went to a professional basketball game in Da Nang, Vietnam

I would imagine that most people are unaware that there is a professional basketball league in Vietnam. I live here and I was unaware of it so you would be well excused for not knowing.

It came up because as I was walking my dog past a sports bar yesterday morning a friend who lives in my building was catching the end of the World Cup game featuring the USA who won their game 4-1. hooray I guess!

Well, he told me he was planning on going to see the DaNang Dragons play that evening in town and I wanted to head along as well. So I did!

I don't really follow sports very closely and I suppose you could say that I don't really care. It's just not my thing but a lot of this has to do with the fact that if I was to try to follow the sports that I grew up with, I would have to stay up very late or I would have to wake up early in the morning. Since watching sports in public normally comes along with drinking beer, I tend to not include this in my repertoire because I definitely don't need to be drinking alcohol in the morning.

Going to see this game though, that was kind of perfect, or so it seemed at the time.

I've been to high school games in USA with more people in attendance than this so suffice to say, basketball isn't really that popular here. I think much of this has to do with the fact that at barely 6 feet tall, I am much taller than the average Vietnamese person.

The game was reasonably exciting, I suppose. But one thing that I found continually frustrating is that the players just aren't very good. Lots of very basic mistakes were made such as most of the free throws being missed (an unforgivable sin in a sport where half of the points are potentially made there) and easy shots like layups were thrown wildly out of play or banked off the bottom of the basket. There were also a handful of airballs where if you don't know what that means, it is that a player tried a shot and missed it so badly that it didn't hit anything at all.

Perhaps some of this could be attributed to the fact that it was extremely hot in this arena or stadium, and the players were sweating a lot.

Every so often the players would get a bit of a break and they, especially the foreigners on the team, would be constantly toweling sweat of themselves. I was sat in the stands and I was sweating despite not even moving.

The game was fine, and you definitely cannot argue with the $2 entry fee that came with a free ice cream. But there was one aspect of it that I should have seen coming that really annoyed me. I just should have known that this was going to be a very loud affair.

In the stands next to the one that I was in was the cheer section or something and this was a dude waving a giant flag and some youngsters on drums that played them as loud as they could with repetitive chants for the entire damn game. There was also a DJ on the other side of the court with a microphone that would shout "DE-FENSE" every single time Da Nang was on defense.

you are on defense a lot in basketball

As is tradition in Vietnam apparently, the amplification was about 5 times as loud as it needed to be and by the 2nd half, my face hurt from the noise and I spent most of the rest of the game with my fingers in my ears.

It didn't help that even though none of the teams would be considered good by proper metrics, Da Nang is the worst team in the league and hasn't won a single game so far this season. They were playing the 2nd worst team and I guess there were some high hopes that they would pull of a "W" tonight. At the start of the game the Dragons managed to get more than 10 points in the lead, but then I guess they just stopped remembering how to play basketball and by the 3rd quarter they were down by 15.

They did manage to rally towards the end and got within 5, and had a number of opportunities to level the score, but they squandered all of them, including missing both free throws twice in a row.

By the time there was less than 30 seconds left and they were down by 5, me and my friend headed for the door.

I would like to say that this was a worthwhile experience but because of the excessive noise, I am very unlikely to ever return to do this again.

I did find out a few things though. each team is only allowed to have 2 foreigners on their team, the rest have to be Vietnamese. As you would expect, the foreigners are the best players on the team and the tallest. Our biggest guy was an American who was 6 foot 9 and he just towered over almost all of the Vietnamese players.

When we got outside and a bit away from the stadium I was just delighted to not be having my ears assaulted anymore.

I just don't get why it is that not just Vietnamese, but all South East Asian countries, seem to really enjoy excessive amplification all the time. I expect there will be an epidemic of hearing loss in the next generation because honestly, me and my friend seemed to be the only people in the stands that were bothered by it.

Is this culture? I just don't get how someone can be cool with something so piercingly loud being cast upon them for several hours in a row.

I told my friend in the taxi home (which cost more than the game did and didn't have free ice cream) that I am not going to go to that again... not this season at least seeing as how the Dragons already lost a game to the best team in the league by more than 50 points.