NBA teams play a number of preseason trips overseas, most of which serve as promotional and branding opportunities for the league and its various sponsors. While some participating teams struggle to find the positives in having to spend so many days so far from home, it’s fair to say that many players and coaches get to have experiences they otherwise would not. Meeting basketball fans and taking in the culture in places like China has the potential to change how they see the world.

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On the other hand, sometimes a professional athlete will do something like autograph the most famous manmade structure that can be seen from space. Yes, guard Bobby Brown of the Houston Rockets actually did that this week during the team’s trip to play the New Orleans Pelicans in Beijing and Shanghai. After spending three seasons as a player in the Chinese Basketball Association, he probably should have known better.





Brown posted the above image to Weibo, a very popular Chinese social media site roughly akin to Twitter. The post got plenty of negative attention. From Laura Zhou for South China Morning Post (via Deadspin):

“Had a blast at the Great Wall of China today,” the 32-year-old point guard for the Houston Rockets wrote on his Weibo microblog on Monday afternoon, adding four photos, including one with his initials and uniform number, “BB #6”, on bricks at the wall, news portal sina.com reports.

His post soon provoked outrage on China’s social media, as many Internet users criticised Brown for defacing China’s most famous cultural heritage.

“Are you proud of your carving? This is a part of world heritage, not the toilet of your home,” one Weibo user commented before Brown’s post was removed.

To be fair, Brown is really sorry about his mistake. From the Houston Chronicle:

“We were out enjoying the Great Wall. I never been, it was my first time. I wrote my name on the wall in chalk. I saw different writings – I didn’t mean any harm by it. I made a mistake. I could have just put my hand over it and erased it. It will never happen again. I’ve been playing in China for three years now and I have the utmost respect for the Chinese culture, and the way of living here. I pretty much adapted, coming from the states, here for three years. My teammates, the fans in Shenzhen and the fans all over were great to me, and I just want to sincerely apologize for that.”

Writing on the Great Wall is, of course, prohibited. “No matter who you are, you should not scratch graffiti on the Great Wall. As a world cultural relic, the Great Wall needs protection from both Chinese people and foreign tourists,” a manager with the Mutianyu Great Wall Travel Service Co., Ltd., told Beijing Youth Daily.

If tourists feel they must leave a message, there are designated “graffiti zones.”

It is believable that Brown had a brief lapse in judgment and did not mean to offend a nation of more than a billion people. Although he is now with the Rockets, the 32-year-old Brown has not played in the NBA since 2010 and could very well find himself playing in a foreign league in just a few weeks. Brown has played for the Shenzen Leopards from 2013 through 2016 and would seem to be welcome at the club barring a major controversy or injury. Put simply, journeymen basketball players do not offend their likely employers on purpose.

Let this be a lesson to all the American tourists out there. If you’re going to autograph a world landmark 5,500 miles in length, make sure you don’t take a picture of it.

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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at efreeman_ysports@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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