Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…That missionary zeal. Also on the contact point—it's important to note, too—it's not just men that are playing this. Women start playing basketball right at the beginning too. It actually becomes just as popular with women. It becomes—pretty quickly—the largest women's high school sport in America. And then it’s played in colleges. Unlike the other major American sports, it has a long history of both sexes playing. I got to give one anecdote. I wasn't going to bust this out, but this is just a great quote from an Atlantic article that we will link in the show notes. "Some of the first groups that embraced basketball in China were college students, western-minded scholars, and most importantly, members of the Communist party, who loved the sport for its cohesive power. During the Long March—the Red Army's storied year-long retreat in the 1930s to evade the Nationalist army—Communist soldiers and officers played basketball to lift their spirits and solidarity." It goes on to saying that the party continued to support the sport after it took power in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao declared war against almost all Western bourgeois affections, from classical music to novels, but he never wavered in his support of basketball. It's just so crazy to me that in China, amidst this revolution—for the 50 years after this—that basketball sort of thrived even though the NBA hadn't even been started yet. Hey, who's the number one ambassador to North Korea these days? Dennis Rodman.…

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