Worldwide, February means basketball. In the United States, colleges fight to qualify for March Madness, while in Europe teams compete in the Euroleague’s Top 16 phase, fighting to get to the Final Four. Over the last two decades, basketball has erupted onto the global sports scene, now ranking as second in popularity only to football (or should I say soccer?), and at this time of year, that fact is especially well pronounced.
In one country in particular, basketball has slowly become a national obsession. Played almost everywhere and by everyone, the sport is so popular it has even become one of the defining symbols of the country’s president. It’s played daily in all schools, all the way from elementary to university, and in a distinguished professional league whose rules are different from those used anywhere else in the world. Sound familiar? Can you guess which country I’m talking about?
Time’s up: The answer is North Korea. That’s right, basketball has been the official sport of the “Hermit Kingdom” for years now, and no one definitively knows why. Suggestions abound, but there are only a few facts that we know about.
For starters, we know that basketball is heavily promoted by the government. Schools everywhere in the country are obliged to have basketball courts and provide instruction of the game to their students. Evidence of this can be seen through the North Korean government’s “Grow Tall Movement,” TV programs that promote the game to the country’s citizens, movies such as The Family Basketball Team, and the building of a major 12,300-seat basketball stadium in Pyongyang, estimated to have cost a country ravaged by famine over $57 million.
There is also evidence that Kim Jong Il, or the “Dear Leader” as he is better known in the country, is a serious basketball fan. In fact, when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited the country in 2000, the first ever time that such a high-ranking member of a U.S. administration visited North Korea, one of the many state gifts she brought Kim Jong Il was a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, according to the Chinese-American monthly magazine China Now. Kim’s passion for the game has been cited by many as the main engine behind the rise in popularity that the sport has enjoyed inside North Korea; however, while this cannot be verified, what is known is that Kim has left his mark on the game in a very profound way.
At present, North Korea is the only country apart from the United States that does not adhere to the rules set by the International Basketball Federation in domestic play. Instead, it uses the “Dear Leader’s” own interpretation. According to articles in Chongnyon Jonwi, a daily newspaper published in Pyongyang by the youth wing of the North Korean communist party, North Korea introduced its own rules in 1997.
Now, dunks in North Korea are worth three points, three-pointers that touch “nothing but net” are worth a very confusing four points, and one point is not only awarded to each successful free throw, but one is deducted for every free throw missed. To make things even more interesting, any baskets made in the final two seconds are worth a staggering eight points.
This new form of basketball has worked other miracles too. According to official government propaganda pieces aimed at increasing interest in the sport, basketball stimulates “millions of brain cells,” and is a sure-fire way of growing taller. In its “Grow Tall Movement,” which was started in response to famines in the 1990s and to what some call a “stunted generation” of North Koreans (international studies claimed at the time that up to 62 percent of five- to seven-year-olds in the country suffered from stunted growth), the North Korean government used basketball as a way to get its population active, healthy and tall. State media claimed that boys playing the sport were on average between 1.2 and 1.9 inches taller than regular boys, according to China Now. They also used players like Ri Myung Hoon, the tallest ever basketball player at 7 feet 9 inches, to hammer the point home.
The result is that basketball has, for better or worse, become nationally accepted and widely played. And while the circumstances surrounding its ascendance to fame may be questionable and dark, its presence in the internationally cut-off country now is, nonetheless, a ray of hope.
Basketball now serves as an intermediary, bringing North Korea closer to its neighbors and the outside world. While not regular, international basketball games between North and South Korea do happen, and they help to promote some sort of understanding and peace between the two countries. Even more importantly, tourists who go to North Korea on strictly guided tours have been known to play basketball against their guides and local people in Pyongyang. In a country where so much as talking to a foreigner can land you prison, the opportunity to interact and have fun with an internationalvisitor in a setting as innocent and pure as sport is priceless.
As basketball continues to spread around the world, stories like these illustrate both the game’s appeal and its potential. While we might have lost the opportunity to use a single sport as a global social bridge with soccer, now synonymous with sports violence worldwide, we still have the relatively much younger sport of basketball at our disposal, showing even the two most seemingly complete opposites, the United States and North Korea, just how similar they really are.
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