Back in 2002, this question was on the nation's lips: Was Bora Milutinovic, the charismatic Yugoslav coach of the Chinese football side, having a sexual relationship with Lily Li, a young sports reporter?
They both denied it, but the public didn't want to believe that, particularly as Lily kept coming up with 'Milu'-presented scoops as he prepared to bring the national team to its first World Cup, in Japan and South Korea. She revelled in his reflected glory, and published a best-selling book called Zero Distance, which detailed how intimate their apparently platonic relationship was.
The intrigue captivated the masses, who were then high on soccer and national pride. Marching to Milu's beat, the sports newspaper Titan went to war. It poached Lily, then the hottest of commodities, from a competitor for an unprecedented package of reportedly 3 million yuan a year.
China failed to win a game; Milu ran for the hills; and Lily stopped writing. But as the dust settled, Titan had emerged as the major sports title in a cluttered market. At its peak the paper, which publishes three times a week, claimed to be selling 4 million to 5 million copies an issue, led largely by the Milu-Lily teamwork.
These days, with little to sing about from the terraces, they say it's down to a million or so an issue - still significantly higher than other sports titles, not to mention most general dailies.
Li Sheng, one of the paper's top editors, believes it has a unique readership: more than 80 per cent of them are secondary school and university students. Also - unusually for China, where most newspapers are city- or province-based - it sells right across the country. The paper was formed in 1988 in Changsha , Hunan province , where it was part of the provincial newspaper group. Now it is partly owned by the South African media conglomerate MIH Group. The paper has 30 journalists in China and 10 posted abroad. Li believes it is the foreign-based reporters that give it the edge over other sports papers and standard titles - many of which are beefing up their sports coverage.