And last Saturday afternoon the two sat next to each other on press row at UD Arena as the Dayton Flyers dispatched Saginaw Valley State in a well-attended exhibition game.
Bockhorn was providing the color commentary with his longtime play-by-play sidekick Larry Hansgen on the WHIO broadcast, while Zhou was delivering his courtside commentary in Mandarin with his partner Xueyin Shi, who also happens to be his girlfriend. Their broadcast was presented online via DaytonFlyers.com.
“We talked to both of them and shook hands with Bucky,” Shi said quietly.
Zhou nodded and added reverentially: “Before the game, all the Dayton players came over and shook hands with (Bucky). They showed respect to him.”
And did the Flyers acknowledge them?
“No, no,” he said shaking his head and laughing. “This was our first time. They don’t know who we are.”
That may soon change.
Shi and Zhou are part of a novel venture launched by UD that has a two-pronged purpose.
Dayton assistant athletics director Michael LaPlaca said it’s an opportunity to promote the Flyers brand internationally and especially in basketball-loving China, where UD — thanks to the push by school president Dan Curran — has a partnership with 10 Chinese universities and also runs the University of Dayton China Institute in the Suzhou Industrial Park.
It also connects the nearly 700 Chinese students at UD to Flyers basketball, their fellow classmates and cultural life on the campus here.
“It’s a win-win for everybody,” said LaPlaca, who is coordinating the effort. “There’s no downside.”
UD got the idea when the University of Illinois announced it would be broadcasting its football games in Mandarin this season.
“The administration tasked LaPlaca to look into a similar effort at UD.
He said he first sent out an email to international students seeking Mandarin speakers to broadcast Flyers home games this season. He got 60 initial responses and he pared them down after he cut a two-minute tape from a game last year. It had crowd noise, but no announcers and he asked the responders to tape commentary.
Fourteen people answered that request and he took those efforts to Professor Lance (Lijian) Chen, who then graded them on things like accuracy, emotion and knowledge of the game.
The list was cut to six and, after interviews by LaPlaca, UD had its Mandarin broadcasters. The trio of two-person teams now will be part of a revolving broadcast rotation.
The other broadcasters, all UD students, include Gu Hang, Ruixu Liu, Xinsi Chen and Bin Zhou. Last Saturday’s game was the Mandarin broadcast debut and Xueyin Shi and Yiqing Zhou, both 23-year-old graduate students studying electro-optics engineering, got the honors, in part for their unbridled enthusiasm.
“Last semester we had the March Madness and I watched it with American students in their (Student Ghetto) home,” Shi said as she sat with Zhou in Kennedy Union the other day. “We wanted to be with them (the Flyers) and really loved them because they did a really good job. It was really exciting to be a part of it.”
Zhou had similar thoughts: “I’m a big fan of basketball. I played a lot when I was in high school. I was really passionate with way the Dayton team played in March Madness. Last year I watched with American students and it was so exciting, especially with Boise State. We almost lose the game … but we came back.
“I want people in China to know what is March Madness and what is NCAA. People there know the NBA, but they don’t know the NCAA. To me it’s much more energetic than the NBA. That’s because it’s a students’ game and the NBA is something like commercial. I prefer the NCAA and I love the March Madness.”
A history of hoops
Basketball was introduced to China more than 100 years ago by YMCA missionaries and soon was embraced by the people.
According to a recent Forbes magazine article, during the fabled Long March, the year-long retreat by the Red Army in the 1930s to avoid the national army, the Communist soldiers regularly played basketball to bond and boost morale.
And during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong banished most things associated with western life … but not basketball.
The Chinese Basketball Association estimates 300 million people now follow the sport in China.
When I covered the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I visited the Forbidden City and was stunned to step into a cobblestone courtyard and see two basketball courts surrounded by the sixth century imperial palace.
But maybe it shouldn’t have been that surprising. The Chinese government had just announced that by 2010 it wanted every town in the country — regardless of how small, poor or isolated — to have at least two communal ping-pong tables and one basketball court.
Just last month the Charlotte Hornets and Los Angeles Clippers — as part of the NBA Global Games 2015 — played two games in China.
The NBA first gave broadcast rights to Chinese Central Television in 1987 and the popularity of the league took off in China when 7-foot-6 Yao Ming signed with the Houston Rockets in 2002. His first game was against Shaquille O’Neal and the Los Angeles Lakers and drew 200 million viewers.
Today, stars like LeBron James and especially Kobe Bryant — who is revered in China — are household names there. And even though he retired in July 2011, Yao Ming is still the stuff of legend in China.
“He is from Shanghai, too,” Shi said proudly.
So did she ever see him there?
Shi started to laugh: “Just in the wax museum.”
‘It’s just so cool’
Shi and Zhou started dating four years ago when they were freshmen at Shanghai Normal University.
“We worked in the student union and started talking one day,” Zhou said.
Shanghai Normal has a working relationship with UD and after three years there, the pair decided to take their last year of undergrad study in Dayton and then begin grad school here.
Shi had been to America once before, as a high school student who spent two weeks living with a family in Connecticut as part of an exchange program. She said that had been such a good experience that she wanted another.
She said she has gotten that at UD: “All the people here are very nice and kind. The only thing I miss from home is the food.”
She and Zhou — who had not been to America before enrolling at UD — live with American roommates as part of the Global Learning Living Community in the Caldwell Street apartments.
Shi has roommates from Long Island, Cleveland and Dayton. Zhou lived with someone from Chicago.
They said they cook in their rooms and share the food with the American students. In turn classmates here have invited them to their homes for holidays like Thanksgiving.
The pair has also tried to discover as much of their new country as they can. They have visited New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. They’ll go to Boston later this year.
Zhou does most of the driving. In New York they said they ate lots of Chinese and Korean food, visited Times Square, skated in Central Park and ate at the restaurant Serendipity IIII on the Upper East Side.
“You know the movie Serendipity?” Shi asked. “That’s where they made the movie, too. We had dessert there.”
“We waited three hours to get in,” Zhou shrugged.
Yet, both admit, when it comes to places with fevered followings, nothing beats UD Arena for a Dayton Flyers game.
And especially when you’re calling the action courtside next to Bucky and Larry.
“Overall it was pretty positive,” LaPlaca said of the debut. “They were excited and enthusiastic. Actually, the whole thing was pretty terrific.”
Now Zhou and Shi will have to wait their turn in the rotation again. Their next broadcast will be the Nov. 21 game vs. William and Mary.
They said by then UD will have issued them matching polos to wear and they will have brushed up on the names and faces of the players. “They are all so big and strong and sometimes (in the heat of the action) I mixed them up,” Shi admitted.
Familiarity will come, but the enjoyment is already here.
“It’s just so cool,” Shi admitted.
And with that she and Zhou had to head to class. Walking out of the Union side by side the young couple had a geometric optics course in front of them, an entire Flyers season beyond that and a potential audience of millions of basketball lovers back home waiting for their words.
Like Bucky and Larry, they, too, deserve a fist bump.
Serendipity?
Yeah, and then some.
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