The image of sports in Taiwan most foreigners are offered is that of smiling, sweat-suit-clad youths happily doing calisthenics, along with the occasional snapshot of government officials playing golf. The island's professional sports scene is noticeably absent from the picture, and for good reason. Read the local sports pages, and that sensational feeling of being lifted out of the armchair and onto the field is only likely to be generated by stories from abroad. The local pro sports pieces, mostly covering baseball and basketball--the anchors of professional sports here--tend to read more like a TV movie-of-the-week. The island's professional basketball league is recovering from a couple of near -death experiences, and baseball is in intensive care.
While professional team organizers spent the last decade working on snappy team logos and hiring cute cheerleaders with color-coordinated uniforms, they apparently fumbled the ball on gambling prevention and team management. Local media lights tend to ignore or give only a slight nod to Taiwan's real sports heroes such as its female athletes, some of whom might even bring home Taiwan's first gold Olympic medals this summer from Sydney.
The list of what's wrong with sports in Taiwan is long. Instead of finding which professional sports were best suited for the island, moves by less-than-stellar businessmen have turned them into a circus. The professional basket ball and baseball teams that jelled in the early 1990s were meant to mimic those of the United States. Lots of excited fans, lots of corporate sponsorship, plus lots of licensing deals meant lots of money for businessmen.
Taiwan's sports promoters can't be faulted for getting excited about the lucrative possibilities professional leagues have to offer. The National Basketball Association (NBA) in the United States rakes in around US$40 billion a year. While the Chinese Basketball Alliance (CBA) could have expected to make only a sliver of the NBA's profits in games and licensing, selling the sizzle of the court was still very feasible. The basketball league, unfortunately, dribbled to a halt in March of 1999, although it was brought back in February this year. Falling apart last March for the second time, with reported losses of around US$39 million racked up over a five-year span, a victim of faulty management and corporate sponsorship overload, the league is supposed to rebound by the end of the year. Of course, whoever thought professional basketball here could be run in rotation by team owners should have been kicked out of the game long ago.
According to the Government Information Office's 1999 Yearbook, "if the ROC could be said to have a national sport, it would certainly have to be baseball." If this is the case, then gambling and watching a real-life soap opera are presumably in close second and third place. Gambling and game-fixing caused the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) to see two of its original four teams fold. The league has gone from an original four teams to six, then seven, then six and now back to four. Another league, the Taiwan Major League, was formed around four years ago as a fresh, graft-free start-up, and the relationship between the two professional rivals has been anything but amicable.
Baseball lovers just wanting to watch a good game feel stung and haven't been coming back to the stands like before. Fans strongly suspect that all the baseball games they've cheered at over the years were fixed, and karaoke and mahjong now seem like a better option. Time magazine probably said it best, albeit diplomatically, in an April sports article when it called professional baseball here, "something of an embarrassment."
Organizers of professional basketball and baseball teams seem never to have thought about the cozy ties their foreign players might forge with foreign reporters in Taiwan. But strong links were made, and stories of imported baseball players being harassed by gangsters to tamper with games appeared more than a few times in the local English press. Foreign basketball players complained of not being paid on time and having their washing-machine use or television hours restricted. These measures weren't designed to curb practice interference, mind you, but to save electricity in a land where utilities hardly cost a fortune. For a nation so intent on maintaining a friendly international image, the treatment of foreign players was a major blunder. Many star imports have since left to work in countries like Japan, no longer having to worry about dirty underwear or being threatened if they don't throw a game.
Golf, perhaps the third most-publicized sport here, is more famous for hosting big names than producing any well -known talent. The stand-ins for local golf stars are government officials, always happy to pose with a club while a caddie stands a respectable distance in the background. The sport is notorious for taking up precious land and then polluting it with fertilizer, in addition to astronomical tee-off fees that shut out most of the population from courses. The sport's only saving grace is that the island is attracting more world-class golf tournaments, such as the Johnnie Walker Classic held here last November. News cameras zoomed to Tiger Woods and other notable golf stars at the tournament-turned-benefit for the September 21 earthquake victims. For one shining moment, international news re ports about Taiwan featured something other than natural disasters and cross-strait ties.
Perhaps it is time to look away from the fumbles of professional sports and toward lesser-known activities and their athletes, many of them women, who have been quietly perfecting themselves. Twenty-five-year-old pool player Jennifer Chen is rated as one of the world's best, although she moved to North America for proper training. Billiards, unfortunately, lacks a wholesome image in Taiwan and therefore does not attract government funding in the same way as "good" sports such as track and field. Taiwan's biggest Olympic hopes this year have been placed on women involved in taekwondo, weightlifting, and archery.
Professional sports, especially baseball and basketball, need to be chalked up as a lesson. Watching a ball game is entertainment, and organizers haven't been delivering the goods to the island's fans. So until professional sports organizers get their acts together, residents will probably keep on turning to karaoke. At least they'll know it isn't fixed.