China is basketball mad.
It’s one billion denizens are avid and ferocious watchers of both their domestic league and the NBA, often having as much knowledge about the US domestic game as any naturalized American citizen.
The following is particularly enthusiastic on the Internet, where certain members of the Chinese online basketball community have taken it upon themselves to give players with Western names new and improved Chinese nicknames.
According to Nick Kapur, from whose Twitter thread exploring this subject more you can find here, “this is due to the official source using boring phonetic transcriptions, failing to take advantage of Chinese characters having both sound and meaning.”
As you will see below, some of these names are truly spectacular (names with Nic’s explanations added where possible):
“Because his English nickname “Melo” sounds like the English word “melon” which they then translated into Chinese (pronounced tian gua).”
“Derives from the fact that the first sound in the Chinese word for “shark” (shayu) sounds like the first sound in “Shaquille.”
“This is a pun on “Marxist Political Commissar,” since in Chinese both “Marbury” and “Marx” are spelled with the same first character “ma” (“horse”).”
“This is an extremely elaborate pun. One of Curry’s phonetic names is 库里 (ku li) and the second character is a combination of the characters 日 (“sun”) and 土 (“ground”). But 日 is also slang for “fuck.”
Given Curry’s penchant for launching shots into the sky, Chinese netizens apparently felt it would be more apropos to name him “fucks the sky” instead of “fucks the ground,” so they replaced “earth” (土) with “sky” (天) in the second character.
Because his last name has…so…many…letters!
“Perhaps the coolest nickname of them all, Ginobili earned this moniker for his ability to slash to the hoop using tricky footwork like the Eurostep.”
“Because his very short curly hair reminds Chinese people of the Buddha’s hairstyle in traditional Chinese art.”
“Jordan’s ordinary name in Chinese is 乔丹 (qiao dan), but Qiao is also the surname of Qiao Feng, the leader of the “Beggars’ Sect” in popular wuxia martial arts novels, often known simply as “Gang Boss Qiao” (乔帮主).”
