Taiwan sports need to expand market

Local media reported that Chen Hsin-an of the Yulon Dinos, one of the league's star athletes, is heading west to Dongguan to sign with the New Century Leopards team of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA).

Chen brushed aside the much talked-about NT$11 million annual salary offered by the Dongguan Leopards, which would be seven times his current pay. However, Chen's exodus follows Taiwan Beer's Lin Chih-Chieh, another high-profile SBL star who also abandoned his local team for the CBA, in his case the Zhejiang Guangsha team, and an annual salary of about NT$4 million.

These two instances clearly show that Taiwan is experiencing a muscle drain of its top basketball talent to China for one simple reason: pay.

When the news of Chen's deal with the Dongguan Leopards was revealed earlier this month, the collective sigh of resignation by Taiwan's basketball fans was nearly audible. Yet, the flight of a beloved basketball star caused no outcry from fervent fans, which the sport has no short supply of in Taiwan.

In an interview by a local newspaper, one fan simply said that she would not blame Chen for the pursuit of a better career. “The career of a professional athlete is short, there is nothing wrong with an athlete making the best use of his years financially,” another fan said in the Apple Daily.

The double setback Taiwan's sports scene is facing recently, with the SBL loss and the game-rigging scandal that almost torpedoed the island's most storied baseball team, the Brothers Elephants, stemmed from the same problems.

The first and more fundamental problem is the general lack of respect for sports as a profession in Taiwan society. With the onslaught of the baseball scandals, Taiwan partly blamed the cheating players for their lack of sportsmanship and integrity.

In a TV talk show, University, the host said that cheating athletes fail the people because they are supposed to be examples of honesty, fairness and strength of character.

What the host did not mention is that baseball (and by extension most sports) is not regarded as a profession by many in Taiwan. It is instead seen as a pastime at best and more often as an outright deviation from the “right path” of obtaining a proper education.

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