BEIJING — Chinese basketball club Xinjiang Guanghui has been
docked 15 points and lost its place in the domestic playoffs for fielding an
American who was pretending to be a local, state media reported on Friday.
The player, whose real name has not been disclosed, was
registered as "Guan Xiuchang" from Heilongjiang Province but was actually a
Chinese-American with a fake identity card.
A Macau passport the club later presented was also proven to
be counterfeit.
"He came to us with a Chinese ID card and he doesn’t look
like a foreigner. Nobody would doubt him at all," Sina.com quoted a club appeal
document as saying.
"Xinjiang is a poor and remote place few players want to
come to and he was only paid 8,000 to 10,000 yuan ($1,102-$1,377) a month."
The use of the 1.72 meters (5ft 7in) guard–the CBA’s
shortest player–in 18 games meant Xinjiang was playing three foreign players,
one more than rules allow.
The results of all 18 games have been changed to 20-0
defeats for Xinjiang, which moved the team from second to 11th in the final
season standings, according to a statement on the Chinese Basketball
Association (CBA) Web site.
It was not the first time the 27-year-old had passed himself
off as a Chinese national to play for a CBA team. In the 2004-2005 season, he
played for Yunnan using an identity card in the name of Ma Xiuchang.
The CBA said they had passed their information onto the police and the
player, who left China on Dec. 26 after media questioned his identity, was
banned from playing professional basketball in China.
