This is from espn.com on January 24, 2003, not long after the teams for the All-Star Game were announced and the Houston Rockets Yao Ming led all West centers with 1,015,018 votes, easily ahead of the Lakers Shaquille O’Neal on 784,920.
Check out the Quote of the Day spoken by ‘Zen Master’ Phil Jackson.
—Excerpt begins here—
“I don’t think it bothers him in the least. He understands fully the NBA has put out four forms of (ballots in) Mandarin, Cantonese, Pekingese and also Hong Kong-ese to allow the Chinese voters to vote on the All-Star ballot, which probably skews it a little bit.”
—Lakers coach Phil Jackson on Shaquille O’Neal’s thoughts about losing the West’s starting center spot to Yao Ming — and two languages that don’t exist (Pekingese and Hong Kong-ese).
—Excerpt ends here—
Um… excuse me. But when written, Mandarin & Cantonese Chinese is all the same… (traditional vs simplified characters have nothing to do with dialect).
And Pekingese? Hong-Kong-ese?
I’ll show ya Pekingese!
Good point about Yao and Read to Achieve!
No kidding, Todd.
No offense to any of those NBA guys, but I’d sure feel better about that “Read to Achieve” program if they’d use people folks that could at least SPEAK English!
-Jocelyn