Show caption LeBron James is 小皇帝 (“The Little Emperor”): a play on the English “King James” that is also a slang term for a “spoiled only child” under China’s “One Child Policy”. Photograph: Ken Blaze/USA Today Sports NBA Fat Pigs and Demon Blades: China’s nicknames for NBA stars are high art At a time when star athletes brand themselves within an inch of their lives, the richly layered and occasionally mean fan-sourced monikers for NBA players in basketball-mad China are a refreshing departure

Nick Kapur Fri 11 May 2018 16.02 BST Share on Facebook

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Earlier this week I started a Twitter thread of Chinese nicknames for NBA players that went massively viral. Although I personally found these nicknames hilarious and thought a few other people might too, I never expected the response to be so large, which got me wondering what it is about these Chinese monikers that people find so entertaining.

Part of the answer is undoubtedly that American sports nicknames have become incredibly dull in recent years. Compared to earlier eras in which sportswriters and fans drove the creation of colorful and sometimes insulting nicknames, the modern athlete is often a wealthy player-entrepreneur who seeks to build a global “brand” and therefore is more likely to foist their own “nickname” onto the media and the fan base, most likely one that is anodyne, short and thus social media ready, and easily understood across language and cultural boundaries. In many cases, the player’s chosen “nickname” is little more than their initials, or their initials and their uniform number.

Steph Curry is 库昊 (‘fucks the sky’): This is an extremely elaborate pun. One of Curry’s phonetic names is 库里 (ku li) and the second character is a combination of the characters 日 (‘sun’) and 土 (‘ground’). But 日 is also slang for ‘fuck’. Photograph: Kyle Terada/USA Today Sports

On the Chinese side, there is a strong incentive to come up with short, pithy nicknames for foreign athletes and celebrities, because the phonetic transcriptions of western names used in official sources are incredibly long, dull, and hard to remember.

Just take Oklahoma City Thunder star Russell Westbrook, for example. Although his name is only two words in English, in phonetic Chinese, it becomes the eight character monster 拉塞尔·衛斯布鲁克 (which in pinyin is luó sù · wèi sī tè bù lǔ kè, pronounced Loh-Soo Way-Suh-Tuh-Boo-Loo-Kuh), for a staggering total of 77 individual strokes, even using the much simplified Chinese characters favored in mainland China.

No wonder Chinese fans prefer to call him something much shorter, like 威少 (“Lord Wei,” from the first syllable of “Westbrook”), 忍者龟 (“The Ninja Turtle,” because people think he looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), or simply 西河 (“The Western River,” a direct translation of “Westbrook”).

The standardized phonetic versions of foreign names are also hard to remember because characters are deployed in random arrangements, chosen solely for their sounds and without any regard for their meanings, resulting in bizarre and nonsensical phrases. This practice deprives Chinese of one of its greatest advantages over western languages – namely that Chinese characters convey both sound and meaning at the same time, not to mention rich historical and literary connotations from China’s 3,500 years of history.

In crafting new nicknames for NBA players, Chinese netizens take full advantage of the the richness and history of Chinese characters and language, and the results are often a series of astonishingly complex and overlapping visual and verbal puns.

Take the case of San Antonio Spurs shooting guard Danny Green. When Green’s shooting percentage dropped off precipitously during the 2015-16 season, Chinese Spurs fans started calling him “Shoots Bricks Green” (张铁林). The first character 张 (zhāng) is short for 张手 (zhāng shǒu), which means to shoot a basketball, the second character 铁 (tiě) is short for 打铁 (dǎ tiě), which literally means “striking iron” but is the Chinese slang term for an ugly missed shot (a “brick”), and 林 (lín) is short for 格林 (gé lín),which is Chinese phonetic transcription of “Green.”

Tristan Thompson is 八贤王 (‘The King of Eights’): Thompson held out of training camp in 2015 and received a contract worth more than $80m, despite averaging only eight points and eight rebounds the previous season. ‘The King of Eights’ was a nickname for several historical Chinese rulers. Photograph: John E Sokolowski/USA Today Sports

However, when you put these characters all together, “Zhāng Tiělín” is also the name of a famous Chinese-born British actor best known for playing the Qianlong Emperor on the Chinese television series My Fair Princess. Accordingly, people started calling Green “My Royal Father” (皇阿玛, huáng ā mǎ), which is what the prince on the show always called the Emperor.

Other names Chinese fans invented for Green include 张继科 (zhāng jì kē), which is the name of a famous Chinese table tennis player but also can be read “Shoots [like] Kobe’s Heir,” alluding to Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, whom people similarly ridiculed for having a low shooting percentage. Another was “Shoots Only Eggs” (张全蛋, zhāng quán dàn), as eggs are shaped like zeroes, meaning misses.

Another example is Lakers point guard Lonzo Ball, whose just concluded rookie season was promising but whose shooting was generally worse than advertised. Chinese netizens took to calling Ball “Pavel Korchagin” (保尔柯察金), a pun that is several layers deep.

First, the Chinese characters for “Pavel” (保尔, bǎo ěr) sound very similar to the characters for “Ball” (鮑爾, bào ěr). But more importantly, Pavel Korchagin is the protagonist of a 1930s Soviet socialist realist novel, extremely well-known in China, called How the Steel Is Tempered. The image of “tempering steel” reminds people of how “striking iron” means bad shooting.

Kobe Bryant himself has several amusing nicknames alluding to his low shooting percentage, including “The King of Striking Iron” (打铁王) and “The Los Angeles Blacksmith” (洛杉矶铁匠). Perhaps the most amusing, however, is people calling Kobe “Carbon Monoxide, Ferric Oxide” or “CO, Fe2O3” (一氧化碳, 三氧化二铁), which sounds exactly the same as “He shoots one fadeaway and misses, he shoots three fadeaways and bricks two of them” (一仰化叹, 三仰化二铁).

It is this combination of cleverness, levity, and meanness, as well as the layers of puns and allusions, which make Chinese nicknames so fun to try to understand. Unlike many American sports nicknames, which tend to be rather straightforwardly hyperbolic and unironically positive (not least because many are chosen by the athletes themselves), even the more positive Chinese nicknames tend to be a mixture of both praise and sarcasm that both fans and haters can get behind.

Dirk Nowitzki is 德国战车 (‘The German Panzer Tank’) while Tony Parker is 法国小跑车 (‘The Little French Sports Car’). Photograph: Mark Sobhani/NBAE/Getty Images

Thus, although Hall of Fame rebounding legend Charles Barkley was called a “fat pig,” he was a flying fat pig (飞猪), alluding to his preternatural ability to rise above taller, slimmer players to grab copious numbers of rebounds (the Chinese words for “fat” and “flying” sound the same). Similarly Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid is called “the Great” (大帝), but with the sarcastic implication that this is a self-anointed epithet that Embiid has not yet earned. Likewise while Spurs star Manu Ginobili’s nickname “The Demon Blade” (妖刀) sounds awesome, and does indeed allude to his incredible ability to slash through defenders and get to the basket, in Chinese martial arts fiction a sword possessed by a demon is quite powerful and devastating to enemies, but often turns against its owner at crucial times, which recalls Ginobili’s track record of occasionally making mistakes or letting down his team in big moments.

The one of the few NBA player with entirely positive nickname is Michael Jordan. Jordan is called 帮主 (“gang boss” or “sect leader”) because one of the Chinese characters for his last name 乔丹 (qiáo dān) is the same as the surname of Qiao Feng, the legendary leader of the “Beggars’ Sect” in popular wuxia martial arts novels, often known simply as “Sect Leader Qiao” (乔帮主).

It is difficult to overstate how beloved and respected Qiao Feng is in Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. An unparalleled martial artist and brilliant leader, Qiao fights for justice and sacrifices for the greater good. This is truly high praise and is a sign of the respect and esteem Chinese people still have for Jordan (as well as Steve Jobs, the other foreign person they nicknamed after Qiao Feng).

Given the large and growing importance of the Chinese market to the NBA’s present and its future, players and teams may want to learn more about the various nicknames that Chinese fans have given them, and may want to play a more proactive role in helping shape how they are called by Chinese fans. Simply pushing existing English nicknames onto Chinese fans is unlikely to succeed, even and perhaps especially if those nicknames are just letters and numbers. As one Chinese netizen puts it, “The English nicknames are mostly boring to us. We only use them for players who are not popular or don’t have too many fans. When a player gets popular in China, they start to get a bunch of new nicknames.”