It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game

Every year in Longgang there is a basketball tournament for the teachers. Each school fields a women's team and a men's team to compete - no p.e. teachers allowed though, because they are "professionals". Because I am an American, and a tall one at that, I must be good at basketball, so they asked me to play. I insisted that I am not good at basketball and I don't even really like the sport, but they took this as me being modest and got very excited because they were certain I would carry their team to victory. Thursday I was given two jerseys and a new pair of shoes before being sent out to attended practice. "Practice" was really just about 20 minutes of shooting around followed by full-court 5-on-5 ball. This, of course, exhausted me. As the practice went on the group of students watching grew, and every time my team had the ball there were chants of Wai jiao, wai jiao! ("foreign teacher" 外教), which resulted in the ball being passed to me over and over, making me more and more exhausted. Finally (and mercifully), the practice ended and I was allowed to go pass out in my room. The next day in class, multiple boys called out "lao shi, Kobe!", with the appropriate basketball-shooting hand motions. I guess they think I'm good...silly youngsters. This Monday was game day and I was informed that the bus would be leaving at 5:30pm. Wally was coming to watch and the school was going to pay for a nice post-game dinner for everyone, so it looked to be turning into a nice little evening. However, at lunch Karina (an administrator) informed me that unfortunately I was not allowed to play because I'm paid by the Education Bureau, not the school. Bummer. I still wanted to watch the games though, and I'm so glad I did because they were absolutely ridiculous. In typical female fashion, the women teams made up for their lack of athleticism and talent by beating the shit out of each other, and the men strutted around like they were NBA All-Stars. In typical Chinese fashion, every man who was not currently playing basketball was smoking. I tried to get a picture of a man in a jersey smoking on the bench, but I couldn't get away with it on the sly...trust me though, it happened! Both teams lost that night, and Tuesday too, so we are out of the double-elimination tournament. Maggie told me that it is not important to win, we just have to try our best. I told her that we have a saying that, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game"...but only the losers say it. That, she found hilarious.