East Meets West

Mark Eaton scoured Tokyo video stores in search of his favorite celluloid hero, a damsel-saving, blind Japanese monk named Zatoichi. Eaton's Utah Jazz teammate Karl Malone gave a 10,000-yen note (about $80) to a street person. Kevin Johnson worked the Tokyo crowds like Arsenio Hall; his Phoenix Sun teammate Kurt Rambis—he of the black horn-rimmed glasses-found that his cult following has spread to Japan. Jazz rookies Walter Palmer and Andy Toolson bought a couple of yukata (Japanese bathrobes), while two young Sun players, second-year forward Kenny Battle and rookie Cedric Ceballos, had their picture taken with Julius Erving, who was in town to give two clinics.

But when all was said and done, the best thing that happened as Phoenix and Utah opened the 1990-91 NBA season in Tokyo—6,750 miles west of the league's New York City address-was that the teams played to a good old-fashioned 1-1 split. The NBA executives would never admit it publicly, of course, but they were absolutely overjoyed with the split. The regular-season schedule is tough enough and long enough without having one team start at 0-2 three quarters of the way across the Pacific Ocean.

"It would have been a long, long ride home with two losses," said Malone. Then again, Karl, it was going to be a long, long ride home anyway.

The Suns won last Saturday's opener of what was called the—let's see—NBA Official Opening Games in Japan 119-96, but the Jazz squeezed out a 102-101 win the next afternoon. That taken care of, coach Jerry Sloan's samurai took a 6:30 p.m. flight from Tokyo, crossed the International Date Line, arrived back in Salt Lake City at about 3:30 p.m. Sunday and promptly went to practice. You deal with jet lag your way, and Sloan will deal with it his way.

The quality of the games, which were the first regular-season games in any major U.S. professional team sport ever held outside North America, was uneven. Utah looked extremely ragged in Saturday's opener, and both teams played the first half of Sunday's game as if they were getting back at the Japanese for buying Pebble Beach. Still, despite the relative lack of sophistication of the capacity crowds (10,111 for each game) at Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, the games had an undeniable NBA stamp, what with an official NBA floor (shipped from Dollar Bay, Mich.), official NBA clocks (shipped from Des Moines), official NBA baskets (shipped from Angier, N.C.), official NBA entertainment (The Famous Chicken, the Memphis State Pom-Pon Girls) and official NBA superstar performances (Malone scored 62 points in the two games and Johnson scored 57).

Basically, the Tokyo series was a giant marketing test for the NBA. "From a coaching standpoint, there are absolutely no benefits to this trip," said Utah president Frank Layden, formerly the Jazz coach. "In fact, I'd call it a downright disaster. Winning is hard enough under the best of circumstances, without putting a coach through this." So why didn't the league, which participates in the annual preseason McDonald's Open, a series that has moved from Milwaukee to Madrid to Rome to Barcelona, settle for two exhibition games in Japan?

Simple. The host nation wanted official NBA games, that's why. The Japanese are serious sports fans, but more than that, they are serious "attenders of events," as NBA commissioner David Stern puts it. Particularly events with honmono—authenticity. Besides, the Japanese tolerance for American exhibitions had plummeted since August, when, during a Denver-Seattle NFL preseason game in the Tokyo Dome, the Broncos used quarterback John Elway for barely one quarter.

"The only reason we bought tickets [at about $170 each] to the basketball game is because it's going to be the real thing," said Yasushi Noda, an English-speaking student who, with his friend Koichi Zaiki, waited in line for two hours at a Tokyo department store last Thursday afternoon to get autographs from Eaton and Jazz teammates John Stockton and Darrell Griffith. "There is no way the teams would play hard if it were preseason. They would say: Ah, who cares? It is only an exhibition in front of the Japanese."

Perhaps more important, executives at C. Itoh and Co., Ltd., the NBA's business partner in Japan, demanded regular-season games. And the NBA most assuredly aims to please C. Itoh, a billion-dollar multinational conglomerate. The complexity of doing business in Japan makes it all but necessary for a foreign entity to have a Japanese partner, and the NBA and C. Itoh have been partners since Jan. 1, 1988. By mutual consent, the relationship has proceeded slowly. Stern, in fact, presented one C. Itoh executive with a crystal turtle some 18 months ago to symbolize the desired pace. Last week's series was, in the words of Masanori Otsubo, a C. Itoh executive, "a kickoff event" to promote the NBA in Japan. In other words, citizens of Japan, look for a blitz of those two big American T's—TV and T-shirts.

The Japanese paid $2 million to land the two games, $500,000 of which went to the teams ($250,000 is the average gate revenue from one NBA home game). The rest went toward travel, hotel and other expenses. The league would not break down the precise financial arrangement between the NBA and C. Itoh, though one executive confirmed that the games were nearly a "break-even" proposition for the league. In other words, C. Itoh wrote most of the checks. Also, executives from both teams wined and dined members of the Japanese banking community while in Tokyo, for it is Japanese money that is backing construction of new arenas in Phoenix and Salt Lake City.