Immigrant Communities Got Game

By Pueng Vongs, Pacific News Service

Inspired by sports stars from their home countries and a desire to fit into the mainstream, fans in America's immigrant communities are following U.S. sports with increasing enthusiasm

June 10, 2003 - During the NBA Finals, each time 7-foot San Antonio Spurs forward Tim Duncan reaches out and stuffs a shot, the loud cry of "Fung Nan!" -- "Rejected!" in Cantonese -- can now be heard on radio and TV stations in Los Angeles and New York.

Welcome to "The Show" -- broadcast for the first time in the United States in Chinese.

Spurred by the rise of cross-cultural stars and the simple excitement of America's favorite pastimes, U.S. "ethnic" media -- non-English and English-language print and broadcast media geared toward immigrant communities -- are leading the charge to cover U.S. professional sports in native tongues, from Farsi to Cantonese to Spanish.

The Chinese community's NBA fever flared this season after 7-foot-5, Shanghai-born Yao Ming joined the Houston Rockets. Chinese Americans proudly watched the ups and downs of Yao's rookie year. Basketball is wildly popular in China, where it is played on playground courts from Beijing to Hong Kong.

Tony Wong, general manager of Multicultural Radio in New York, says his station's decision to broadcast the NBA finals on their Cantonese radio and TV stations to approximately half a million Chinese was a result of overwhelming demand from fans, who felt detached watching and listening to the games in English. As any sports fan knows, watching a televised game with the volume muted fails to deliver.

This season, the network also carried a daily NBA call-in segment. Wong says even housewives called in and talked trash like jaded sports-bar patrons. Yao himself was not immune to ire after an off night.

After the local East Coast team, the New Jersey Nets, dropped the first game of the Finals series, calls flooded the station from upset listeners, who offered sophisticated, couch-side analysis. Could the Nets have suffered from the long 10 days off? Why didn't superstar Jason Kidd play up to billing? Theories abounded. Some listeners complained about lost money from wagers.

But in the end, like tried and true fans, the audience remained staunchly loyal.

"They were forgiving of their team and felt like they could learn from their mistakes and rebound," Wong says.

Station managers say they have been approached by mainstream advertisers interested in the Chinese NBA fan base. A major advertiser already sponsors Multicultural Radio's sports program in Houston, home of Yao's team, and the company says it plans to expand coverage in other markets next season. But Wong says the station's priority is to offer a way for the Chinese community to engage U.S. culture.

"People's attitudes are changing. They used to keep to themselves and just rent tapes of Chinese movies. Now they want to be in tune with what's happening around them. They see NBA games as a way to get more involved in American society," he says.

Other groups, such as Latinos, already know this. Latino players dominate the sport of baseball and have inspired a new generation of Latino athletes starting at the Pee Wee level.

But Latino athletes are making an impact in football and basketball, too. "There is a common misconception that Latinos embrace only soccer," says Armando Botello, a sportscaster with the Spanish-language KRCX Entravision Radio in Sacramento, which broadcasts the Sacramento Kings basketball games. "As I was growing up in Mexico, basketball was huge. And now you are seeing the emergence of talented players from places like Argentina and Spain."

Latino fans have a cadre of young stars, including Spain's Pau Gasol of the Memphis Grizzlies, Mexico's Eduardo Najera of the Dallas Mavericks and Argentinean Emanuel Ginobili, who helped clinch Game 3 of the Finals for the Spurs.

Botello's station has broadcast the Kings games for a good portion of the past 12 years. The one or two seasons they didn't, listeners where outraged. "Every time I went out somewhere, the first thing anyone asked me was why weren't the games on," Botello says.

Basketball may be less entrenched in Iran than in China or Mexico, but KIRN or Radio Iran in Los Angeles -- a Farsi-language station broadcasting to approximately 500,000 Iranians in Southern California -- drew a large audience to its simulcasts of Lakers games this season. General Manager John Paley says he was surprised to find that many new fans in the well-educated and affluent Iranian community listened to the games because they knew that anybody who was anybody in L.A. was watching.

"The community likes to stay on top of trends," Paley says. "When the Anaheim Mighty Ducks made the Stanley Cup hockey finals, suddenly we began receiving calls to broadcast the Ducks."

Though immigrant communities are quickly becoming converts to American professional sports, their enthusiasm doesn't yet equal that shown toward the international sports institution called soccer. "Right now, we're carrying the World Cup qualifying matches, and if we don't, we'll get 200 calls," Paley says. For now, he says, soccer is still sacred among Iranians, right up there with other time-honored Iranian sports like weightlifting and wrestling.

Pueng Vongs (pvongs@pacificnews.org) is an editor of NCM, an association of California's ethnic and in-language news media and a project of PNS.