Dog says: Just wait till next year, Master Po

In November, I wrote about the passions aroused by college-level “American football’’ in the United States. I compared and contrasted this sport, known as

ganlanqiu or “olive ball” in China because of the ball’s shape, with the system of scholastic athletics here.

For those who haven’t heard, my wife’s collegelevel team, the Alabama Crimson Tide, and my university, the Georgia Bulldogs, made it through their semifinals and recently played each other in the national championship game. It was a hard-fought game and Alabama — for years the sport’s dominant team — pulled out a 26-23 win in overtime.

It was a tough loss to swallow, and those who would deny the validity of its sting because it’s “just a game” clearly don’t understand sports. (That said, it’s clearly important to remain within the boundary of good sportsmanship. Note: My wife and I are still talking to each other.)

Sports is important enough that President Xi Jinping has made it a priority to build China into a soccer contender befitting its status as a rising power.

It’s important enough that the bitterness of fans of Shanghai Shenhua of the Chinese Super League is palpable after the team spent millions of dollars on foreign players like Argentina’s Carlos Tevez but didn’t get their money’s worth.

In the case of the Alabama-Georgia rivalry, the national championship was a game with overtones worthy of William Shakespeare, or his contemporary, Tang Xianzu, author of The Peony Pavilion.

The game was a story of a master, Alabama coach Nick Saban, and his student, Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who spent years working for Saban and studying his methodical formula for building winners, dubbed “The Process”.

Smart, 42, was born in my wife’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, but played college ball at Georgia. He spent years recruiting some of the state of Georgia’s most talented young players for Saban’s team, and now has made the Bulldogs a national contender in just two seasons after many years of being good — but not great.

When I think of these two, I picture the 1970s US television show Kung Fu, in which David Carradine plays Kwai Chang Caine, a fictional Shaolin monk who travels the Old West in the US after having to flee China. Caine fled after killing the emperor’s nephew, who had ordered the killing of Caine’s blind mentor, Master Po.

Caine has frequent flashbacks to his talks with Po, who calls his young student “young grasshopper” and counsels him to have patience. It was one of the early positive exposures many of my generation had to Chinese culture.

While Saban (Po) has had many students, Smart (Caine) is often considered more like the master than others. Despite this year’s pain, Bulldogs fans must remember Po’s counsel: patience.

It’s OK to bellyache some (I know I have). As Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

But then it’s time to look forward to next season, young grasshopper.