The NBA All-Star Weekend just past was full of bad reviews, and if it weren't for McClung Leaping Car to save some face, this All-Star would have tasted like chewing wax. The numbers don't lie, and this year's NBA All-Star ratings are the second-lowest in history, second only to 2023. The overall ratings decline has become an irreversible trend for NBA All-Stars.

Looking back at the CBA All-Stars, the early CBA All-Stars were just a clumsy imitation of the NBA All-Stars, and the viewing was far less than the latter. But this is the family's Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, even if the craftsmanship and ingredients are not good, everyone is still full of interest. Today I spent the whole day looking back at all the slam dunk contests in CBA All-Star history. I even watched the first slam dunk and three-point contest in 1987. The champion of that year's slam dunk contest was Zhang Xuelei, a national player who passed away not long ago, and the second place was Sun Jun, the current owner of the Jilin team.

Some of these videos have been watched many times, and now when they come out, they will still be touching and fresh. Those ancient dunk performances are far from today's street ball players in terms of bounce, power, and beauty, but the vivid faces and the sparkle in the eyes are moving. That's true love. At that time, the audience was not only ordinary fans, but also stars from all walks of life, singers, actors, directors, athletes in other sports, and various model workers. At that time, the CBA All-Stars were like the scene of a Spring Festival Gala. And all of that has changed now. It's like you'll never pinch the seconds and wait to watch the Spring Festival Gala anymore. What has changed, and who has changed? It's stupid to always give a simple answer to a complex question.

When we look away from the eight-sided screen of the indoor court and cast it on the distant southeast of Guizhou, we may be able to get some inspiration. There are no spotlights for professional stadiums, villagers use motorcycle headlamps to illuminate the mud floors, and thousands of onlookers watch the village BA ball game, but the real shouts are boiling. When the elitism of professional sports meets the earthy smell of grassroots basketball, the essence of the all-star game is the invisible glass curtain wall between professional sports and folk ecology.

1. Alienated carnival: When festivals are reduced to shop windows

The All-Star Weekend schedule is accurate to the minute, but the names of fans are missing. A fan who has purchased VIP packages for five consecutive years posted a collection of star bracelets on social platforms, with the caption: "These plastic rings record the whole process from excitement to numbness." "The well-designed interactive link of the professional league has gradually evolved into a digital trap of scanning the code to receive coupons and forwarding the lottery under the discipline of business logic. When one of the All-Star Games launched the "fan decide the MVP" gimmick, the backstage data showed that the voting system was mixed with a large number of troll accounts — and the democratic experiment was eventually reduced to a technical performance.

The caution with which the players are on the pitch is playful. An All-Star guard revealed in a post-game interview: "On the eve of the dunk contest, six brands sent 12 pairs of sneakers of different styles. The "free expression" created by this commercial bundle is like a masquerade ball with shackles. When the three-point contest becomes a muscle memory display for fixed-point shooting, and when the obstacle placement in a skill challenge requires sponsor confirmation, the creativity of professional sports is slowly suffocating in a standardized process.

2. Grassroots Apocalypse: The Basketball Force Growing in the Dirt

The basketball myth of Taipan Village in Guizhou Province has torn through the delicate camouflage of professional events. On the field without a professional referee, Lao Wang, who runs a commissary, blows an iron whistle as a referee, and his punishment standard is surprisingly simple: "Whoever does not move cleanly, thousands of people in the audience boos are yellow cards." "This primitive democracy, with the participation of the whole people, has given rise to an incredible passion for basketball. When a team of delivery riders counterattacked to win the championship, the narrator's hoarse shouts spread throughout the mountains through Douyin live broadcast, and this unmodified passion hit the emotional acupuncture points of the times.

The wisdom of folk basketball shines in the cracks. A village basketball league invented the "spectator decibel value scoring rule", and the home team can convert extra points through sound every time they attack brilliantly; Private competitions introduced a "foreign aid salary cap", stipulating that the bonuses of factory owner players should not exceed three months' wages of ordinary workers. These institutional innovations, which are full of market wisdom, expose the arrogance and sluggishness of the rule system of professional leagues.

3. Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: Let the audience become the creator

The time has come to break the fourth wall. Imagine that thirty days before the All-Star break, the fan community began to co-create the rules of the game with blockchain technology: from a referendum at the four-point line to big data matching for mixed teams. An Internet platform's experimental "cloud coaching" system allows the audience to adjust tactics in real time through barrage voting, and although a large number of absurd instructions appeared in the early stage, it accidentally activated the players' improvisational adaptability. When Guangdong fans devised tactics for Liaoning players, and Beijing audiences choreographed dances for Xinjiang stars, the geographical barriers collapsed in the co-creation.

A wave of cultural icebreakers is reshaping the arena. A college league in Zhejiang integrated Yue opera singing into the on-site commentary, and Sichuan folk events used hot pot spices to grade the team, these localized expressions provide the possibility of surpassing American basketball culture. When the entrance ceremony of the All-Star Weekend becomes a cultural parade of fans in various provinces, when the skills challenge track equipment is replaced by Jingdezhen porcelain plates and Chaozhou wood carvings, and when Internet celebrity street ball players can also form teams against elite professional players, professional events can truly complete the transformation of locality and national participation.

The salvation of the CBA All-Star Game lies in returning the right to define to ordinary people who shout in front of their mobile phone screens. Just like the "Bowl Bowl" basketball game in a Dong village, the winner is determined by the number of bowls smashed by the audience in the court, and this rough judging standard has created the purest form of sports democracy. When the spotlight of the All-Star Game can illuminate every face in the audience one day, when every action of the players carries the temperature of interaction with the stands, this basketball carnival can find the long-lost holiday essence - it is not a well-choreographed theatrical performance, but a sports epic written by tens of thousands of people.