Your Posts: We shoot, we score

Gregg Found, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate from Iowa City, Iowa, posted this story on share.triangle.com. He wrote the story while working in a UNC-Chapel Hill study abroad program in Beijing at the Olympics. Here is an excerpt.

Our mission was to test our mettle in James Naismith's game on the hard courts and hazed air of Beijing, and a motley crew we were.

We featured a left-handed point guard who couldn't resist a hook shot, a swingman who played like he was auditioning for the Globetrotters, a bruiser down low, and me, a tall forward who spends too much time outside the paint.

Not exactly the Dream Team, nor even the Somewhat Decent Team. But a team nonetheless.

We were only four members strong because that's the way you play pickup basketball in China: four on four, with quick games to five points so that teams are constantly interchanging on the court.

After divine intervention blessed us with a 20-something expat, already on the court, he became our English-to-Chinese translator and we were brought up to speed on the local game play.

Soon we were on the court shuffling our feet, launching ill-advised jump shots and swiping at our opponents in our first Beijing game.

We were just getting into the swing of things and starting to congeal as a team when a funny thing happened.

We lost.

Our opponents dropped their fifth basket through the net, our tally was stuck at four, and a new team shooed us off the court.

But, before long, we were back on the court with a shot at redemption. ... We didn't lose a game the rest of the day.

Along the way, we learned a few things from the Chinese.

We learned that the rise of basketball is a trend, not just a fad, in Beijing. And we learned that no matter the continent you're on [or] in which language you say "foul," it still hurts to lose.