Basketball

At the end of January I attended my first Korean basketball game. I remember thinking during the experience that it was totally surreal. I think because it was so colorful and everyone was so excited and loud and because it was like watching a video game. I was also confused about which team I was supposed to be rooting for, since everyone around me was cheering for the away team, and neither the fans nor the screens all over the walls were calling the teams by their team names, only by the sponsor name. That seems kind of screwy to me.


Here's the stadium in Ulsan:



The court seemed smaller than an American court, in keeping with my experience at the baseball game.


Cheerleaders:



Time out?


Resume game:


The house was seriously packed. I was quite disappointed to find that unlike at the baseball game, there were no traveling vendors, and no cheap beer. I hate beer, anyway. But I did get hungry and all they had for concessions were soft drinks and water, ramen bowls, and skewered hot dogs. Actually, I saw people with pizza, but I'd happened to have pizza for lunch, so I thought it would be a bad idea to repeat the meal.


Part of the surreality of this whole thing, yet which was so Korean, was the hype man who was out there riling up the audience practically the whole game:



I'm getting kind of lazy here, so I'm just going to give you all the videos at the end, instead of trying to fit them into appropriate places in the pseudo-narrative.

Here are some precious midget cheerleaders who performed after the first quarter or something:



There were a lot of events going between quarters, and even during time-outs and other game pauses that they stuck in there for fun. This was some sort of contest for audience members:



The cheerleaders for Ulsan's Mobus Phoebus team performed several times, often leading the audience in dances that they all know and love, which are of course totally foreign to me:


Stop. Bannertime:


These are the last few moments of the game. Ulsan won by some ridiculous amount, like 20-30 points. My friends, who actually follow the local sports, told me the opposing team was second in placings right now, and Ulsan was first. If the second place team gets their asses kicked this hard, I'd hate to see how the others play.