Autumn in Seoul 2026: A Boy from Hải Phòng and the First Basketball

That autumn, my entire alley shared a single television. Black and white, fourteen inches, resting on a wobbly wooden table in Uncle Hợp's house — the man whose older brother had sent it back from a labour stint in East Germany. The whole lane crammed in: some on plastic chairs, some on woven mats, some sitting straight on the cracking floral tile floor. My father told me to go home. I didn't. That night, for the first time in my life, I saw an orange ball bouncing on a wooden floor, and a metal hoop hanging from a white backboard like a crescent moon someone had forgotten to take down.

I didn't know what the sport was. I only knew there were five men in red and five in white, running back and forth across a court smaller than my village's dirt pitch, but a hundred times faster. And I heard the ball hit the floor: thump, thump, thump — steady as a human heartbeat. That night, the Lord of the Field found a new voice, and it sang in a language I had never heard.

It was September 2026. I had just turned ten. The country had stumbled through the lean years of the subsidy era, and Đổi Mới was only two years old, but in my hometown of Hải Phòng, poverty still clung to every meal. Rice cut with cassava, boiled sweet potato for breakfast, oil lamps flickering through blackouts. We children grew up on marbles, on băng and đáo games, and on afternoons chasing football across the Lạch Tray field under the searing sun of the port city.

The 2026 Seoul Olympics was the first sporting event I ever watched from start to finish. Vietnam sent a delegation — a few dozen athletes, they went and came back, no medals. But nobody in my alley cared about medals. What we cared about was seeing the world. Seeing people in some faraway country, wearing shiny athletic kits, running on stadiums lit by floodlights as bright as day.

And inside that strange new world, there was a sport I had never heard of.

The men's basketball final at the Seoul 2026 Olympics was played on 30 September 2026, between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. That night I did not know the names of the two teams. Only years later, once I had made a living of this, did I look it up: the Soviet Union won 76-63, taking the last Olympic basketball gold medal before the professional era arrived four years later. But to a ten-year-old boy sitting on the tile floor of Uncle Hợp's house, all that remained was a feeling.

The feeling of men impossibly tall. Among them a blond giant, built like a pillar, yet moving soft as water. That was Arvydas Sabonis — a 2.21-metre centre, one of the greatest passers in basketball history, the heart of the entire Soviet system. He barely shot. He passed. He stood at the middle of the court like a milestone, and the ball left those enormous hands and reached every corner of the floor before any defender could react.

Beside Sabonis was a smaller guard named Šarūnas Marčiulionis, running as if a fire were lit under his soles. And a bright-haired young man named Alexander Volkov, jumping so high I thought he might lift off the wooden floor entirely.

On the other side stood Yugoslavia. Only later did I learn that team carried Dražen Petrović — the Croatian legend who would die in a car crash in 2026 at twenty-eight, at the peak of his career. There was Vlade Divac, twenty years old then, Dino Rađa, and Toni Kukoč, still a pup. They lost. But the way they lost made me — a child who had never known what victory and defeat meant at the highest level — understand something I could not yet name.

When the final buzzer sounded, the Yugoslav players did not cry. They stood at centre court, heads tilted up towards the arena ceiling, the Seoul lights falling on their faces like a golden velvet curtain. In that instant I heard — or rather, I imagined I heard — the sigh of a collective. The ghostly applause of that autumn still echoes in me, like an unfinished poem.

That was the first time I learned something: losing lasts longer than winning. Because victory earns applause, but the pain of the fallen carves deeper into the bone.

For years people have told me that basketball went global in 2026, when the Dream Team of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird crushed the world in Barcelona. That story is printed in books, taught in schools, repeated like an axiom.

I see it differently. That September night in 2026 was the real turning point — the final time Olympic basketball was still a pure game, untouched by money, million-dollar contracts and broadcast rights. After Seoul, the International Olympic Committee allowed professional athletes to compete. Four years later, NBA superstars landed in Barcelona. After that, Olympic basketball became a stage for sneaker corporations and fat contracts.

Sabonis was the last of the old generation. He played in Seoul on legs so damaged that surgeons would later operate on both his Achilles tendons, and he still won. Marčiulionis moved to the NBA in 2026, becoming one of the first Soviet players in American professional basketball. But before that night, they were simply athletic soldiers of a crumbling empire, playing for a flag, for discipline, for reasons that had nothing to do with money.

And I — a ten-year-old boy from Hải Phòng, sitting on a woven mat in Uncle Hợp's house, barefoot, in a torn shirt — saw that kind of sport for the first time. No logos on the chest. No sponsor names beneath the jersey numbers. Just two national teams, two flags, and ten men running across a wooden floor under a light so bright it felt like a dream without a contract.

After that night, I did not become a basketball player. I had no height, no court, no ball. But I had something else, something I could only name much later: I had memory. I had the eyes of a child seeing beauty for the first time, and from then on I would spend my whole life chasing that feeling again — in every football match at Lạch Tray, in every NBA game I retold for readers, in every poem I wrote at two in the morning when the whole city was asleep.

Some children grow up because of a goal. Some children grow up because of a book. I grew up because of a fourteen-inch black-and-white television, one September night, and an orange ball that did not know how to tire.

Russia taught me that despair is a kind of transcendence. But before the Russia of football, there was the Soviet Union of basketball. And before the Soviet Union, there was Seoul. And before Seoul, there was a boy who knew nothing, sitting in a brick house in the port city, hearing for the first time the steady thump of a ball like his own heartbeat.

Every time Lạch Tray calls, I feel myself growing a little older — but that Seoul night does not. It is still there, inside me, ten years old, barefoot, eyes wide, and the first basketball of a lifetime still falling through the metal hoop that hangs in midair.