting when we got there at night reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Here we have a few pictures of the Duke team warming up.




And a few of the Chinese team warming up

Tom before the game ... he looks bored, doesn't he??

Coaches before the game during the warmups





The Arena itself

For the VIP ticket holders (or at least I assume they were the VIP ticket holders), the Duke mascot and cheerleaders were around taking pictures.

This is the other mascot. Not sure if it is the Chinese team mascot or a generic Shanghai mascot, not sure. But I got a picture with him, anyway!

Cheerleaders .. Duke had brought the mascot and 4 cheerleaders although we saw almost nothing of them because they pretty much stayed in one little corner and never went anywhere. On the other hand, the Chinese team had a dance team and almost every time-out they would come out on the court with some little routine. They also would have little gold basketballs (see the 3rd picture) that they could come around and throw up to the crowd. I got pretty close to getting one. I elbowed the chinese guy in the next seat, but obviously not hard enough because he kept hold of it!



This is before the game, and they played the National Anthems of both countries with both teams lined up on the court.





Grant Hill was one of the VIPs that was there, and basically the only one I could pick out. He was a Duke player and then moved into the pro ranks, playing with Detroit, Orlando, and Phoenix. Him and his daughter (we assume that is his daughter) sat across from us at center court.

Both teams and the coaches posed for pictures, although they posed the wrong direction!!!

A "local boy" from Durham on the big screen ... both Chinese and English text.

And the Tip-OFF!

The screens that showed the score as we went through the game .. this is at the beginning (of course).

I tried to take some action shots, some more successful than others.





Beginning of the game, the Duke team seemed to me to struggle with the difference between college rules and International rules, that tended to call more fouls on minor contact between players. Here is one of the free throws early-on with the Chinese team.

And hopefully, Coach K is here telling the players "guys .. come'on ... let's hold the fouls to a minimum here".

Near the end of the 1st quarter

Coach K also didn't seem all too happy with the ref's, nor did the players. Again, it seemed to me that they struggled with the international rules and how the refs were calling fouls. A couple times a Duke player would be called for a foul and you could just see it in his face and body language "say WHAT????? me??? you called that a FOUL???"

Halftime score

Here is another Coach K moment where I thought he was going to pop a blood vessel at the refs.

At halftime, Grant Hill and his daughter moved a little bit ... he seems to be intent on the game .. his daught ... not so much.

The chinese team during a timeout. The guy in the back, he was #15, towered over everybody.

Final Score and the shaking of the hands after the game